Word Tip: Collaborate with Other Authors in Real-Time

One of the neatest features in Google Docs is the ability for two or more people to work on the same document simultaneously, with everyone's changes merging more or less in real time.

Fellow Biz Hacker Rick and I have co-authored documents this way, and it's surprisingly liberating. Now you can do that with Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2003, 2007, and 2010, too.

Remember OffiSync? It's an add-on for Office that I told you about last year.

Officsync lets you access Google Doc files from Office's ribbon. In a nutshell, it lets you open Google files from the cloud or save your local files to your Google Docs folder.

Well, OffiSync has been upgraded extensively since then, and now it has a slew of cool features including, first and foremost, the ability to merge changes from multiple users -- right in your open copy Word, Excel, and PowerPoint -- in real-time. When someone makes a change to a document you have open, you are notified via a small pop up at the bottom of the screen. Click Merge, and the changes are immediately reflected in your document.

OfficSync does a lot of other new things as well. Google Image search is built right into the ribbon, for example, along with access to Google Sites, allowing you to save and open files form Google Sites file cabinets.

Check out this short video demonstration of OffiSync:

Most of this stuff remains free, but the real-time collaboration, along with Google Sites integration, requires a subscription to OffiSync Premium, which costs $12/year or a $30 one-time fee.