Collaborate and share documents online using Show Document

Posted on October 28, 2008 at 5:32 am

Looking for a free online document collaboration tool? Earlier, I wrote about EditGrid, a free online spreadsheet program that several people can edit and collaborate on at the same time. The only problem is that it’s just a spreadsheet program! What if you want to share a Word document, PDF document, a Text file, or some other kind of document with a group?

ShowDocument is a nitfy little web service that provides live and free document sharing. It’s super simple to use and requires no downloads or installations in order to work! You can upload a document and invite others to view and discuss it.

To share a document, click the Select File button and choose your file to share (doc, PDF, text, image, etc) and click Upload. Then click the Click to Start button.

Now the document will load and you’ll be brought to a dialog where you can type in your name and invite other people to join the document sharing session.

You can either tell them to go to ShowDocument.com and enter in the code in the Join box or send them a direct link or just type in their email addresses.

Click OK and now you’ll be able use several tools to on the document, kind of like a whiteboard. There is a Pen tool, Hightlight tool, White Out tool, and Add Text tool.

Of course, everyone will be able to add their own markings. Also, there is a universal chat window where everyone can type into to talk to each other.

The best thing is that you can download the document back onto your computer with all of the markings and edits in the original format it was uploaded. Since I uploaded a PDF file, it gives me the option to save the file as a PDF. Remarkably, even with all of my highlights, added text, and pen drawings, it looked just the same in Adobe Reader!

Overall, it’s a very simple and basic tool, yet very useful for working people who may need to quickly share or collaborate with others on a particular document. Enjoy!

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