When it comes time to work I turn to Microsoft Office as do the majority of business people and users looking to do some word processing, check email or build spreadsheets. Microsoft Office is expensive for sure and several free products have turned up that offer Office-like capabilities.

Among the free offerings that are Office alternatives are Google Documents and OpenOffice. While both of these offerings are free, they still only have a tiny fraction of the users Microsoft has for Office. A new study from Clickstream Technologies polled Internet users to find out what productivity suite most people use.

Google today has announced the roll out of a much anticipated feature for the online Google Docs - bringing them offline. Starting today a select group of individuals that have Google Gears will be able to save their online Google documents and have them available offline as well.

The online Google tools currently provide a great convenience with things like Gmail, calendars and online documents with centrally located storage that can be accessed from almost any browser with an internet connection. One of the downsides is that as soon as the internet connection is lost, so are the documents, email, etc. With this new feature, the documents will still be available through the browser when the internet connection is lost and it will continue to save changes, syncing up with the online storage the next time a connection is available.