Thanks to Ephrem Rabin for reminding me about Google Docs. Using Google Docs you can create and store documents, spreadsheets and presentations online and control others' access to them.
The programs you use to edit the documents are all browser based, but the look and feel is so similar to the Office Suite that you will think you are still using Office.
Ephrem suggested this to faculty members who wanted to allow students to edit documents, I suspect, because not all students have the Microsoft Office Suite.
Another alternative I suggested to him was to save Word docs as RTF (Rich Text Format). RTF will retain much of the formatting when a student opens the doc in Word, but a student can use Notepad or Wordpad (both included in Windows Operating System) to edit the doc as well.
