Aah, who hasn't forgotten that PowerPoint slide, or that word document file that they needed for that ever important meeting.The majority of people out there from what I can tell still use a piece of hardware called a pen drive.
I wonder how many of us out there remember the days of yesteryear when a floppy drive was the mainstay of data transportation. For some of us this was almost a lifetime ago, but for some others of us it was not that long ago. Still the main concept of a floppy drive is still in the heart of us all only in a different form. The difference may be the size or the shape, but still the basic idea is still there. A medium that we can fit in our pocket.
I hate to say it, but this whole idea is a very archaic one. There is a completely diferent way of thinking that some call Web 2.0. This concept is the whole idea behind modern forums and blogs, modern cell phones, and many other forms of communicating information.
Perhaps the biggest change with the advent of the formation of the the Web 2.0 paradigm is the invention of the Cloud. Some people may say, if you haven't heard of the cloud; then your head is probably in the clouds.There are many current uses of the cloud. Some people, including this author uses Skydrive to store homework and other files that the user needs to access across different computers no matter what network they are on. What it does is act like a virtual pen drive. Which can be accessed from any other computer that in online and has a Web browser. This is including at their school, work, or even on a friends computer. All they need to do to use this feature is create a Microsoft Live ID. Another feature that someone with a Microsoft Live ID can use is Microsoft Mesh. With Microsoft Mesh a person can synchronize folders across any number of computers. I myself have my main documents folder synchronized across all my computers. This means that instead of keeping a file on a pen drive that I could just as easily forget at home, I can just as easily go to a public computer, open the file and print or edit how I see fit. In this way you can save a lot of time and not have to re-create that needed file at the last minute.
If you happen to use a different operating systems, then there are options for you as well. I don't have experience with too many of those, but for those of you that are used to the Web based systems like google, those work on other systems since they are platform independent. There are also other options that are not browser based such as SpiderOak. Spider oak also synchronizes between different operating systems. In other words, if you have a computer running Windows, and a computer running Linux, It is able to synchronize your documents between them without much of a fuss.