Here’s an analogy. Suppose you had to type in words with a “word editor” You click on a palette of letters and symbols and you have to type by clicking on letters. Now you’ve given up the advantage of touch typing and are forcing people to hunt and peck for letters. Ridiculous.

As I wrote in this post, I have been using DropBox to work with my collaborator. But these seem like other good options.

If you type up a full-fledged LaTeX document in Google Docs, then you can use SpartanTeX to compile it. I haven’t used this extensively, but did play with it quite a bit. Here is the link for SpartanTeX:

http://tex.uncg.edu/login.php

Also, along the same lines, you can use ScribTeX for LaTeX document collaboration:

http://www.scribtex.com/pages/index

I started with latex in my first year as a masters student. I am now in my first year as a phd student and at this point, I am sure latex saves me time on assignments. Probably the first semester I started with it, it did not. Second semester it was probably a tie. After that, it started paying serious dividends.

Though that comes with a caveat: the reason it works for me (as a statistics student) is my course work standards are “turn in something that looks professional”, but there are no specific document rules to follow. That sort of environment is great for latex because you don’t have to get anything exactly right. If you were in course work where instructors typically had very demanding document standards and worse every other course seemed to use a different standard, that could get old very fast (unless they supplied the latex packages and appropriate document stubs in which case latex would be solid gold).