Have you ever started a document thinking “Man, tons of other people must have done this same document or something similar. I wish there was something I could use as a sample or template”? That’s exactly what I was thinking today. And then I found .docstoc. This website is a huge repository (over 3 million documents!) where tons of people share their professional documents. Anybody can view the documents for free, but if you want to download them you’ll need to create an account (which is free).

To give you a feel for what they have to offer: I was looking for a document to help me lay out Skill Capture’s financial projections. My search for “financial projection” gave me 250 resulting documents. I didn’t even bother looking at any of the documents past the first page because I found several really useful ones right at the top of the search. I downloaded the xls files and was ecstatic to find that they were full-fledged spreadsheets with formulas to calculate lots of things automatically.

I did several other searches for documents on the service and found that each of my searches had an equal abundance of quality results. This is something I’ve wanted for a long time and I’m extremely excited that I found it.