Week 8, Thing 18: Take a look at some online productivity tools

I checked out both the Zoho and Google Docs. This is amazing! Often we will have problems where someone created a file in a newer version and then sent it to someone who has an older version and then there are formatting problems, etc. Recently I created an Excel document to log information for the game I run. Unfortunately, one of the members on staff did not have excel on his computer and therefore is unable to utilize the information I prepared. Had I known these things existed, I might have created the file there and then it would be accessible to everyone. The only problem I could foresee is that often when I am working on things for game, I am using the game's antiquated laptop. This machine runs on an impressive P2 processor and could potentially go onto the Internet if I felt like having a dial up account. (Course, I think it would be silly to have a dial up account to connect the lap top when my phone lines run through my cable...)

In Zoho writer, it appears that you can do just about everything that a basic Microsoft Office suite would allow you to do. Of course, there are some disadvantages, such as not having access to a plethora of fonts or font sizes. Basically, if you want it for a simple text document, this would work just fine. But, if you want the ability to vastly manipulate the document, then you would need to use a Microsoft Office based program.

Google Docs does not appear to have as may different options for types of documents you can create, limiting you just to a document (ala Word) or a spreadsheet (ala Excel). It is also limiting with the fonts, sizes, etc. While you are limited to 2 different document styles in Google Docs, Zoho gives you a lot more choices and includes some templates for creating documents in specific styles.

I do think that these programs have their place, but I also would hate for this to be my only options. I've been spoiled with my ability to completely manipulate my documents and would feel trapped with the few choices given by both Zoho and Google Docs. While I do not think that this will cause the Microsoft Office suite to go the way of the dodo, a possible result my be that the cost of Microsoft Office may decrease as people are able to have these other options. (let's hope)

And while I'm happy with these online productivity tools, I'm also happy to say 18 down... 5 to go!