Week 5 - Web Office Tools

I'm going to see if I can write my post in googledocs and post it to my blog. This is an experiment based on the optional exercise. [Note: this didn't work - I had to cut/paste to get this here...]

This week happens to be a week I've had the least amount of time to devote to this class, which is too bad, because I see lots of potential for this product. I had not even heard of googledocs before, so, this week was totally new and I love the concept. How many times have you read committee meeting minutes and you read the section that has to do with something you said, and you think, "Boy, did they get this wrong - this isn't what I said at all." Well, with googledocs, drafts of minutes could be posted for all participants to see and edit prior to it becoming the official documentation. This would save so many future hassles with amending minutes, revised copies, etc...

I don't do much with spreadsheets or slides, so, I devoted less time to this, and haven't had the chance to really compare googledocs to the other web office products, yet, but, hope to be able to spend some weekend time looking through this and looking at more features of the google products.

Is this the future of all software products? I think not in its current format - but, it's getting closer. I found the "comparison" feature cumbersome. I'd like a better way to see what others have done to my document - maybe colors, or fonts, or something other than lots of crossed-out lines. Bryan suggested you need a constant internet connection. While I don't know if this is true, this would be a shortcoming if if is true, although I suppose one could work off-line and then upload a document into googledocs from another product, such as Word. But, this, of course, means you have to buy more programs...

Very interesting concepts and I've enjoyed playing with this. One additional problem I encountered is that some colleagues invited me to share their documents, but, my work email and my googledocs email aren't the same, and I couldn't figure out how to get into their documents, even though I was invited. Again, because I didn't have much time this week, perhaps I would have figured it out with more time, but, for now, that didn't work well.