Week 5 – Web Office Tools
Week 5 – Web Office Tools
My response to the MLA Web 2.0 101 Week 5 assignment was first prepared as a GoogleDocs document, then saved to my Blog for further editing.
- I first imported an existing WEBTREAT on end of life care to GoogleDocs and saved it to my Blog. I then made a minor change to the document and saved it to my Blog again. I was pleased to note that GoogleDocs reminded me that I already had saved a document with the same name to my Blog and asked me if I wanted to replace it.
- One problem that I noticed in transferring a Office Open Writer document to Word to GoogleDocs to my Blog was spacing, so I don’t recommend so many generations of programs going into a Blog. However, importing my document into GoogleDocs seemed just fine.
- Pulling up the spreadsheet and making changes was very easy.
- Creating a presentation slide was more challenging on a dial-up connection. I thought I had lost my slides as I kept getting error messages when I tried to save the show, but an earlier version was still there. I was able to edit it and share it with people. Apparently you can not post a slide show to a Blog however. Too bad!
- Comparing GoogleDocs to Zoho, Microsoft, and Webex: I did not get into any of these three products to check them out. Zoho required too much paperwork, Microsoft did not display the required fields, so I could not register, and the Webex website did not work. I like that GoogleDocs did not require any upfront paperwork – just an existing Google account.
- Do I think that GoogleDocs and similar Web-based products are the future of office software? Probably not, or not any time soon. For me, they have great potential. I’m part-time, so it will be nice to be able to work on documents at home and at work in the same format. I can also see great potential for group document development, although my (cheap) husband said that he just sends an e-mail. Assuming that these documents are really secure and safe, I can see keeping some common documents on the Web, so that they can be used at home or at work. For instance, we respond to dozens of incoming e-mail messages every day, many asking for guidelines form our organization or other commons questions. We keep various “cheat sheets” that summarize some answers on our computers at work. My boss also keeps them on a portable hard drive. Keeping them on the web might make more sense – and perhaps we might even want to share some of them as FAQS.
- Obviously one needs to be very careful about what one stores on the Web and how one shares information. I keep adding websites to del.icio.us for my own quick reference, including adding a FacePage and other sites from this course. The FacePage site had more than 600 co-links – all spam! So that was probably not a good idea.
