Next Semester Experiment, Google Apps
The next half-semester is going to be pretty light weight. I’m only taking one course, broken into two parts, Physics. This should be a pretty easy class for me, I hope.
The experiment is going to be trying to do most of the class using Google applications. As of right now, I use MS Office 2007, with the 4 major applications being OneNote, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. I use at least 3 of these for any given class, so it’s going to be hard not to use them full time.
What I will use, and probably the biggest transition, is for starters, Google Notebook. I use OneNote for all my classes, it saves a lot of time with taking notes, cross-referencing notes with other notebooks or sections, and a lot of time printing off a hundred documents. I’ve got it down to where I print off rough drafts only by the way. I will post all the stuff in OneNote as well, mostly for archiving.
Next, I will use Google Documents instead of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Now, the caveat to this is that I will use Google Documents only for creating, editing, and proofing. For final submission, I will use MS Office for final proofing and submission, until I have a warm and fuzzy about using Google Doc’s by itself.
Using these won’t be a real big deal, since I have been using them for quite some time. It makes it easy for me to work on homework at work (while not working) and do the notes in Google Docs, and work on it at home as well. It comes in handy since I have to use my secure thumbdrive for both work and the Guard (federal regulations and all), and it’s a real pain in the ass to keep one document current. I have, on more than one occasion, submitted one document that was still in draft, whilst the finished product was not on the thumbdrive, but on the computer, or on the server. Synchronizing my files using the Google Doc’s should hopefully mitigate that issue. Hopefully.
So, while I’m in the middle of this experiment, I’ll post any information I have, be it cool tricks, annoyances, and just general fact finding.
