The Online Experiment
So I finished up this semester using primarily Google Apps. The experience has left me with two separate critiques.
First, Google Notebook is very handy. I was relatively impressed on how easy it was to use, to grab snippets online and import them into the notebook, and to do some light cross referencing. It made it very convenient to keep a working document going between home and work without getting into doing a lot of change revisions and trying to keep those straight. I wouldn’t recommend Notebook for anything that is cross reference intensive, such as programming and using it to lay out modules and code snippets. For something like that, I’d still recommend using something commercial such as MS OneNote.
Second, using Google docs for making word documents, I was not entirely impressed with. Mainly, it’s the formatting. It is relatively impossible to format a multi page document with formatting rules such as APA. Even importing a formatted document to use as a template lost its formatting altogether. Now, using Google docs for basic spreadsheet and slideshow presentations, it’s easy to format and translates well into other formats, such as the MS Office formatting.
Now, I talked about a site called ThinkFree earlier, how it is a web-based Office suite that you can either download and use as a stand alone office suite, or use purely in a web browser. I have to admit that I have yet to use this. I can say that along the same lines, there is a site called Ulteo that offers the same thing. It has the ability to create documents in a web browser, gives you a 1GB storage area to store documents, so forth. The big difference is that this is a port of OpenOffice, another free office suite that is the forerunner of StarOffice (now is free through Sun or through using the Google Pack download). Why I mention Ulteo is that I am very familiar with OpenOffice, I have been using it for years. It will open any MS Office document, as well as any of a multitude of other office suite formats.
The goal here, to show you that you don’t need to spend 750 bucks on an office suite when there are many others free to use, to download, and now, some you don’t even have to download at all, just create a login and use away…
