I had cause tonight to write a document that I’ll need to share with a couple of members of staff in the PlusNet office on Monday, and thought that I’d be best do it in a Word Document (it’s quite long, unfortunately!)

Personally, I’m a cheap-skate (I am Scottish after all ;-)) so I don’t have Microsoft Office. When thinking about installing OpenOffice on to my PC (haven’t needed it since upgrading) I decided that it might be better if I decided to embrace ‘Web 2.0′ and make use of Google Docs.

This may seem surprising, as some people will know that I don’t actually like Gmail. As a Mail client, I hate it - it just doesn’t work for me, yet for other people it works great and they use it over any desktop client etc. This made me slightly wary of using Google Docs as it was probably going to be likely that I’d not like that either.

I duly logged in, was presented with the WYSIWYG editor for my Document, and started typing away. 2 hours later, and I’ve written about 75% of version 0.1 of the document (why’s it always much easier to write documents when you have no word limit - I always used to struggle with Uni essays!), and I have actually enjoyed using Google Docs. I did find it slightly annoying that I couldn’t make my table centre on the page, but since I usually struggle to get Open Office to do what I want when it comes to tables, I can live with that.

The other good thing is that, when the document is complete, I have the option to export it to a Word Document, Open Office Document, PDF or even a Webpage — or I could just email the Google Docs link to the person that’ll be getting the document in the first place and (it would appear) they’ll be able to view it and collaborate on it with me.

I think I’m slowly adapting to these new fangled web apps… after insisting I was on Web 0.1 for months

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This entry was posted by Colin Ogilvie on Sunday, July 1st, 2007 at 12:12 am and is tagged with Thoughts and is posted in the category Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.