The biggest advantage I can see with online productivity tools is the price. Free is free. Microsoft charges a fortune for their Office products. It appears that Open Office is a great and inexpensive solution to having the same tools I paid lots of money to get on my home computer. I mainly use the word processor, spread sheet, data base, and power point programs. I don't know how compatible these would be with my MacIntosh and I cannot try it since I already had Microsoft Office bought and paid for and installed. But, even those don't interface seamlessly. Formatting gets lost in the translation, and don't even get me started about how incompatible the excel programs are. So, the boast that Open Office makes for their use on multiple platforms doesn't really cover the ability of the programs to crossover from platform to platform correctly. I am suspicious of this capability, since Microsoft cannot even mange this, despite all of the resources they have available to throw at the problem. However, if you are not crossing platforms, it is probably a wonderful solution.
Open Office will allow many people who could otherwise access these office tools due to their expense the ability to have and use them. I wonder about the security of the documents, but that is a concern on any platform with any software program.
As to Google.docs, I learned about them when I was creating my first wiki. It is a wonderful site for sharing a single document that many people are working on. I think it is the ultimate collaboration Tool. I really, really like it, and will use it often, as I do a lot of collaborative work.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment