Friday, 26 March 2010

Week 10: Office 2.0 (Part 1)

Thing 19: Google Docs
I have previously used Google Docs, and found it to be particularly useful during my undergraduate studies - not just in terms of saving the need to carry a USB stick anywhere, but also negating a lot of the problems caused by everyone having different versions of Office, especially for collaborative work. However, when uploading files previously created in alternative office programs, I found that many of the formatting issues prevalent when changing between Office versions or programs still prevailed. The worst offender for this was footnotes - a particular annoyance whilst writing my dissertation! On revisiting Google Docs for 23 Things, I noticed that the manner in which these were handled in native documents did seem to have changed - with a handy little sidebar within Google Docs itself (see image to the left) . Non-native footnotes (see image to the left) were still handled in a rather clunky manner however (see below).
For less complex documents however, and for situations where collaboration and accessibility are paramount, Office 2.0 definitely wins out.
As advised, I experimented with the collaborative functions of Google Docs - I liked that revised documents, like unread e-mails, are highlighted in bold. The ability to view revisions (very wiki-esque!) was also extremely helpful - and I imagine would still be so for documents only being edited by one person.

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