atw: Re: OT Writing tools

2009/1/27 Jean Hollis Weber <jean05@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>

> Christine Kent wrote,

Google Docs - it seems pretty good, and amazingly it does save to PDF,
>> as well as Word, RTF, and OO.  It even does presentations that you can
>> save to PowerPoint!
>> I wonder if anyone is using it?
>>
>
> I have heard that Google Docs is popular in tertiary education, where
> groups of students work together on projects. Especially in distance
> education, all the work is done online, with the final product saved to PDF
> or presentations or whatever is needed to turn in as the assignment. For a
> group project, that's a lot easier and more efficient than emailing files
> back and forth.
>

Even for non-group projects, it's useful when one person works on multiple
computers, and requires access to their documents.  Google Docs offline is
excellent for writing during my commute.

I use GDocs all the time for my coursework, but must submit .DOC format to
meet my course requirements. It is a nightmare fixing all the formatting
problems generated by exporting to .DOC (tables, lists, etc.).

It is still good to know HTML fairly well and a little CSS, as you need to
hack the source to get tables to display correctly. I hate working with
tables in Word and Frame as well, so I may be biased. The HTML/CSS that
GDocs automatically generates is quite messy.

I haven't tried the GDocs -> OpenDoc -> .DOC export path yet, it's rumoured
to require fewer corrections.

Kym
-- 
www.nifwlseirff.net

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