Week 11 Ofice 2.0

What is Office 2.0?

Office 2.0 is the availability and use of online productivity web-based applications (think word processing and spreadsheets). These applications provide users with the ability to create and share documents over the internet without the need for installed desktop applications.

Some experts speculate that this emerging trend may mean the death of Microsoft Office and other software-based productivity tools, while others think web-based applications have their place, but not in the office. But no matter what side of the office suite platform you side with, on this both sides seem to agree; web-based applications have their place.

One large benefit to web-based applications is that they eliminate the need to worry about different software versions or file types as you email documents or move from PC to PC.

Another advantage is that they easily accommodate collaboration by allowing multiple users to edit the same file and provide users with the ability to easily save and convert documents as multiple file types (including HTML and pdf). And, you can even use many of these tools, such as Zoho Writer and Google Docs to author and publish posts to your blog. It’s this type of integration with other web 2.0 tools that also makes web-based applications so appealing.

For this discovery exercise, participants are asked to take a look at a web-based word processing tool called Google Docs or Zoho Writer, create a simple document and then document your discoveries in your blog. If you are up to the challenge you might even export your document as a HTML file or publish it through Zoho to your blog.

Read through the Google Docs tour or watch Google Docs in Plain English.

With Zoho, Google Docs and other web-based applications, the possibilities are endless.

Discovery Resources:

A short list of web-based productivity applications – (authored by Helen Blowers in Google Docs)

A longer list of web-based applications - (authored by Helen Blowers in Google Docs)

Discovery Exercise:

1. Create a free account for yourself in Google Docs or Zoho Writer.

2. Explore the site and create a test document or two, email it to a friend. Try out Zoho Writer’s features and create a blog post about your discoveries.

Optional: If you're up for the challenge, try using Zoho’s "publish" options to post to your blog.* Note: Here’s a Document (viewable as a webpage) I created in Zoho about some of the features I found beneficial.

3. Try out Google Doc's or Zoho Writer features and create a blog post about your discoveries, including comments about how this could be useful to you in your life or useful to your library.

2 comments:

  1. Zoho writer templates for time sheet, write a speech and student homework look good.

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  2. I've been using GoogleDocs for a while and it's been very useful for ongoing documents, like the one where I jot down thoughts on 23 things as I go along! It's handy because I've been using different computers during the project. There aren't as many options in Google Docs as there are in Microsoft Word, and I really miss having my spellings automatically corrected.

    I was pleased to find Zoho Writer through this project. It has more functionality than Google Docs, plus it's never suddenly lost a document on me as Google Docs did last week. I'm delighted that it lets me use my Google sign-in, so it's not a new username and password. I shared a document successfully with Ciara, and I posted from Zoho Writer to my blog. The posting to the blog wasn't great. Lots of html went over that I didn't want and that made formatting difficult. In future I'll just copy and paste. My main problem with Zoho Writer was remembering its name, and I guess that for that reason alone Google Docs may, initially anyway, be more successful.

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Useful comments!