The Doctor is in!

Google Docs, that is.

Sick of the limitations to your productivity software? Tired of endlessly emailing documents to colleagues far and wide? Well, my dears, Google Docs may have a solution....

I haven't actually tried Google Docs before, so this was an interesting lesson. Primarily in-house we use Microsoft Office, and since we're large enough to have our own server environment, documents that need shared editing are constructed, edited & commented upon using Word in Office in a shared environment on the server.

I was feeling a bit rebellious today, so after reading through the lesson, rather than review the tour or view Google Docs in Plain English, I just hit the link provided to Google Docs and commenced learning by trial and error.

Why, you ask? Actually I had a practical reason for initally ignoring the tutorials - while many of our patrons use Microsoft Office, a number of them don't. I'm also on several library-related, non-DWU committees. Having an alternative option to emailing documents back and forth sounds to me like a very practical idea.

BUT, too many time software applications require odd things to be downloaded, or are overly confusing for novice users. So I used the same tack here that I often take with database trials: namely, I experiment with real tasks that I need to accomplish , and tackle them in the new database/product. That way, I have actual goals and when I finish, I have results I can compare against those produced using a product with which I'm already familiar.

I figured, if I can use it cold, without lots of instruction, it may be easy enough for a novice to catch on to - of course, for a real test I'd want to grab a patron, but....

In this case, I created a few signs for the instruction lab, a short presentation for faculty on how (and when) to reserve the lab, what type of equipment they'll have available, etc., and a quick & dirty spreadsheet for some withdrawal statistics.

The results? Google Docs provides an acceptable, if somewhat generic, alternative to a few of Microsoft's productivity apps.

Overall, the presentations software is a bit bland: it certainly doesn't seem to offer the same bells & whistles that are available in PowerPoint, for example. The same could be said of the spreadsheet & text document options.

But all three - document, spreadsheet & presentation - proved easy to open, manipulate, save, reopen, edit, etc. I even tested sharing & embedding with no difficulties.

The one option I didn't/couldn't immediately wrap my head around is forms. After a bit of experimentation, however, I managed to create one.

Want to help me test my success? Fill in your answers, and I'll follow up with the results at the start of next week :)

Well, that's all for now, folks. I'm off to play with a few other applications mentioned in this week's lesson links.