Week 8: Lesson 1
On Line Productivity Tools
You no longer need to buy basic desktop applications. A few companies are offering basic word processing, spreadsheets and even presentation software for free on the internet. The pluses are that you can access this from any computer any where in the world. You don't have to pay hundreds of dollars to buy Microsofts office product. And usually you can share you work with anyone else anywhere in the world.
Frederick County Library 2.0 training blog points out the pluses of online productivity tools for our patrons.
1) Library customers can save documents online instead of porting around their documents on a disk
2) They can do word processing and spreadsheets on ANY computer with Internet access, even one that doesn’t have Microsoft Word or Excel.
The minuses are that they are not as sophisticated as the ones you purchase. If you are going to write a book or keeps books for your business you would probably need one of the commercial software packages. As Sue about google docs. She finds it very buggy.
We are using Google docs for these lessons. When you link from the blog you go to a google doc. I am selling items on ebay and am using google spreadsheets to track my sales.
Discovery Exercises:
Explore the Zoho page. Zoho has a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation program, wiki, and other applications.
Zoho - Username: lucylibs Password: 95cedar.
Here's what you can do with spresent a presentation software like Powerpoint.
Assignment:
Read Online Productivity God from the Mashable blog and review one site you are interested in on the llll20 wiki. Username: llll20 Password: 95cedar
I'll put a section for Online Productivity Tools in that blog.
Always remember Sue S or Vicky are available to help you if you have any questions. Or ask someone who has completed the lesson, it will help them learn as well to show you.