Sunday, March 2, 2008

Thing Eighteen - Open Office where have you been?

Like others participating in Libray2play, Openoffice.org took a very long time to download. But it was worth the wait, maybe not for me, I'll stick with Microsoft Office (I still don't know all there is to know there) BUT, this is a product to share with students who may not have access to all the programs we do. I will be sharing this info with my campus in our next weekly bulletin. This is not an "on the fly" sort of thing. A bit of planning needs to take place.

I practiced saving in the usual formats and then opening them in Microsoft Office. Everything I tried worked fine. I will need to experiment more with Impress to see if that truly crosses over. I did find CALC a bit easier than EXCEL, maybe more intuitive for non-math types, like myself.

As for Google Docs, again you need to be registered. But, I do see this as an alternative to our district's student folder. A student can quickly upload a document here and save and continue to work on it from home or another computer. Perhaps eliminating some frustration? Again, can't do this or much else "on the fly." I also liked the fact that you could upload larger documents and powerpoints than most email services will allow.

3 comments:

Terry said...

Hey! You're in the home stretch!

Grendel said...

Yes, you are! Congratulations are in order! Although I, too, had a long wait while downloading Open Office, it was worth it to me because I was able to help a student who needed to open a document in a different platform, and it was amazing to me that I had just the right tool at my fingertips!

LauraAnn said...

Did you try to create a powerpoint and then save it to your blog? I couldn't ever get that to work!