The free Agile project plan template is meant to make this communication quick and simple. But the applications aren't as ready for prime time as more traditional Office alternatives.Microsoft project plan In the start date Step 2: Set Up Calendar.
If you value collaboration and online storage over traditional features, or you're just looking for a cheap, efficient way to write letters and reports, Google Docs may be for you. But in its current test phase, Google Docs are limited in size - in fact, I had to scratch around to find a spreadsheet on my hard drive that came in under its 500-kilobyte limit.Īlthough it was fine at basic formatting, Google's word processor quickly got lost importing Word documents with more sophisticated formatting - including several samples of standard resumes.
Google Docs can export documents to your hard drive in Office and OpenDocument formats, and the software can import most documents you upload from your hard drive. More importantly, Google encourages collaboration - you can easily share documents with others, who can revise them online and share their documents with you. You'll see these types of schemes referred to as Web 2.0, the second generation of interactive Web programming.īy default, Google stores documents on its own servers, so they're available whenever you log on, no matter what computer you're using. Instead of downloading huge programs to your hard drive, Google offers lightweight word processing, spreadsheet and presentation programs that live in your Web browser. If you don't create complex documents but do value portability and collaboration, Google has taken a whole new approach called Google Docs. Heck, in our shop, we're still using Office 97 - that's the clay tablet version. In any case, the overwhelming majority of Microsoft Office users will be working with pre-2007 versions for years to come. But I think experienced Microsoft Office 2007 users will save documents in the earlier formats anyway, just to keep things straight with people who might have to read them with older versions of the program. Although Office 2007 programs can read and write traditional Office formats, their native tongue is a new format that only Microsoft has adopted so far.įor now, the free, open source suites might have problems with native Office 2007 documents. OpenOffice and Symphony are compatible with the OpenDocument format (ODf), an industry standard that allows programs from different developers to read each other's documents and preserve typefaces, paragraphs, indents, tabs, bullets, numbering and so forth.īoth free suites also support the proprietary but widely-copied formats that Microsoft used in its basic Office products until the 2007 version. But the moment you share the electronic versions with other folks, you'll have to pay attention to this issue.
If you're creating documents strictly for your own use, this isn't important.
These are the coding schemes that programmers use to store documents. This brings up another technical issue - file formats. If a glitch costs a couple of hours of your valuable time, free software can turn out to be very expensive. If your company documents do, test OpenOffice or Symphony carefully before committing time-critical documents to their care. Also, none of my documents required Microsoft's internal macro programming language for automated tasks.