MLA CE WEEK 5

This week I have been testing web 2.0 office products. Specifically, I have been comparing Zoho Sheet, Zoho Writer, Zoho Show, & Zoho Planner with Google Documents, Google Calendar, and the standard Microsoft equivalents.

Zoho Sheet seems very similar to the Microsoft counterpart Excel. In this case I think its a matter of familiarity. It is often easier to continue using a product until sufficient advances are made by a competitor before changing to the new application. This requires learning new controls and proficiency develops slowly.

Zoho Show is impressive in its ability to resize objects and place them in specific locations on a page. I liked the wide variety of backgrounds and formatting choices. All of the Zoho products were extremely slow to load. I do not know how well these applications perform on a Mac (My usual platform) as I previewed all the applications on a PC.

Google calendar seems superior in its ability to create schedules and share these with colleagues. I was not impressed with Zoho Planner. Google documents is a great place to store files and share them with others.

One product I find very useful was not mentioned in the course. I still use Adobe Acrobat to send files to others. When send multiple .Pdf files to others or to myself for comment I find PANDO to be extremely useful. Large amounts of data can be quickly forwarded in a Pando Package to anyone with an e-mail address.

Excel, Word, & PowerPoint are still the standards and while there may be some issues when groups have to create or edit documents, the alternative choices need further refining to be maximally usable.