CPL 2.0 Productivity Tools

I tried out Google docs. I don't see it replacing Word or other Microsoft Office products, since it is pretty basic. The automatic spell checker alone would drive me crazy, since it doesn't recognize contractions. I can see how Google docs would be useful for some people, who may be using a variety of different computers, or groups of people who want to access the documents (for example, students working together at university). I don't have a need to do that in my personal life, and if I want to do it at work, I use SharePoint.

Library customers might find it useful, but they may not want to use up their Internet time on documents when they could use productivity software and save their documents to a memory stick. I would be interested to know if customers would be able to upload documents they create in Word, PowerPoint or Excel into Google docs, but I suspect they can't. I tried to upload some of my documents on Central's I-drive into Google docs, but it didn't work, and I got was a "server error" message, which wasn't at all helpful. I also tried several times to copy and paste my test Google docs document into this blog, but that it wouldn't work either.

I might consider using Google calendar at home and syncing it with my Outlook calendar at work, but I find that sometimes these things are much more cumbersome and time consuming than just writing stuff in my daytimer. (And lately, Shaw's Internet service in my neighbourhood has been unavailable for several days at a stretch -- an Internet based calendar is not really useful when you can't access it!)