Something that has always caught my interest is the idea that web applications can take over a lot of the day-to-day tasks that a basic word processor once could. Realistically, unless you are putting together more detailed documents involving styles, columns, and presentation type things, then you can easily just use web based solutions and be fine.
I am seriously thinking about trying out some of the online spreadsheets soon for an upcoming tournament, as I think they can do just as good of a job as Excel can, and can be web browser compatible too. Both Zoho and Writely (and Google Spreadsheets, which I now seem to have access to) can do those basic tasks for me now, provided I do back them up every now and then, because as great as the web is, having something on YOUR disk and not theirs is nice too.
But I digress … the full web suite is truly the next step. There’s four such groups of apps that I’ve seen be thrown out there: Glide Effortless, Goowy, YouOS, and DesktopTwo. All four should work in Firefox or IE, and I’ve played with them all. While I’m undecided on whether or not they will take over my standard desktop usages, they all do offer a nice set of applications built in (one of them even has OpenOffice in its full form through Java, nice touch!) that will allow for productivity anywhere … although maybe not on my iBook G3. Since they’re all heavy on Flash and Java, my older G3 will choke on these badly.
Sign up for these, and let me know if you do, I’m all for trying out some of the collaboration pieces of these apps. (Links are forthcoming. In the meantime, read this article from CNet)
As a follow up, my Anchordesk e-mail had more on cool Web 2.0 tools today, so this may be worth checking out too! LINK
2 Responses to Who Needs Office … When You Have Firefox?
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Google Spreadsheets – Updated with new features
Google Spreadsheets is updatede and has some new features. Here’s a summary of the new features.
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I’ve done some reviews on my site of running spreadsheet- and wordapplications on the web. There are plenty more spreadsheetapplications, for example ajaxXLS, irows and Num Sum. Let me know if you like my reviews!