I will admit that MS office is the best office software however Google docs is good enough for me. It's not as full featured as Microsoft office but it's free and always in sync across machines. My favorite feature is collaborative editing. A class mate and wrote a paper for school using google docs and were able to write the whole thing simulataniously. I would see him editing the top of a paragraph before I had finished writing the bottom. We got the paper done fairly quickly. That experience lead us to a great idea for a collaborative writing contest. Wouldn't it be fun to give teams of say 6 people ten minutes to write a short story or essay on a given subject. At the end of the ten minutes the stories would be judged. I realize that most Friamer's could easily write a very long essay by themselves in 10 minutes, so maybe some sort of handicap could be pused, where avid friam writers would only have like 2 minutes. Just an idea.
Cody Cody Smith On Mon, May 20, 2013 at 11:10 AM, Arlo Barnes <arlo.bar...@gmail.com> wrote: > While MS may have lost loyal users who had used Office 2003 or 199X for > years when they introduced the Ribbon, but they gained a bunch of new > users. The goal was doubtless to 'freshen' Microsoft's (or more > specifically Office's) image, and it worked at least for a while. It is not > uncommon to see applications trying to be user-friendly blatantly rip off > the Ribbon, for example WinZip (not to be confused with WinRAR or 7zip). > There are many reasons why this is a silly, useless thing to do, but the > sentiment was definitely out there: people were overreaching when they said > that Microsoft had revolutionized the word processor user experience, but > that still shows that many people reacted favourably towards the ribbon, > and that is real. I don't think it really affected the long-term perception > or fate of MS, though. > Two things still keeping the behemoth in place are an odd sort of > nostalgia, back to the time when larger parts of the general public still > thought of Microsoft as technologically-minded innovators, like recent > articles about Bing Translate now featuring Klingon (emphasizing that the > Microsoft engineer who worked on the project was fluent) hearken to; and > tech deals - it is just one extra step to have to install something else > over Windows rather than over a blank disck, which takes no more practical > effort but has the added difficulty of convincing yourself that the > advantage of having Linux or whatever is greater than the convenience of > just using the substandard but already available OS, Windows (and this is > for the consumer that even knows of Linux, and how right it's price is, and > it's advantages). > -Arlo James Barnes > > ============================================================ > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College > to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com >
============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
