Enthusiasm and MS?

Office 2007 is a bit unusual, for me. Been using it for a while (since it became available to Indiana University’s community) and have been enjoying some of the features. Still don’t really enjoy the “tape” interface in Word or PowerPoint but some things seem to have been planned pretty carefully.

For instance, I’m currently writing this in OneNote which seems greatly improved over OneNote 2003. Zoho Notebook seems simpler to use (and, obviously, will be available at no cost) but OneNote is sufficiently better from previous incarnations that it is conceivably a cool tool.

Coming Up: Montreal’s Blogging Community Celebrations

Seems like Montreal’s blogging scene is as active as ever, this month. Scary!

First, on Wednesday, March 7, at 8p, yulblog First Wednesday (monthly meeting, at Quincaillerie on Rachel near Parc Laf). Then, on Friday, March 16, at 5p, Blogging Book Launch at the RJ microbrewery on de la Roche (near my place).

Zoho Tools

I might enjoy Zoho more than I thought I would. In a browser (like Firefox 2) with a “spell as you type” mode, it can be fairly useful.
However, the desktopization of Zoho Writer (a widget which allows users of Zoho Writer, Sheets, or Show to edit files offline) wasn’t working for me, just now. The other desktop widgets did work and the add-ins for Microsoft Excel and Word also seem to work. Strange there doesn’t seem to be a PowerPoint add-in, but maybe that’s coming.
At first glance, Zoho Writer seems more feature-rich than Google Docs. It also works in browsers to allow for opening online documents, which can be quite useful. But Google Docs has the advantage of Gmail integration…
Actually, I just received a Word document which was to be co-edited with members of a group I’m a member of and I decided to open it in Google Docs. And I then shared it through Google Docs. Maybe because I thought it would be easier for the “collaborators” to recognise what this was supposed to be. But I guess I should have used Zoho Writer.
Ah, well…

I’ve been using Zoho Show for lectures and it does work fairly well. I wish it worked a bit more like an outliner with different output options (screen display, outlined notes, etc.) but it works quite well as a PowerPoint replacement.
The advantage, for me, is that I can edit it on any computer and know that it’ll be available for classroom presentation. Perhaps a less important point but it also means that I only log in to my Zoho Show account, from the classroom computer.
An issue I had while presenting was that read-only presentations were too slow to go from one slide to another. Another issue I have is that Firefox isn’t keeping the classroom computer awake and the screen sometimes goes black if I spend too much time on the same slide (which might happen on occasion).
I just wish I could synchronise things with my Clié so that notes I take while reading some things can be transformed into lecture notes more easily.

All in all, Zoho’s online tools seem to be fairly well adapted to my workflow.