Week 11 - NSW Public Libraries 2.0

After viewing the slideshow it was amazing how many free tools are available for creating and editing documents. This will allow staff to create masterpieces without having to purchase additional software. I think the tools are also a great idea for when people are travelling and accessing the internet at a cafe or similar, these tools will allow you to create and share documents regardless of what is installed on the computers, and as a bonus you will be able to access them again later from any location.

I have created a basic document in Google Docs and shared it. My workplace has used Google Docs quite extensively for a number of different reasons. When planning events that involve people from different geographical areas it is easy to share a Google Docs document that they can all access and have input, without having to worry about email, lost attachments or multiple versions. Everyone is accessing the latest version of the document and their changes are instantly visible to other participants.
I can also see Google Docs being very useful when working on PCs that do not have Office or similar installed, documents can still be created in a number of formats without requiring a software installation.

I created a zoho account to compare it with Google Docs, I think I prefer the zoho options, particularly in the word processing application as it allowed a large amount of document formatting which is not available in Google Docs. Zoho also allowed a larger range of formats to select from, but I have not explored all of them to see how useful they are.
I think that I will continue using both until I am more familiar with them and then determine which one I am going to stick to.