I love google, I really do. I blog through them, I email through them, they host my family's photo albums, they give me a home page on which I can save all my links - and they host my wordprocessing. Even cooler - my school email is through google, which means I have a whole new google account just for school. It also means that I have a whole separate documents account for school. I use google documents already, have for a while now. And since google documents does all the other great things that most data processors do, I was considering uninstalling OpenOffice.
I also want to make it perfectly clear that I love OpenOffice, mainly because I love open source applications. I've actually sent them money - though admittedly less than I would have paid for Microsoft Office Suite. Which is why even though I don't actually use it anymore, when I got this brand new laptop, I downloaded and installed it yet again. In fact, this being a brand new laptop (I've never owned a brand new computer before), it had Microsoft Office pre-installed (even though they wanted me to pay for it after the trial ran out).
So here I've sat with OpenOffice, but I haven't used it - not once. I've had this computer for a month. I've written several different things, all on google documents, or if it's a quick note, on notepad. Never opened it until today, when I went to print my papers that are due tomorrow. I got the word count on one of them and realized that something wasn't right. I had realized it seemed rather voluminous while I was writing it, but I really didn't think much of it. So I opened OpenOffice and copied, then pasted.
The assigned paper was 2-4 pages, I had written 3. When I pasted it into OpenOffice, it was nine and a half damned pages. And let me tell you, it's not possible to just trim a nine page paper into four. Oh no it's not. So I got to rewrite it this afternoon. On the upside, I do feel better about my humanities paper. It was open ended, so I really didn't feel too bad about it, but I'm glad it went from less than a page to two. Now I just gotta figure out google documents......
4 comments:
LOL - Been there, done that.
I don't know if this is relevant to you at this point or not, but depending on what school you're at - if they have a bookstore that sells software, you can usually get a pre-licensed copy of Microsoft Office student version for much, much cheaper than what it normally goes for. I think I paid $65 for the Mac version at my MRU bookstore, and the license is good for 5 years.
Oh, I could get it without a problem. It wouldn't have cost much just to register the version that came pre-installed with my laptop. But I really like OpenOffice, mainly because I absolutely love open source applications.
And when I get google documents worked out, I'll probably just use that, because I love google and I love having my documents available at any computer that's online.
What annoys the fuck out of me with Google Docs is that there is only a single Google login that can be active on a given computer at a given moment in time for *all* Google apps: mail, reader, apps, calendar, etc. This is a total fucking pain in the ass for people who use multiple different Google accounts for different purposes.
I don't have that problem with my school account, which allows me to open my google docs through that address in the same browser. When I feel the need to open my other gmail account, I just open a different browser.
The other thing that can be done is to consolidate your gmail accounts to get mail in just one of them. Makes everything much easier. All you have to do it go to setting - accounts - get mail from other accounts. You can get mail from up to five other accounts.
I like that I can have my personal account open and still open my school account, because I use docs attached to my school address for school work and my personal for personal use. And my favorite google tech tells me they're working on the problem of opening multiple accounts in the same browser. But apparently that's a little complicated.....
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