Acrobat.com Preview…

Tonight I had a phone conversation with Mark, a guy from the marketing department at Adobe. Someone over there had seen my write up on Google Docs from a couple of weeks ago and they wanted to give me a tour of their similar online offerings, Acrobat.com.

During the 35 minute conversation, Mark showed me some pretty amazing things that could be done on Acrobat.com including creating documents that printed and looked on screen exactly as you format them. No wonky bullet points, no continuation of the underlining depending on cursor position. They have collaboration that shows in real time who is viewing or editing a document, spreadsheet, or presentation. You can comment on their edits as they move along.

Of course all of this is done in Flash so you can use it anywhere flash is available including offline with Adobe Air and on your mobile phone in the next year as Flash rolls out to smartphones everywhere (except the iPhone, apparently).

I’m going to give a more thorough going-over soon, so look for that post. I am also looking for a couple of volunteers who might be able to sign up for Acrobat.com and test it out with The Digitante. If you think you’d like to participate in a bit of experimenting, email me by heading to the About page, or you can click the Google Voice widget over in the right column of the blog.

Google Docs…

Microsoft Office owns a lion-share of the word processing (Word), spreadsheet (Excel), and presentation software (PowerPoint) market. These tools have great feature sets and can perform tasks from the mundane to the complex. There were a number of drawbacks to Microsoft Office, including the big two: file sharing and the cost.

Google Docs has managed to cure these two woes and added a bunch of other common, useful features.

The common stuff

Documents, spreadsheets, and presentations have similar options as their Microsoft counterparts:

• Documents – Inserting images, links, and tables; print preview; headers and footers; spellcheck; texting formatting.
• Spreadsheets – Inserting and deleting rows/columns; comments; formula toolbar; formatting rules; solve and validate data.
• Presentations – Themes; speaker notes; inserting images, links, and tables; slide import from PowerPoint.

Google Docs’ first big win: file sharing

Since Google Docs, much like Gmail and Google Calendar, is all online, you can access your documents, spreadsheets, and presentations from any computer with access to the internet. This allows you to focus on other things rather than figuring out if you have the most recent version of the file on your thumb drive or saved in your email.

Not only do you have online access to your files, but you can switch your files from Private to Public or share them with certain other users.

As you can see, you can directly email people to let them know they have permission to edit and collaborate on your documents. Additionally, you can get a link directly to the document that could be posted to your blog. After all this, you can also check and see who has access to your document and what type of permission they have, either editing or viewing. You can also make the document private again so no one can see it.

Google Docs’ second big win: cost

For the most basic version of Microsoft Office, you are looking at spending $150. Fortunately, access to Google Docs is free. For most basic, non-work tasks, there are no features that you are going to be missing. A few that could be missed if you work on more advanced projects would be mail merge in Word and macros and Visual Basic in Excel.

Even in the event that you need a feature that Google Docs is missing, you still don’t need to purchase Microsoft Office.

You may remember that we have talked in the past about open-source software. OpenOffice.org is a robust, free, open-source alternative to Microsoft Office. The below screenshot is from the OpenOffice.org website. You can see that it is very similar to Microsoft Word 2005. OpenOffice will be getting the new Word ribbon style bar in it’s next iteration.

Get collaborating

If you would like to get started with Google Docs or would like to know how to use some of the features of documents, spreadsheets, or presentations, be sure to head to the About page. Once there you can find contact information for The Digitante. Feel free to send an email or call with your questions.