week 10, thing 20

ThinkFree Office has a look and feel similar to Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint. All in all, as free software it compares well to Microsoft office.

I played with the presentation software and found it familiar but it didn’t have the same defaults as Microsoft templates so I felt it was better for someone with no access to Microsoft or who prefers to creating their own design.

I noted that the default setting for a saved document was Bodley 25. I was surprised that Thinkfree.com used my network server to name a document so when I was on a quiet evening shift I did some experiments and read the notices more carefully. Thinkfree states quite clearly that it only saves to the desktop when the system crashes. When I chose the File/Save As menu, I did indeed have a choice to save in My Office on the Thinkfree site, or on the Bodley K, U or M Drive. This creates useful options for having backups of a cloud document on my hard drive, on a memory stick, as well as on a network drive. At the same time I found it somewhat scary that an unknown server could read my computer as well as my network. Let's hope it's a benign site.

I was also interested who uses this site for social networking. I viewed one site by Danielle Brigida Social Media Outreach Coordinator National Wildlife Federation. Her document (Welcome to the Social Media Bandwagon) gave an overview of current social media options and a summary of some of the tools we are doing in 23 things (Facebook, Twitter, Google alerts) as well as other social tools such as Stumble Upon. It was interesting to see the same information in a presentation and to note that other institutions are also joining the media bandwagon.