...actually, why EVERYONE can start to say goodbye to MS Word and Excel.
If you work as web designer or web developer you would have come across some issues with MS Word. Although ideally our job is not content filling, the odd occasion will still require this (small, premium site, training etc) and if you're anything like me, you like to cut and paste...a simple, easy and effective way to get the content in, then go on to formatting. Funnily enough, content is often written in soft copy (insert_sarcasm) and more often than not this tends to come from the market leader - Microsoft Word.
Dunno about you, but have you ever cut and paste content from a Word doc, into ANY type of web design software or CMS and seen what happens? You get those great little diamonds with question marks inside for one. You'll then notice some wHAcKy formatting and line breaks, weird code markup, font tags and and and....needless to say the list goes on.
At Efront, we've been using gMail for some time now. The ease of use coupled with the great storage has helped us and our clients with email solutions on the web. Being a company that bases our business on web design and working on the web, it made sense to have a great webmail solution, and at this stage, gMail is it....here's another reason why :
Last week when I received an email from a client with a Word doc attached, normally I'd download the doc into a clients' folder, open it and proceed from there. This time I noticed an "Open as Google document?" option. I clicked, a new tab opens in FF and hey presto....I've got an online word processor. I open a few more mails and click a few more docs and I have an index page of documents. On the web, ready to be used, saved, formatted, revised or even SAVED AS A PDF DOCUMENT.
Holding my breath I cut and paste into the layout mode of Dreamweaver (I know, I know, I'm slack, EVERYONE else is hardcore and codes in text editors).....I publish the file.....perfect. No weird formatting and most importantly, it correctly marked up my code.
Time savers, I love them.
So, not only do I now have a better word processor (especially for web design work) I no longer have to download and consolidate documents between machines (work/home etc) or worry about having the latest update. We've also had a lot of clients who don't use Macs (it's a native print feature) but want to be able to switch their documents to PDF's without installing more software and now they can!
The internet is coming along nicely (its even on computers now) and the move away from locally installed software will be a strange one for many, myself included, yet I can't help but think we're heading the right way.
Peace out, enjoy the public holiday and the gorgeous weather if you're in sunny Melbourne.
Mark
Posted on Wednesday, April 25, 2007