Google Docs

The Way We Use: Google Docs in Office and Classroom

Honestly I’m not promoting Google Docs for Google as an affiliate, the “Google Docs” in this article could be any kinds of online office applications, such as Zoho, ThinkFree, etc. Google Docs is just the might-be popular one as I know. And here I’m expressing my personal experiences about that.

Google Docs Make Office More Productive

I usually open those attached Word or Excel documents in my Gmail with Google Docs. That’s the best convenient and safe method I think to review these documents at the first impression. And then recently, more and more co-workers of mine like to share some documents via Google Docs to complete them with collaboration. It’s really save time and energy to do so. And the best part is, we can resume the work anytime anywhere if we get Internet to access Google Docs.

Google Docs Makes Classroom More Interesting

As not a teacher, I’m not sure more uses of Google Docs in classroom, but some teachers ever told me the Google Docs way to enrich the class is so friendly and it can be accepted by more students easily than the ways with LMS (Learning Management System). Certainly Google Docs cannot replace LMS, but for most documents, presentations sharing, it’s easy to get a class closer. There’s an good example presentation by Tom Barrett:

Eleven Interesting Ways to use Google Docs in the Classroom
http://docs.google.com/Present?docid=dhn2vcv5_8323t58h3ft

William Peterson
Presentation Veteran

Live, Not Survive: Microsoft Will Take Online Office on the Best Road

According to Anita Hamilton’s “Late to the Game: Microsoft Office Online” on TIME, the rivalry of paperless office technologies like word processor, spreadsheets or presentations, etc. has been not the old style ”Microsoft Office or IBM Lotus” for more and more companies. Giving Google Docs or Zoho a try is the recent popular choice for us.

Although Microsoft Office is still the dominant in the area of business applications for office, it can’t ignore what’s going in the current markets. It has been quite a few months after I introduced Microsoft’s project “Office Live Workspace Beta” (refer to Live Workshop Rivalry: Build Your Presentation Mind On the Road), and I cited that we really need better Web capabilities on the coming office suite (refer to On The Road: Microsoft Office Has To Bet Its Future On The Web). But why Microsoft decide not catch up the way until 2010?

Microsoft Wants to Make the Best Web Office

I have to thank for all the efforts on those gorgeous ribbons and SmartArts in Office 2007, which really help me a lot on presentations. However, online compatibility is the biggest weakness in the Internet times. The coming Office 14 would be really late for the online office market, but I guess Microsoft won’t make that launch another miss. Heard from Workspace Team Blog, the Sliverlight technology has been added into the new Office Live Workspace. Based on the great rich media technologies from Microsoft Silverlight, maybe the expected Office 14 could move all rich features in Office 2007 to the Web. Isn’t that the best idea to conquer the online land for Microsoft? We’re waiting.

William Peterson
Presentation Veteran

Open Office or Not: Web Friendly Microsoft Office 14 Takes the Stage

Microsoft has announced that the Service Pack 2 for Office 2007 would be out next spring, but I can’t find more surprises like the ribbon in first 2007. When I was interested in the recent frenzy of gorgeous Open Office 3.0, Microsoft PDC 2008 (Professional Developers Conference) showed us something new: Office 14 for Web.

I can’t tell this new Web friendly Office will catch the future or not. We see, it’s really cool, with the immigration to online office trends like Google Docs. Definitely Microsoft wants to capture the newly Web market as Google does, and it’s not a bad idea to start up testing the future software as service. Does this work? We’ll see how Google makes and wait for the answer.

William Peterson
Presentation Veteran

Post Presentation 2.0: Showing Your Presentations When You LinkedIn with Friends

I really can’t believe this great feature from LinkedIn: a new platform called “Applications” allows you to add PowerPoint presentations from SlideShare or Google Docs to your profile. The service is amazing and good.

Certainly, this still-beta-testing “LinkedIn Applications” feature seems to be a copycat of “Facebook Application. However, it’s just the real post Web 2.0 collaboration. For kinda online presentations like SlideShare or Goodle Docs, it’s show time. Likewise that Omnisio combines SlideShare with YouTube, PowerPoint presentations are going to a new day, and I call it “Post Presentation 2.0″.

William Peterson
Presentation Veteran

Stick to Omnisio: Imagining the Next Generation YouTube Presentation Service

There’s nothing exciting for presenters after the events that YouTube video embedded in Google Presentation service (refer to my previous post YouTube Video in Google Presentation, As Expected ). Perhaps we can imagine the future from the collaboration of YouTube and Omnisio. The better interactive features (such as Video Annotations) will enahce the experience and free the creation. But how about the next generation service we can do presentations in YouTube like what we know in Omnisio?

We believe that Google will not ignore the best part in Omnisio to add the presentation slides with online video synchronized (refer to my previous post Perfect Presentation Online - Your SlideShare PowerPoint Slides with YouTube Video Narration Together on Omnisio ). So the empowerment of collaborative online video could that better video presentation collaboration experience for users. Maybe the presentation service by next generation YouTube will be integrated with Google Presentation, and boost the multimedia enhancement of next generation Webcasting.

William Peterson
Presentation Verteran

Saving Yourself from Desktop Publishing: Keep Your PDF Documents Online

No doubt that one of the great contributions by Adobe is the standard of Portable Document Format (PDF) from 15 years ago. As Adobe referred, PDF is used for representing two-dimensional documents in a manner independent of the application software, hardware, and operating system. Post Script, Distiller Server, Acrobat Connect, so many deeply developed technologies around it. But who cares these or those technical aspects? All the reasons we favor it so much could be: cross-platform compatibility, compact size, easy creation, nice security, print and browser friendly, etc.

This morning, one friend of mine told me that she would store all her documents in PDF other than Word documents in the future. Maybe it was a good idea to do so, but I persuaded her not do that, because Word documents are Word documents, while PDF documents are PDF documents in your own business. Word documents could be the best-ever desktop sharing, as PDF might be the best-ever desktop publishing. However, that wasn’t enough for the good arrangement of one’s business. The advanced suggestion from my mind is: backup all Word documents, convert them to PDF documents, and store all PDF online. Why online? Definitely there’re millions of answers to this question in the Internet times. After all, we’ve already entered the upper class of traditional desktop publishing, with the online documents.

Adobe’s Create PDF Online
http://searchpdf.adobe.com/

PDFCreator on SourceForge
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/

Google Docs with “Save as PDF”
http://docs.google.com/

On the honor of the great help from Adobe’s PDF for our businesses these years, let’s move our PDF documents to the Internet, and leave the business with PDF in a better vision.

William Peterson
Presentation Veteran

Do We Really Need Microsoft Office? No in the Past and Future

Yesterday I read the an article “Do I Need to Buy Microsoft Office?” at Ask a Geek of latest Popular Science. As the its result of “Our geek weighs the options and finds Office might not be the best bet”, I agree that Microsoft Office’s rivals are really powerful and nice, such as Google Docs, OpenOffice or Corel’s WordPerfect Office suite. On my personal side, I would rather choose Google Docs, whether Google would charge me some fees or not in the future. But most businesses nowadays must have the Microsoft Office suite installed, while IBM extremely loves his Lotus Notes software as exception.

In the future, desktop software will be completely replaced with Web applications without doubts. So Microsoft Office is certainly the product for current days. But we can not rush to the future without it because of its popularity in the past. Because a lot of people are working with it now, and will work with it in the future for a long time. In order to avoid any bad incompatibility, our business must have and manage it. Just think about, you partner sent you a document in DOCX format, but you cannot read the contents properly with your OpenOffice, and you will ask for another PDF copy? That’s also why a huge enterprise IBM can not abandon its ever popurlar used Lotus Notes easily.

William Peterson
Presentation Veteran

Be with Acrobat.com: Do Business in the Online Office as Usual, Why Not

Like Photoshop Express’s photo sharing and photo editing, Adobe can’t help unveiling its complete online office solution to gear up file sharing and documents collaborating using Acrobat.com. From Adobe’s official description, it’s a set of online services - file sharing and storage, PDF converter, online word processor, and web conferencing.

Already one month after its rocket launch to enhance online documentation office upon the mastered Flash technology, Adobe pushed Acrobat all the ways to the de facto international standard. The final release of Acrobat 9 comes that, Adobe actually desires the online service as better component for its desktop apps. Even if the online solution not caught up as Acrobat Professional, but the support of source formats arranged from Word to PowerPoint is really inspired, and better than Google Docs.

That goes here, Google Docs versus Acrobat.com. By contrast, Google Docs has less enhanced editing, and less powerful conversion - not sophisticated in document contents/web conferencing as Adobe’s strength. But popped with Google’s account, the document collaborating, and file sharing is easy and flexible. More than these, Google’s AJAX structure is a little better than complete Flash core in browsers if we don’t get a faster connection.

Anyway, I encourage people to try more business in the online office, Google or Adobe, whatever you like. But it’s really great influences to improve efficiency, avoid complexity, and help environment. Finally, I recommend this AIR “Acrobat.com for My Desktop” to launch acrobat.com as AIR app from desktop.

William Peterson
Presentation Veteran

YouTube Video in Google Presentation, As Expected

Caught from Official Google Docs Blog last Friday, Google Presentation took Speaker notes and YouTube videos in.

As we expected the feature of YouTube videos in Google Presentation long long time ago, Google finally simplify the adding YouTube in Presentation way with its adopted YouTube. About the traditional methods to add YouTube Flash videos in PowerPoint presentation, please read my complete guide.

Videos can help you make a point, command the attention of your audience, or even add humor to your presentation. Now in presentations, you can insert one or more YouTube videos onto your slides and play the videos while you’re presenting.

William Peterson
Presentation Veteran

Why Not Add YouTube Flash Video in Your Next PowerPoint Presentation

Maybe not everyone loves YouTube, watches and uploads videos on YouTube, but in the world’s most popular community, sometimes you would like to add a favorite video on YouTube to your next presentation. Many people have tried various methods to make YouTube video in their PowerPoint. Here I just review these great ideas, and express the clear fact in my words.

Play YouTube Flash Video Online in PowerPoint with Live Connection

If you’re going to give a PowerPoint presentation under the environment with live Internet connection. You can directly embed your expected YouTube video into the slide, and play the video in your presentation from Internet like embedding YouTube video in a Web page. Just follow the simple steps below:

1. At first, you need to find the hidden Control Toolbox out in PowerPoint. In Normal View of PowerPoint 2003 and earlier versions, go to View -> Toolbars -> select “Control Toolbox”; for PowerPoint 2007, go to PowerPoint Options -> Popular -> tick “Show Developer tab in the Ribbon”.

2. In the Control Toolbox, click the last icon “More Controls” which is displayed as hummer plus wrench. In the set of controls available on your computer, select “Shockwave Flash Object”. Then use your mouse to draw and resize an area in the slide as you like to place your YouTube video.

3. Go to the YouTube video page you’d like to add, and check the URL in the address bar of your Web browser. You’ll get an address like http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hChq5drjQ…. Change the phrase “watch?v=” to “v/”, and now the address become http://www.youtube.com/v/hChq5drjQl4. The address is what we need to link the video from YouTube.

4. Right click the area you drew which is displayed as a big cross, select Properties and go to Properties tab. Just copy and paste the YouTube video address like http://www.youtube.com/v/hChq5drjQl4 in the field as value of attribute “Movie”; set the value of attribute “Playing” and “Loop” to False. Close the Properties tab when everything is done.

5. Now save the presentation, preview and enjoy the embedded live YouTube video in the slide with a Internet connection.

Get YouTube Flash Video Offline and Add To Presentations

When you don’t like the live YouTube video way, which requires live and reliable Internet connection, you may download YouTube video to your hard drive, and insert the video into presentation offline. It’s also very easy to make in a few minutes.

1. Go to the YouTube video page you’d like to add, and check the URL in the address bar of your Web browser. You’ll get an address like http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hChq5drjQ…. Then try some online services like KeepVid or other offline tools to retrieve and download the original Flash video file from the address. Rename the downloaded YouTube Flash video file from “get_video” to “xxx.flv” as you like in FLV format.

2. Now you need to decide in which format of YouTube Flash video you’d like to add in PowerPoint presentation. If directly inserting the Flash video in FLV format, you have to ensure the FLV file could be properly played back at first. It’s recommended to install VideoLAN VLC media player to play YouTube Flash video files in FLV format.

3. Find the hidden Control Toolbox out in PowerPoint and go to “More Controls” as the way in the first steps of online YouTube section above. Select “VideoLAN VLC ActiveX Plugin v1/v2″ in the set of controls available, then draw and resize the displayed area with mouse in the slide as you like. Right click the area you drew and go to Properties tab, and complete the value of attribute “MRL” with the path of the YouTube Flash video file, like D:\Temp\2008\temp.flv, then close the tab. Now the YouTube Flash video in your hard drive is ready to play in the presentation.

— Insert YouTube Video As Common Video

Besides, you may also try to convert your YouTube Flash video in FLV format to other common video format like AVI, MOV, etc with some online services such as vixy.net or other offline video conversion tools. Then you can directly insert these converted video in your hard drive via “Insert Movie from File” in PowerPoint.

— Insert YouTube Video As SWF Flash Movie

Generally speaking, to avoid video codec problem with different computers, and ensure the properly video playback in PowerPoint, Flash video in FLV format and other video formats is not recommended to be inserted in PowerPoint. Based on the popularity of Adobe Flash player, which is widely installed on most computers in the world, Flash movie in SWF is highly compatible cross-platform and properly played back. You may try some video to Flash conversion tools, such as WebVideo Author, to convert FLV or other video formats to SWF format.

The Flash movie file in SWF format could be inserted into PowerPoint presentation as “Shockwave Flash Object” in Contorl Toolbox like the way in the first steps of online YouTube section above. And you can embed the SWF Flash file in your presentation through setting the attribute “EmbedMovie” to True in Properties tab.

By the way, some presentation authoring tools, such as PPT2Flash Professional, Articulate Presenter, offer the shortcut to insert SWF Flash files quickly, and finally output the PowerPoint presentation with YouTube Flash video as Flash movie in SWF format. Flash-based presentation is kind of great solution to avoid compatibility issues from video codec, PowerPoint versions and operating systems, and easy to make Web compliance with.

Maybe the total guide for YouTube video in PowerPoint is a little of complicated for everyone. Google’s PowerPoint killer in Google Docs is highly expected to add the feature to add YouTube video in online presentation instantly, if Google really wants to be the killer. After all, YouTube is a great video treasure for everyone, we can make better use of it with our works and life.

William Peterson
Presentation Veteran