42 Reasons Why Netbooks Are Better Than the Apple iPad
Just in case you were looking for the list.
Personally, I don’t like either. Some things are fine miniaturized. But others are really better full scale.
Keyboards. Talking about keyboards here. I saw a gentleman in the coffeehouse today, squinting away at a tiny Sony Vaio, while hovering his hands, one at a time, over its cutesey little keyboard. Wouldn’t be good for me.
Today, it’s raining. So I have put on my Techie Wizard hat, and here are a few notes on the best practices and etiquette of providing documents to others for review or editing. 
Unless you want the recipient to work with – edit, change, modify – the document, never send them the native format file. Native means the format it was created in, such as Microsoft Word, Excel, and Adobe Photoshop. It’s like saying here, I baked you a cake, and handing them a bowl of flour, sugar, and eggs. It ain’t done yet.
Done means PDF for documents, jpg for photos. There are others for images, but usually it’s jpg. If you’re making a slideshow or presentation, done is PDF or PPS, Powerpoint Slideshow, not PPT, which is the native application of Powerpoint.
Portable Document Format (PDF) is a file format created by Adobe Systems in 1993 for document exchange. PDF is used for representing two-dimensional documents in a manner independent of the application software, hardware, and operating system.[2] Each PDF file encapsulates a complete description of a fixed-layout 2D document that includes the text, fonts, images, and 2D vector graphics which compose the documents. [Wikipedia]
Adobe Reader, the software that displays PDF, is free, easy to get, and it works great. It shows your document clearly and completely. Get it here.
Anyone can make a PDF from any document they could otherwise print on paper, using a free PDF virtual print driver. My favorite right now is Bullzip. It works quickly and well. Once installed, you click Print and select Bullzip instead of your paper printer (even if you don’t have a paper printer) and printing creates a PDF file.
If you do want your recipient to work on the document, check with them to find out what software they use to do that type of work. Not everyone has the same programs for making stuff. Microsoft Word, for example, comes with Office, which is not a free product. Many people don’t have it. (You can buy Word separately, but you don’t save a lot of money doing that, and then you don’t have other programs you might need, like Excel and Powerpoint, is my point.)
People who do have Office don’t necessarily also have the programs that come free with most PCs, like Works. Sometimes it has to be activated, sometimes it has been deleted. It may be necessary for parties to work together, or get a geek like me involved.
If one person is using a Mac and the other a PC, heaven help you both, because I probably can’t.
All of which brings us to a point that maybe you weren’t expecting. We should all be able to work together, at least on computers running Microsoft Windows. So Microsoft’s proprietary, closed-source, secretive, and very expensive approach to document creation software should have ended long ago. They have made too many things that don’t work together – like Word and Works – and it spells grief for us. True, there are conversion and compatibility applications you can download free, but that’s getting pretty geeky again.
If you have Office 2007 and you use Word to create a document and send it to me to modify, I can’t do it because I use Office 2003. Your file is .docx, and mine is old .doc. So I open your file with a conversion software I got from Microsoft, change it, and send you back .doc, not .docx. I can’t make .docx. You could have sent me .doc in the first place, and you can now open my .doc and save it again as .docx. But raise your hand if you weren’t in class that day at Bill Gates’ School for Nerds.
Here’s an article by someone who decries the practice of attaching Word files. He has a unique perspective because he’s not running Windows, but a free operating system called GNU. Who gnu? Must be gnu. Ha. … He makes this point:
Don’t you just hate receiving Word documents in email messages? Word attachments are annoying, but, worse than that, they impede people from switching to free software. Maybe we can stop this practice with a simple collective effort. All we have to do is ask each person who sends us a Word file to reconsider that way of doing things.
Most computer users use Microsoft Word. That is unfortunate for them, since Word is proprietary software, denying its users the freedom to study, change, copy, and redistribute it. And because Microsoft changes the Word file format with each release, its users are locked into a system that compels them to buy each upgrade whether they want a change or not. They may even find, several years from now, that the Word documents they are writing this year can no longer be read with the version of Word they use then.
He needs to check his facts a little, and back off the hyperbole, because new versions of Word will open old ones. It’s just that old versions won’t open new files, as I explained above. And the format doesn’t change with every version.
[Note: Microsoft changed to .docx in response to a global demand for XML zip-compatible open-source applications. It’s not a trick to get us to spend money.]
But he makes a point about cost. Microsoft would just love to keep us all hooked on their products, and just because they are the best products doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to break free, if only on principle and the good of our cash flow. Who doubts that they could sell Office for a lot less than this and still make a nice profit?
I recently spent a couple of weeks happily test-driving the latest from MS, Office 2010 Beta. It’s a free test version of their latest Office suite. But it was like driving a cool rental car. You don’t want to start liking it too much, because it has to go back, and you have to go back to your regular old ride. So it goes. And to be honest, I ultimately decided I prefer old Office 2003 anyway. So I ditched it, because I’m not going to pay $200 in October when the free trial ends and the final product comes out, whether I love it or not.
What’s the solution? Either we keep struggling, or we go to school with snarky little half-baked wizards like me. Or we drop out, run off and join the circus of OpenOffice.org. Free, open source office suite for the masses. I’ve got it, I’m using it along with MS Office 2003, and I’m learning to like it more everyday. It does everything MS Office will do, as far as you know, except e-mail, and it’s free gratis*. Plus, each time a new version comes out, you can have that free too.
Let’s think about it, shall we? Just a little, and not too often. Or you’ll wind up blogging about it, like me.
Therein endeth the lesson. How are you feeling?
* Deadwood, HBO:
Merrick: “The vaccine will be distributed gratis.”
Al: Free gratis.
Merrick: Free gratis is a redundancy.
EB: Does that mean “repeats itself?”
Al: Then leave gratis out.
Merrick: What luck for me Al, that you have such a keen editorial sense. “Free. Distributed Free. Period.”
Last week, I shared my incipient explorations of newer ways to store and access one’s writing projects. Specifically, I was looking at Microsoft’s Office Workspace. I said:
Office Live Workspace lets you keep your whole project in The Cloud, open it on any computer with Office installed, save it back to the Cloud, and go on with your happy day. No syncing needed, is my point.
I’ve been working with it more, and I’ve learned that what I said was true, but not complete information. I don’t think I’ll be using Workspace for my daily writing, and I’ll explain why.
First Some Background
If you use a single computer, you keep your documents there, work there, and hopefully you back up copies to a CD, separate drive, or online storage.
If you use two computers, as I do, you want them to have the same documents. You don’t want to open a story or something on your laptop, just to realize that the newer version is on the computer at home. So you have to keep them synced. There are ways to do that, either manually—which is difficult—or using a special program on both computers, or on a flash drive. I like Microsoft’s Windows Live Sync for this, though it does require a lot of attention.
The trend in technology now is to keep projects on neither computer, and not on a physical storage like a flash drive, but on the Internet. You keep your work out there – in The Cloud – work on it there, then leave it there.
Online applications like Google Docs are great for this, but in my opinion you can’t write a novel on Google Docs. It works well for small documents such as rough drafts, lists, spreadsheets, etc. But it’s not as robust as a full scale program like MS Word. And Office Workspace lets me save my project there, open it in Word, work using all of Word’s features, then save out there again.
This process should not be confused with online storage sites like the late Yahoo Briefcase. That required me to download the saved file, do my work on my hard drive, then upload the new version when I finished. That’s not actually working online.
So I was happy to find Workspace. And today I did my first field test – away from the stable and fast Internet and Wi-Fi in my home – as I met with a friend to discuss our projects over coffee.
My Field Test
Having connected via customer wi-fi, I opened my documents from Workspace in MS Word and we discussed the project. Soon I saved the important changes, and we talked on. As our meeting drew near its end, I made a couple of insignificant changes and hit Save again. No dice. I was no longer connected to the Internet.
I tried to save it to my hard drive, but that didn’t work. When I lost connection, I lost access to the document that was really on a server, not on my computer. It didn’t disappear, so I could see it, but I couldn’t save it.
Sure I could have copied my text from the unsaved file, pasted it into a new text file, and saved that. But that’s not the point, is it? The point is that Cloud Computing requires a stable connection to the Internet, and the Coffeehouse assclowns had disconnected me without so much as a bronx cheer.
(A page appeared in my browser, saying the coffeehouse was thoughtfully putting me on a time-out, so I could get some more coffee, and rejoin the human race. Or something to that effect. Very cute. I think that it’s time for people who provide connectivity to take their role a little more seriously. I’m workin’ here, don’t fool with me if you want me back.)
None of this points to shortcomings of Office Workspace. It worked fine. But because the coffeehouse put me on a time out while I had documents open, I had to finish my notes of the meeting today by hand. I didn’t lose anything critical, but I easily could have.
Findings
Epilogue – The Bottom Line
Office Workspace might be ready for work, but the Internet isn’t. The lights are on, but you can’t always get there from here.
Word on the street is that Google’s Chrome OS is coming out in about a year. It will be an operating system that consists mostly of a browser. There will be no software like Word or Excel on it. Everything will be done in the Cloud.
I don’t think the Internet is ready to take on the task. They’re getting all these fancy Cloud applications set to sail, but forgetting that the Internet isn’t everywhere, and it isn’t reliable. And until it is, we just can’t move our stuff out there.
“So what is Office Live Workspace? Essentially, it’s a SharePoint-based online storage service designed for users of Microsoft Office that provides anywhere/anytime access to important documents and sharing and collaboration facilities that so small teams of people can work together on documents and projects.”
—Paul Thurrott’s SuperSite for Windows: Office Live Workspace Review.
I’m currently checking this out for myself, and thought you might like to as well. It’s pretty cool. I like the idea of being able to access my documents from anywhere, do some writing, and put them away without having to update other computers. So for the past several months, I’ve been using Windows Live Sync, which syncs files and folders between my 2 computers. It works OK.
Office Live Workspace lets you keep your whole project in The Cloud, open it on any computer with Office installed, save it back to the Cloud, and go on with your happy day. No syncing needed, is my point.
I’ve also been test driving OpenOffice.org for a while now, with an eye toward replacing MS Office with an office suite that’s free and updates for free, automatically. It’s excellent, but not quite all that MS Office is. Essentially, it will do everything Word will do, but doesn’t exactly integrate with other programs as well. Plus, there’s nothing in the suite to replace MS Publisher, which I use to build web sites.
I really like Google Docs, for drafts, lists, spreadsheets, etc. But no way is it up to the task of handling my big projects. Here’s a word count I ran on my biggest project today:
It’s a big dude, by my standards.
So just in case you’re wondering, I’m sticking with MS Word 2003 for my word processor. I like OpenOffice.org’s Writer pretty well, and will keep using it sometimes, to keep in practice. But it’s not replacing Word yet.
From Kyle’s Tips for Geeks, here’s a shortcut to zoom in and out in MS Word.
Don’t say ya never learned nuthin’ on Metaphor.
Greetings to recent visitors to Metaphor from Bulgaria, Saskatchewan, and Mountain View, California. Could it be that the Googlers from Google dropped by to see what’s up? Maybe they’re checking the blogosphere to see what’s being said about the g-mail outage the other day. I think I said it’s no big deal, and it’s not.
Hey, Bulgaria, bogdaproste, dudes! That’s Romanian, it’s phonetic, and it’s probably wrong, but I’m just a provoslavny kid from Carpinteria, so my tricks are limited.
Keep coming back. Take what you like and leave the rest.
I like Google Docs. I use it pretty often for notes, lists, etc. I don’t use it much for serious writing because it lacks many of the advanced features of software like Microsoft Word. And usually, when I upload a document I’ve formatted in Word, all the line breaks, paragraph indents, and other formatting is vaporized. Not cool. But the whole idea of cloud computing, and becoming less dependent on files and software on one’s own hard drive, intrigues me.
Fiddling with Google Docs last night, I decided one of my least favorite things about it is that there’s no zoom in function. I usually have to zoom in to 125% to 150% in Word to keep from going blind while I write.
I found a work-around, when it suddenly dawned on me that you can always zoom in on any Web site, and that’s what Google Docs is.
I use Firefox. To zoom in and enlarge the text on any page, you press Ctrl and +. To zoom out, press Ctrl and -. In other words, press the plus (+) or the minus/dash (-) key while holding Ctrl.
Sometimes it’s also good to get toolbars and stuff out of your way, to concentrate on what you’re writing, right?
In Google Docs, go to full screen and hide the g-Docs toolbar by pressing Ctrl shift F.
To full screen your browser window and get everything out of your way, press F11.
Now you’re one rung of the tech ladder closer to the clouds. And since you’re connected to it now, you can watch a bunch of geeks talk in the cloud, about the cloud.
“Gmail, Google (NSDQ:GOOG)’s Web-based e-mail service, is back up and running after the site suffered yet another outage that blocked users’ from accessing their contact lists.”
Oh well, it was about 20 mintues for me, 2 hours for others. And whataya want for nuthin, ya know?
Here I am, blithely blogging about it, on another free Google service. Actually, I don’t think I will.
I got some editing done this afternoon, despite the weather in here. It’s hotter than a biscuit where I live.
How was your day?
My post Songs to Fill the Air, from Monday, was revised and updated.
I updated the creative writing pages on my Web site, restating the links to poems and stories offered there.
Back in the spring of last year, I said Vista sucks and we should speak out to save Windows XP. Well, I’ve had Vista for about a month on a new computer and I like it. C’est la vie.
Cory Doctorow is thinking on the cutting edge about copyright and life in the information age. Go to his blog to find more of the interviews. This is only part 2 of 7 that he’s posted so far.
You’ll also want to check out creativecommons.org.
Metaphor 