Thing 18: Web-based Apps

Web-based Apps...interesting idea. My main concern is what about when the Internet goes down?! This doesn't happen *too* often anymore, but when it does, it's nice that people can at least still use Office. If you're doing everything online, well, you're out of luck.

I created an account with Google Docs, and played around with it. It was a little frustrating, as I'm used to Word and like how it works. With Google Docs, I never was able to figure out the bold and italics feature...sometimes I could only select one or the other, but if I clicked on them in a certain order (italics, then bold) I could have them both, but not always. It didn't seem consistent, but I'm sure if I used the program more I'd figure it out. The font size was also a problem...it let me change it at first, but then I hit "enter" and typed one letter and then tried to change the font size and it wouldn't let me...it was stuck on "10." I had to delete that document and start over. I guess you can't make mistakes or change your mind with this program! Something else was inserting images...I love how easy it is to do that with Word, and it's fun to do a search and choose your clip art. Google Docs doesn't appear to have this feature; you can enter a URL but can't just search for clip art (that I could see anyway). One thing that I do like is that it's so easy to email the documents, and you can put it in pdf format very easily.