Document Collaboration, the Easy and Cheap Way.

When we think of creating a document many of us think of firing up Microsoft Word and typing away. This is all good and fine but you could also forget the jumbo price tag of Word and type your document using Libra Office (my personal recommendation) or us another office suite like Lotus Symphony both are completely free and feature rich. There are also a lot of other word processors out there that are free, just pick one that you are comfortable with and go to town. Critics would say that nothing is 100% compatible with Microsoft Word and that when you start to do special formatting sometimes things don’t exactly translate back and forth. But So what, Big Deal! If you need to send a document to someone and guarantee that the document is going to look exactly the way you created it when the reader opens the file, then save it as a PDF. Then it doesn’t matter what you used to write your document with. PDF readers are free and everyone has some sort of program to read a PDF document with. Being completely compatible with Microsoft Word is not all that important anymore. Did I just say that?

 I worked for a software company a few years back and we were making auto service schedules for car dealerships. Each car dealership wanted to package their services a little differently, but still ensure that all of the scheduled maintenance was being performed for a particular model of automobile. We used Google Docs to create the service schedules; Google Docs was used because we needed to work on the documents collaboratively. Each participant could work on the schedules wherever they were, and we didn’t have to think about the mechanics of collaboration. The documents were saved on Google’s cloud server so we didn’t have to create our own server or email around documents. It didn’t matter what kind of IT situation our company had and it didn’t matter what the other company was using. We could take documents that were created with our favorite word processor and then paste them directly into Google Docs or create the document directly in Google Docs itself. The document could then be easily saved as a PDF or uploaded as a file to your computer in any of the most common formats. Oh did I mention that Google Docs is free, you already knew that anyway almost every application Google makes is free.

Sharing a document, and inviting others to your document is as easy as sending an email. The originator can completely control what others can do, you may want to work with a document with 3 other people and have the rest of the company only be able to read the document. Or you could let the whole world be able to read it. You can do all of that with Google Docs, permissions are easy to set.

Just for the record I am writing this with Word only because it’s a new version and it came with the computer. But I would rather use a Word alternative if my only choice is an old copy of Microsoft Word or a New/Updated version of something else. I’m downloading Lotus Symphony right now and I can’t wait to play with it!

Happy Collaborating!

Dan LaFollette