Lesson 12 Office: I 1/When people refer to Office, many still mean Microsoft's Office. Microsoft Office Online is its online home and you can see from this page that MS's Office suite combines many different programs; the range of programs you get access to depends upon which edition of Office you buy. (There's a page devoted to help and support, with links to training and demos.) Wikipedia has an entry that outlines the history of Microsoft Office. But MS Office is not the only Office suite available. There are several Office options now available, some offline, some online, some both. (Examples: Sun's StarOffice, OpenOffice, Zoho.) Here's the Wikipedia entry for Office (any computing Office): In computing, an office suite, sometimes called an office application suite or productivity suite is a software suite intended to be used by typical clerical worker and knowledge workers. The components are generally distributed together, have a consistent user interface and usually can interact with each other, sometimes in ways that the operating system would not normally allow. In your pre-SPS school life, you've almost certainly been introduced to MS Word, Outlook and Excel. In the 4th Form, you'll be given a more substantial grounding in MS Word and MS Excel by the English and Maths departments, respectively. MS Office is hard-drive based: the Office suite runs on your machine. There is a trend now towards working on-line, but obviously this is no good if internet connectivity drops or is unavailable. One advantage of online Office is that it makes (real-time) collaboration easy. 2/Keeping your data and programs online, available anywhere from any machine, is a key attraction driving the adoption of online Office programs. A term sometimes used to refer to this is cloud-computing (Wikipedia): Cloud computing is a popular phrase that is shorthand for applications that were developed to be rich Internet applications that run on the Internet (or "cloud"). In the cloud computing paradigm, software that is traditionally installed on personal computers is shifted or extended to be accessible via the Internet. These "cloud applications" or "cloud apps" utilize massive data centers and powerful servers that host web applications and web services. They can be accessed by anyone with a suitable Internet connection and a standard web browser.
Major companies are investing heavily in this: eg, Dell, MS Live SkyDrive, Amazon EC2, GDrive (and here). Google has also developed Google Gears, a way of synchronising data between online servers and a local machine; currently, Google Gears works with Google Reader only, but 2008 will see it extended to other Google apps such as Gmail, Calendar, Docs ... At the same time as these companies are doing this, hardware manufacturers are creating devices that are highly portable and capable of handling web-based files and apps: eg, RM Asus miniBook, reviewed here; iPod Touch; Nokia N810. Many students at SPS use web-based services for storing and accessing their files. One way of doing this is to use a web-based email system to store your files as attachments. But there are more powerful ways, too, and we're going to spend some time this year looking at Google Docs: here files and apps are web-based. 3/ Start by logging into your Google account and then exploring the Google Docs interface. If you've no files in it at present, upload some from your H drive now. Try creating new files and play with the functions (such as renaming a file, folders, etc.).
You'll find help online at the Google Docs Help Centre:
Your teacher may run through the Google Docs demo, create documents, spreadsheets and presentations online; if not, look through it for yourself. Finally, be aware that there is also Google Docs for Mobile. |
