Microsoft Office Live

Microsoft Office Live inserted itself into my life this weekend while I was trying to update an Excel spreadsheet. This free document sharing program from Microsoft is modeled on Zoho and GoogleDocs, although you need to download Microsoft's program to use it. If the library decides we want it, we'll need ISS to install the software on our staff and/or public computers.

Because Office Live supports Microsoft Office Word and Excel, I think that it might, in the end, be a more attractive option than GoogleDocs. However, right now I can't get rid of the annoying Office Live ad that pops up every time I open a Microsoft document, even when I tell it that I never want to see it again. I would not want to inflict that on the rest of my colleagues.

GoogleDoc Experiment

A few of us have been messing around with the Info desk schedule in GoogleDocs. The Info desk skedmeister creates it as an MS Excel spreadsheet and stores it on our common server. Recently we uploaded the sked in GoogleDocs and invited the other schedulers in as collaborators. The schedule imported beautifully, but we realized that the drawback to having the schedule on the web is the URL. To keep the same URL, we would need to delete the current schedule and reload each new schedule weekly, probably on Saturday, which might not be very convenient. If we let Google change the URL weekly, we’d have to refer back to our email for the link. It is fun to play with, until I remember the fifteen other work tasks that should be taking priority.