Thing 9 - Online Documents

Ooh. Now this is a Cool Thing.

My mind is just a-spinning with the possibilities on this one, for work and volunteer duties. I can easily think of dozens of applications for Google Docs. In fact, if I were working on this from work instead of home I'd be uploading a current project and inviting two other staff people to work on it with me. We've been doing the e-mail attachment thing. That suddenly feels so 15 minutes ago!

I didn't go into Zoho much beyond the intro "this is what we can do for you" pages. Google docs felt comfortable and intuitive.

I have to admit that one reason I didn't go into Zoho is that I simply don't want to have to keep track of another user name and password. It just gets ridiculous how many of these a person needs to come up with and remember in order to do anything.

Some of these productivity tools are really cool. Half the battle, I think, is just re-training ourselves to think that we might use an online tool. In April I and another staff person need to do a follow up survey to branch managers about a collection issue. Last year we sent out an e-mail and asked everyone to respond, then scribbled and tallied the results. This year, thanks to the 23 Things program, I had the craziest idea... ooh, maybe there's an on-line tool for this... ooh, there IS. It's called surveymonkey.com. I don't even know if survey monkey is mentioned in the 23 Things program, but it's cool and we're planning to use it. And let it tell us how many people answered in which ways.

And I can see Google Docs providing a similar -- and similarly time-saving -- service.

Thanks!