LibArtTech

Editor's note : This weeks article is brought to you by Wesley Allen. Wes is an expert in presentation technologies and the creator of a technique called "Sermon Painting" which gives pastors more effective tools to integrate media into their teaching ministries. In this article I'll be comparing three web-based presentation applications — Google Presentations, PowerPoint on SkyDrive, and the beta of Apple's Keynote in the cloud. Yes, Keynote is a beta, but this series is including it because Apple is more than fashionably late to idea of cloud-base office suites. There are other options out on the web, including ZoHo office and Prezi, but we're limiting ourselves to the threes suites compared throughout this series. User Interface User Interfaces in web-apps has come a long way over the years. As the web has matured web apps have begun feel like applications, instead of forms forced into a browser interface. As such, the three presentation applica...

Document In this edition of Getting Work Done Online we'll be taking a look at the workhorse of any office suite, the word processor. Online text editing has been around in some fashion for many years, but it's never really been captured effectively until recently. The ubiquitous 'Word doc' has been the gold standard for text documents for over two decades. Now, with the advent of some on-line competitors, as well as it's own attempt, writing your term paper can maybe be done in the cloud.  Again, I used a personal document as my test. Just like last week there were some issues with the file, but this time it was my own fault. The file I used was from many years ago when I had decided to work with OpenOffice for my word processor of choice, while I was in graduate school. Thankfully Google Drive was able to import it, but the result was less than ideal. So I took the imported document, exported it to Word, cleaned it up, and re-imported it into each of the th...

Spreadsheet In this installment of Getting Things Done Online we're going to look at the spreadsheet component of our big three offerings. As with many of these posts, I'm going to use a real-life example as a way to show the differences and similarities between the products. In this case, I fired up my personal budget spreadsheet. It's a semi-complicated spreadsheet with multiple cross-sheet references, a pie chart, and a multi-nested 'IF' formula to do paycheck withholding for both Federal and State (Minnesota) taxes. There are plenty of other features I could also review, but I wanted this to be a real-life example, and not just a mock-up stress test. First, some background on the file that I used to perform this review, and how I got it imported into each of the services. My budget spreadsheet was originally done using an old version of Excel many, many years ago. When Apple's iWork Numbers came out, I converted it to that, and was mostly happy with it f...

Just a real quick update that this blog now has it's own domain name. You can get to it at http://www.libarttech.net/. The old blogger address will continue to work as well, but wanted to share the new custom DNS name.

I'm a huge fan of cloud based computing, especially for productivity applications. With the advent of the iCloud Beta, there are now three major players in this space, and I'm going to take some time over the next few weeks to give an overview of each offering. The three leading companies (in the U.S.) I'll be looking at, are Google, with Google Drive/Apps, Microsoft with SkyDrive/Office365, and Apple with iCloud. Each upcoming piece (hopefully weekly) will focus on one component of their productivity suite (order subject to change): Word processing Spreadsheet Presentation Email Calendar Messaging Finally, I hope to tie it all together with talking about how the different systems tie themselves together into an ecosystem. My hope is to also have a guest writer for at least one of these components, lending their expertise. So stick around for the next few weeks as I start a review catalog of how you can best get work done online!