Good afternoon everyone, sorry for not posting yesterday, I'm still trying to get comfortable with my new school schedule. In my last post, we talked about text editors and how versatile they are. In terms of this course though, you'll be using a word processor. I love trying new software, seeing how different developers decided to handle my problems as a writer. We are mostly focusing on free apps, but I want to talk about a couple commercial products, so that's where we'll start.
Commercial products
Microsoft Office: You currently have two options for Microsoft Office, Office 2007 or the beta version of Office 2010. What is a beta? A beta is a public software test. Beta software is usually free to use, so if you really like MS Office. There is an upside and a downside to beta software. The good news is that you get to test drive some very expensive software, you'll have an opportunity to see if you like it, and because the company will ask you about what you like and what you don't, you have a chance to make it into a better product. The downside is that beta software is buggy. It crashes, it'll eat your work, or maybe just do strange things to it. If you're interested in the beta you can find it on the Office Online Homepage
Being a student is awesome. No really, everybody wants to sell you something and they often offer you truly absurd discounts. Microsoft does this with MS Office 2007. This is what we use in the classroom, and if you like it, then this is a great thing for you. You can get it for just $59.99 at Microsoft's Student promotion page compare that to the list price of almost $700.00.
This offer can also be found on your MySPC page under student discounts. While certain terms apply, usually the big one for any software purchase is that you have a student email address. So make sure yours is set up.
One thing that is great about MS Word is that it is well suited to doing MLA formatted papers, which we will be doing for class. It has a template for the paper itself and a tool for formatting citations in MLA format. You'll hear this in class when we do our section on MLA but it bears repeating. Don't trust that Word is going to format your citation correctly. Check it and double check it. I'm not putting the onus on Word here, yes I'm a Mac user, but I feel Office is a pretty good product even though it doesn't meet my needs. This goes for any software - whether we're talking about Word or something web based like this.
I think one of the biggest problems that office suites, whether we're talking about Microsoft's product or Open Office.org is that they try to be all things to all people. That's great if you need an application that combines text, graphs and presentation software in one package because you use those things together in your job. But it also adds another layer of complication that you may not need.
A reminder about using Word in class. SPC uses Deep Freeze. That means every night, the machine resets and if you save a document to your computer at school, your work just got deleted. Some classes don't use Deep Freeze, but I would err on the side of caution and expect that they do unless the instructor specifically says otherwise. Even then, backing up your work in a lot of places is a good thing. Put it on your thumb drive, email it to yourself, save it in ANGEL's file storage area. It only takes a few minutes to do that, and if you do it this way your work is safe and available to you from any computer.
iWork: Apple's Office suite. I used this in Comp I for my MLA formatted papers and it did a pretty good job, though if I had to print the paper I had to send it to Word and Word sometimes did odd things to the formatting. You can get a trial of this, which is what I did for Comp I. If you want to own it, you can get it for $40.00 as a student, the list is $80.00. Apple's store page on iWork is here, and you can get to the education store through your MySPC page. iWork is OS X only. I think it is a very good package, when I used it for my papers it was easy to work with the template they provided, and generally easier than Microsoft's version in Word. It did not have the citation tool, but that's not really something that interests me.
I hate spending all this time on OS X software when there are what, three of us Mac users in class including the instructor? But I really want to talk for a moment about something I've used everyday in class since I've started back to school. It was some of the best money I've spent on software since I moved over to OS X.
Circus Ponies Notebook: This is my go to software for note taking, both in class and in real life. Yes, you still have to take notes when you're all grown up. Sorry about that. First, a notebook is something that just about everybody gets, it's a physical artifact that we're all familiar with. The nice thing about notebook is how flexible it is. You can do note taking in pretty much any manner you choose. You can link to sources, include photos, graphs, tables and most anything you could possibly need. I suspect you could do an MLA paper in notebook, though I haven't tried it - I might this term, and if I do, I'll let you know how it works out. As I said, this software is OS X only. You can get it as a download from Circus Ponies and they offer both a trial and a student discount.
Free Software
So that's it for the paid apps. Let's look at the free stuff.
Google Docs: I love Google Docs. I'll admit, I'm a bit of a Google fan boy. Google Docs does word processing, spreadsheets and presentations. So think of it as an on the web version of MS Office, with some of the cruft swept away. Docs has a lot of advantages because it doesn't live on your computer, it lives on the internet. First, you can access your docs from any internet connected computer. In addition to being able to type up documents, you can also store documents you've already done and access them on the web. Of course, you can download them in a variety of formats and put the document on whatever computer you happen to be using. This is great if you have a desktop, laptop and a machine you use at school. You can also share them with other people, and let them edit the document or restrict them to viewing it. Multiple people can edit a document at the same time. Obviously, there's potential for abuse here, so I want to be clear - every student needs to do their own work, I'm not suggesting collaboration as a feature in that sense. But there are legitimate uses for this feature.
For instance, one great thing to do with a paper is after you've been through it yourself several times and you're absolutely convinced it is perfect, is to show it to somebody who isn't afraid to bruise your pride a little bit. Because I guarantee you that no matter how good you think it is, there are at least a dozen things you need to correct. Then show it to a few more people. Incidentally, that's why I ask people to comment on this blog. I want to make it better. So please do. The silence is unnerving. So using docs you can share this document with someone you know, even if they're halfway around the world and let them read it. If you let them edit it, they can highlight the parts they feel need changes and comment on why you ought to do that.
It's great for group projects. One problem I have with ANGEL at SPC is that it does not allow collaboration. So what typically happens in a group project is this: you have three or four people and one guy doing the typing or writing. This guy is the one who typically does the lion's share of the work. It shouldn't be this way, everyone should contribute more or less equally. If everybody types, and you can see who typed (or deleted, edited, highlighted what) you don't have to even consider this as a problem. You know who was working and who was slacking. That's a great feature, and one of many that ANGEL should have but doesn't.
Which brings me to another cool word processing trick that can help you when you're doing a paper, whether alone or as part of a group. Revisions. Most word processors track revisions, which are a record of changes to a document. Word can do this. iWork does, and so does Google docs. The nice thing with docs is that you can see who made the changes, as I said above. This allows you to play around with a different wording, or seeing what your paper would look like without this or that paragraph before you make a final decision to keep or cut it.
You can also publish a document to the web. It is indexed by Google and it will come up in a search. This is neat, but I can't see an immediate application for Comp 2, but I figured I would mention it.
You can also choose from a wide variety of user created templates for Docs, which is true of most word processors, but the nice thing with docs is that you aren't downloading anything. Why is that good? Anything you download is a security risk. Any file could be malware or a virus, so if you can avoid putting something on your computer, that's a good thing. Word processing templates are frequently used as a vehicle for virus delivery, so if you aren't using docs, then be cautious about where you get your templates from. Another nice feature that templates has is a rating system. You can see how useful other people found the template, which might save you some time in deciding what to use. They do have an MLA template, and I will make a point to check it out and let you know what I think.
Google docs is free and works in most web browsers, I've used it in IE 7, Safari, Opera, Firefox, Flock and Chrome for Mac. Mobile browsers are a little more troublesome, forget about Mobile IE, but Safari on the iPhone/iPod Touch works well.
Open Office.org: A free and open source product that runs on Windows, OS X and Linux. There are system specific versions of it, like NeoOffice for OS X, that are designed around a particular operating system. It is an office suite containing a word processor, a database, a spreadsheet and a drawing program. I love Open Office, but I do not consider it well suited towards Comp 2. There is no MLA template, though I may look into creating one if I have time. You can get Open Office.org here
Abiword: Abiword is a word processor and nothing else. Like Open Office it is free and open source, and will work on Windows, OS X and Linux. You'll usually find this bundled in lightweight Linux distributions as the default word processor. I've never tried it, but I'll probably take it for a spin and let you know how I like if for Comp 2. You can get Abiword here.
Why do I talk at such lengths about tools? It isn't just because I'm a geek, it is about the nature of work. A student is like any other worker, your work is only going to be as good as the tools you use to produce it. That doesn't mean you have to spend a lot of money, but you do need to select tools that are appropriate to the job you need to do and that you are comfortable using.
In future installments of this series the tools are going to be a bit more "one off" than what I've talked about so far. Things like scheduling, notebooks (made of dead trees), pencils and pens. Things like that. I hope you'll find it useful and will take a moment to comment. Thank you!
