Week 8, Exercise 18

Google Docs does a better job of introducing the benefits and features of its service. My actual trial, as required, was conducted using Zoho Writer. After a little bit of a rocky start, I figured out how it works and everything worked pretty smoothly. I created a basic table template called "Community Contacts." I used that template to create a brief document (based on memory, since I was trying this at home) called "School & Education Contacts." I emailed and esported the document successfully. The drawback I encountered with Zoho Writer is its limited table options. I couldn't see how to have a table larger than 6 columns by 6 rows. Hopefully Google Docs would be more sophisticated.

What I can see as key advantages, over traditional ways of sharing documents, is that everyone working on a document is always accessing the most current version and multiple people can access the file at the same time. Nothing slows things down like getting a response in email that is responding to a document version that is already passe. Among its other benefits, I can see that this tool would be an easy way to create an aggregated contact list of any type (e.g., Friends, community partners, media, school, etc.)