How Google Docs can rescue you when you’re away from home …
Wednesday, February 20th, 2008
It’s Midwinter Break, so I’ve packed up my car and am spending a few days at my cottage “Up North,” as we Michiganders say.
Though I had 12″ of snow in my driveway when I arrived, I don’t have an Internet connection at the cottage. A friend once suggested that I could really use a techno-break from time to time, so no phone, no TV, no Internet. I always bring my laptop so I can drive to the next town and access the Wifi when I need it, and I can watch DVDs on it after a long day of yard work. All of this works great … usually.
This time, I packed the laptop but not the charger! On deadline to write the weekly newsletter for the Institute for Education and the Arts, one of my free-lance gigs, I wasn’t sure how I was going to accomplish this. My usual strategy is to compose the newsletter in Word, then paste the text into an email document for the listserv and again into Blogger for archiving.
But no power cord = no Word. Hmmmm ….
Then I remembered Google Docs. I hopped over to my lovely little community library (about half the size of my own school library), composed the newsletter in Google Docs, and was even able to send the document directly from Google Docs to be posted in my blog. I could even have emailed it straight from Google Docs to the listserv if I used the same Gmail account for everything … something easily remedied for next time!
Whoever it is that said that necessity was the mother of invention was right. I’ll use Google Docs from now on for this weekly project.
It’s Midwinter Break, so I’ve packed up my car and am spending a few days at my cottage “Up North,” as we Michiganders say.
Though I had 12″ of snow in my driveway when I arrived, I don’t have an Internet connection at the cottage. A friend once suggested that I could really use a techno-break from time to time, so no phone, no TV, no Internet. I always bring my laptop so I can drive to the next town and access the Wifi when I need it, and I can watch DVDs on it after a long day of yard work. All of this works great … usually.
This time, I packed the laptop but not the charger! On deadline to write the weekly newsletter for the Institute for Education and the Arts, one of my free-lance gigs, I wasn’t sure how I was going to accomplish this. My usual strategy is to compose the newsletter in Word, then paste the text into an email document for the listserv and again into Blogger for archiving.
But no power cord = no Word. Hmmmm ….
Then I remembered Google Docs. I hopped over to my lovely little community library (about half the size of my own school library), composed the newsletter in Google Docs, and was even able to send the document directly from Google Docs to be posted in my blog. I could even have emailed it straight from Google Docs to the listserv if I used the same Gmail account for everything … something easily remedied for next time!
Whoever it is that said that necessity was the mother of invention was right. I’ll use Google Docs from now on for this weekly project.