Cartoon by Dave Walker. We Blog Cartoons.

This is a new section on current technology services in the web 2.0 that are free to use.Technology can be very intimidating to most of us, but it also helps in reducing our every day morning stress.This section is aimed at people who are not geeks but who require free or easy to use tools.

One of the tools that we use everyday is word documentation,remember the time,when we had to work across multiple computers at work and at home and if on road with portable computer.

You had to save your files or documents on a floppy disk and then re-use it across multiple computers,if you are lucky they worked well but most of the times,they crashed if the disk becomes corrupt.Moreover,you had to worry about virus infection if you used it on a unknown- un protected computer.Also you had to juggle across multiple floppies as capacity in each was limited to 1.44 MB.Then came the era of USB-flash drive,this was robust and allowed us to accomodate upto 1GB now even 4 -160 GB,but again you had to save the information on these drives,risk losing your drive or misplacing them at work or home and also tugg them along.

But, now we have an alternative in that we can use and store every bit of information online.You could then access them anytime,anywhere when connected.

ZOHO is one such free web based information management tool.they have all office suite platform integrated into a single account.Moreover,you could save the word doc across multiple formats like .doc,.pdf and open office .dt.It is convient,in that simple word documents and comments could be written on any computer and you could access them via web anywhere,no more need to carry any USB drive.
It has a account for spreadsheet and presentation too,although similar to google docs,but the writer application has more features when compared to google docs.

Pithfalls

The the spell check feature is not yet robust.
The presentation application has limited templates.

When you are travelling,these tools can be come in real handy.With security check across airport changing-you had to always worry about removing your laptop and hardrives during multiple security checks and then if you travel across muliple cities-this had to be done every time you change your flight.I constantly worry about losing my data drives at the security check points.

Online tools could be useful at these times.However,to note:

You cannot use it to store sensitive and vital documents as they are stored on the web,and we do not know where the data is hosted and stored.

But,for all other non sensitive documents work and storage it works fine.

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