Online Tools

I inadvertently destroyed this blog’s link to my Notebook of Online Tools. I’m restoring it and you might want to take a look since there’s been a lot of activity lately.

Online Spreadsheet Updates

I’ve been running all my spreadsheets online for many months now and never hit a serious problem until this week. I’ve updated my report on how to choose between Google Docs spreadsheets and Zoho Sheets. My two problems were:

1. I hit a computational limit in a complex spreadsheet hosted on Google. Fortunately, I moved it to Zoho and all was well. Bad on Google, good on Zoho.
2. I moved to Firefox 3 and pivot tables stopped working on Zoho. Bad on Zoho.

But, I’ve has some good news as well. Firefox 3 made both Google and Zoho run a lot faster. And the new Firefox 3 smart address bar makes it easy to jump straight into a Google spreadsheet by simply typing some of it’s name.

Firefox 3

It was hard punching through the Mozilla servers so soon after the official release of Firefox 3, but I made it and am now an “early adopter”. Remember the first time you used a fast Internet connection? You might have said something like “Wow! This is the way it’s supposed to be!” That’s what Firefox 3 feels like. It’s snappy - really snappy. Any page with a lot of Javascript, such as Gmail or Google Docs, runs like a fox. Heh! I’m too busy playing to post much more, but if you’re going to Firefox 3, you might find this useful.

Google’s Monster

Google is unleashing a monster. It’s called Google Sites. It allows you create Web sites. Unlike Google Pages, Google Sites has a strong site orientation. The editing and overall control are far better than Google Pages. The best part is that you can control access to sites you create as well a collaborate and have multiple owners. Holy cow! What’s going to happen when every household, club, church, sports team, band - really, any group of people - realize that they can construct professional looking Web pages for any purpose whatsoever without much technical expertise? I expect that the consequences will be widespread and quite surprising.

Spreadsheets in the Cloud

I’m a big fan of “cloud computing” and a big user of spreadsheets, so I’m a big user of spreadsheets in the cloud. This involves choosing between Google Docs and Zoho Sheets. I use both, choosing between Zoho and Google on a case by case basis. Here’s how I choose.

Brijit

I’ve just discovered brijit.com. As if keeping up with things on the Web wasn’t enough, brijit tries to summarize the best of the unWeb as well. But what I really like is their idea of summarizing long form pieces without adding much additional stuff. Maybe I should move closer to that format as well?

Education

If you’re discouraged about the prospects for American education, cheer up! Free online education is a growing trend. Who knows how many people are learning who knows what outside of the formal education establishment? In the long run, it’s education, and not degrees, that matter.

Will Wonders Never Cease?

A wonderful thing has happened. The Wall Street Journal is now online and free. With all their great content, no one will have time to read me!

One article I read says that Washington is going to stimulate us. I guess it’s easy to be bipartisan about giving away money in an election year. My Notebook has some information about why the stimulus package is a dumb idea.

Zoho Notebook

When I first encountered Zoho Notebook, I was not impressed. It wasn’t much like Google Notebook at all and had a much more complex and cumbersome interface. Silly me. A couple of things caused me to look at Zoho Notebook again and a light bulb went on! True, it’s not like Google Notebook at all - it’s far more powerful. What really sold me was the ability to embed spreadsheets inside a Notebook. But now I’ve been looking at Zoho Notebook as a publishing tool. I’ve tried to use Google Notebook in a similar way, but the constraints it imposes made it awkward and unnatural. Zoho Notebook looks much more promising. Take a look at my first effort.

Almost Free

How can all these companies offering free stuff on the Web do it? This article has a nice explanation and has some background. The payoff: because it is so cheap to offer digital services online, it doesn’t matter if 99% of your customers are using the free version of your services so long as 1% are paying for the “premium version”.