Q: desktop software or web applications ? A: both !
There has been a lot of news and internet traffic on the topic of traditional “office suite” software installed on your PC vs on-line web applications. Put another way - Microsoft Office vs Google Apps. How about having your cake and eating it too !
If you subscribe to the 80/20 rule where 80% of what you need a wordprocessor, spreadsheet, or presentation application to do is handled my only 20% of the available features, then web applications are *good enough*. It will be a while before Google Docs has every bell, whistle, and wizbang that Microsoft Word or OpenOffice.org Word Processor.
When I moved to Linux I switched to OpenOffice.org software for my “office suite”. Recently, I signed up for Google Apps as part of a not-for-profit initiative. Today I learned I can use them both together with OpenOffice.org2GoogleDocs extension (which has the odd but usable short name of OOO2GD which I pronounce “OH Too Good” <grin>.
I’m looking forward to using with the rest of the team. It will let me write my drafts locally and then quickly export them to the website for review and group editing. This will be great as a few of the group are new to having their own computer and are using the simple gOS on their computers (a combination of one Walmart purchase and few recycled old machines.
One word or caution - the OOO extension is officially still “beta” so there may be some issue and need for polish before all is happy with the world.
