Google Documents

I tried Google Documents. It published my blog off a text I wrote using google docs. I've complained many times of no simple html editor available without installing a whole suite of applications. Well, here it is. Google Docs is great for throwing some simple text down and formatting it. You then click on the HTML tab and paste that in to your blog or forum field. So far so good. There is zero installation. It is all web based applications.

I ran smack in to one limitation. I tried to open a Word document that had an embedded excel sheet as a table. That didn't work at all. This was on a Linux box. That may have had something to do with it. I really hope not.

For simple things, it works well so far.

It says it will export as Word, Open Office, PDF and others. It supports links, pictures regular formatting, spell checking. Oh, and it lets you save your own custom spelling dictionary. That's nice. You can access your documents from anywhere. You can share them. You can share them and let others edit them. It does revisioning of a kind too, but I'm not sure how well that works.

I always thought Microsoft would be the first to come out with online document editing. I suppose I should have known better.  MS makes a bunch of money making you run their software on your own computer.

I predict it won't be long before you can edit spreadsheets and other documents on your phone using some kind of online software. That is not all. There are any number of applications that can run like this. Most office type programs would not take much to put in a form that would at least be usable on a PDA type platform. I've said many times that doing your taxes on your phone is the death nail for desktop computers.

I want a phone that will listen to online radio. Not satellite radio mind you, online radio. I want it to do a bunch of other stuff too.