Thing #18

I downloaded and explored some of the features of Open Office. It seemed pretty user friendly. I am very familiar with Microsoft Word, so I made a small word document. I think that this can be a valuable program, especially for those who may not have Microsoft Word. It certainly offers many more features than Wordpad. If it is utilized in the classroom for the students, it could save money for schools, since Microsoft does not offer a site license for its Office products. I like that it can be saved as an Office document, because chances are the computer you would have to do a presentation on these days would be a Microsoft product. This helps for those who may not have Office or an updated version of Office. I also liked the feature that would convert the document to a pdf format. That and emailing the document is right on the shortcut bar.
I don't see myself using this, just because I am so used to Office, but I am glad to know about it to recommend it to students who may not have Office. There were some nice templates and wizard for presentations as well, and they could be saved in a Powerpoint format.
I also investigated the Google Docs templates. When I investigated all the Google features earlier in the 23 things, I had saved a document to Google Docs. I thought that was what it was for--which is really cool because I don't have to carry around a flashdrive or attach a document to email. Now after looking at all the other features of Google documents and the templates, I will be using these as well. There are things for address labels, invitations, scrapbooks, presentations, and more. These also have the ability to save them in a Microsoft product format and has the benefit of having other people to have access to the document. Once again--lesson plans for grade levels and/or collaboration could all be done via this resource. I am still amazed at all the things that are available on the internet for free!
The only disadvantage that I can think of for this type of document is if the internet goes down, you would be stuck without your document if you didn't save it in an alternate place.