Office Live

[Crundy]

In another thread someone mentioned how they'd lost their wine notes spreadsheet when their computer broke, so I thought I'd point out Office Live from Microsoft which is a free document management service. You sign in using your Live account (if you have a hotmail account then use that) and then install the plugin which allows you to connect to your online workspace from Excel / Word etc as if you are opening / saving it on your local machine. You can also share your workspaces with other people.

I've now got my 'Wines' workspace set up with all my notes and tips PDF files

[fatbloke]

In another thread someone mentioned how they'd lost their wine notes spreadsheet when their computer broke, so I thought I'd point out Office Live from Microsoft which is a free document management service. You sign in using your Live account (if you have a hotmail account then use that) and then install the plugin which allows you to connect to your online workspace from Excel / Word etc as if you are opening / saving it on your local machine. You can also share your workspaces with other people.

I've now got my 'Wines' workspace set up with all my notes and tips PDF files

Ah, now that might have been me!

I only have one problem with your kind suggestion, I try, very hard, not to use anything proprietary unless there's no other option.

IMO, using anything from MS, or Apple for that matter, is like tying myself to the devils apron strings i.e. they won't allow you to do anything except the way they want you to do it.

It's pretty much as using the currrent flavour of the month technology of "cloud computing or storage", once you let your data out of your own system/servers/etc, then you have little or no control over it or what might happen to it.

My answer, is to use google docs if you really need to keep stuff you don't mind sharing/has little intrinsic value, or from a "production" point of view, use an app that doesn't, in some way increase Mr Gates or Mr Jobs bank balance - which means use the excellent (and 99.8% MS compatible - to keep other, less enlightened happy) Open Office and for my storage, I'm hoping to be able to utilise one of the hard drives in my old PC, when I've enough money for a housing and firewire cable. there's plenty of open source backup apps available for that.....

And yes, in case you hadn't already worked it out, I'm a linux user, who only retains the windows install on my PC because of a few friends who don't have the knowledge to install linux and are too far away for me to do that for them (I have an 81 y.o. great aunt who's a linux convert, so if she can use it, it can't be that difficult.........)

regards

jtfb

p.s. oh, and you can save docs directly as pdf's with open office. A very handy facility...

[Crundy]

You don't have to use the plugin for Office, you can just use it as online document storage and edit directly, any file type.

I normally use a Subversion repository for my document storage and save everything in XML spreadsheet format so I diff versions. However, I'm assuming most people here use Office on a Windows system and so Office Live shouldn't tie anyone in any more than thay already are.

[fatbloke]

You don't have to use the plugin for Office, you can just use it as online document storage and edit directly, any file type.

I normally use a Subversion repository for my document storage and save everything in XML spreadsheet format so I diff versions. However, I'm assuming most people here use Office on a Windows system and so Office Live shouldn't tie anyone in any more than thay already are.

Sure, I can see what you're driving at, it does just strike me that it's one of those things that they're playing "catch up" with i.e. google docs has been around for a good while, and that they'd be deliberately targeting existing MS orifice users to try and grab market share, before the end up lagging too far behind.

Lets face it, there's a number of solutions to help with file management like this, so either of our methods would "do the job" definitely a good suggestion though.....

regards

jtfb

[Crundy]

I'll have to have a look at Google Docs, I always assumed it was completely open (i.e. you can't have a private workspace) but if you can then it's definitely worth me playing around with.