Why then should the mind not climb right out?

I was both impressed and unimpressed with Thinkfree Office.  I haven't come across it before, and it's always good to discover new alternatives to applications.   Compared to Google Docs it has a lot of nice functionality - it looks almost exactly like MS Office, it offers you all the same choice of fonts as you have installed on your machine, and can save directly as PDFs too.  And the HTML notes function is nice, although I do wonder whether it's not a little bit behind the curve, seeing as there are so many web 2.0 tools which make publishing content to the internet so easy already - why would you use their travel template when you could blog instead for example?   However, as many people have said already, it's just so slow!   It took an absolute age to load up the first time, and despite assurances that that was just because it was the first time, it was still not exactly speedy when opening things the second and third and fourth times.   And if that wasn't offputting enough, it was even sluggish when actually using the application, leaving me to have to wait for it to catch up with my typing.   I also found the interface rather unintuitive.   To be honest, these are dealbreakers for me.   It's nice to know that if I do get frustrated with the limited functionality of Google Docs, particularly where presentation is concerned, there is an alternative, but I can't see me using it a lot unless I really do need to overcome that limitation and am prepared to deal with it's slowness.

Paper's for wimps

This may be becoming a bit of a theme, but I'm a big fan of Google Docs.  So much so that when I got my new laptop at home last year I decided not to fork out to buy MS Office, and just use Google Docs for everything.  That isn't to say I'd advocate abandoning it entirely in all circumstances, but to be honest I found I was using Google Docs far more than MS Office for most things at home anyway.   I love that if I use Google Docs, I have access to the document no matter what computer I'm using, I love Google Docs as a filestore (now if I'm giving a presentation I usually upload the file to Google Docs as well as putting it on my USB drive to take with me - that way if I forget the drive I've got the online back-up), I love the sharing function for collaborative documents (so much better than emailing things back and forth the whole time), and I love the plethora of file formats supported (exporting as PDF is a particular favourite, much the easiest way I've found to do this without Acrobat or similar).   I don't use them so much generally, but I love the forms as a really easy way to create quick questionnaires and get the results automatically delivered into spreadsheet form for you - this is exactly how we as the 23 Things team dealt with you all registering your blogs, and you'll register completion as well via a Google form at the end of the programme.

As I said, I use this all the time, but I have just now used it to create our Saturday staffing rota for Trinity Term and shared it with the staff concerned, which satisfies Thing 19 nicely.