How to be Productive Online

And um? We are going to talk today about being productive, something we know a lot about here at how stuff works dot com. We produce lots of things blogs, podcasts, articles, bs, you name it, we produce it, But we don't tend to use online productivity software, which is really what we wanted to talk about today. In fact, we have to thank our guest producer, Tyler. We call him guest producer

because you never know who going to produce our shows. Uh. He's the one who actually came up with the title for this one about online productivity software? How can I be productive online? Well, there are a lot of companies out there that have provided tools to do that, and it's really marking a a shift in computing back in uh, you know, the traditional route would be to have this kind of software natively on your machine and you would

use it there and save all your work there. We're starting to see all that shift over to the cloud, and so it's it's one of those applications cloud computing applications. It's really easy to point to and say, hey, this is what we mean when we talk about cloud computing. Yes. Uh, if you're not familiar with the term cloud computing, you probably haven't been listening to our podcasts very often, because

we talk about it quite frequently. Um. Cloud computing is uh sort of a relatively new thing that's really gone on over the past few years, or at least not new outright, I would say adopted more often uh than it had been in the past, because it's been made popular by high speed internet connections. Rather than using your computer's hard drive to store applications and files, um, this can all be done now on a server in some location,

in fact, often frequently backed up. So there are many many copies of the applications and files that you would normally keep on your hard drive out there in what they call the cloud, and you probably make use of some of these sort of applications already, things like email. There are a lot of web based email applications out there.

We're talking about things like Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail. In a way, you can think of those as cloud computing because those messages are uh they live, if you will, on a server that could be hundreds or thousands of miles away from you. Uh, but you're able to access them through a browser. So the browsers acting as your user interface, but you're really tapping into messages that are quite a quite a ways away. Yes. Um, and that's the funny thing about the productivity soft where that we're going to

talk about in just a moment here. Um. Unlike email and services like dropbox, box, dot net, um, those that that serve as a cloud storage device. Um. This is this is the kind of thing that that you're going to notice a lot more easily because, um, rather than opening up an icon on your desktop, you're gonna go and do everything really through your web browser. UM. So where you uh, whereas you might do your word you know, we're processing in a separate program from the program that

you would use for your spreadsheets. Now you're just doing everything in Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome. Um in some cases safari. Yeah, if you're the poor, unfortunate Sari Safari hater. Um. So, uh so let's get started. How did how did all of this really take off? I mean, it's it's it's not something that just happened with the dawn of the new decade. No. No, Let's well, first of all, you gotta look at traditional productivity software.

When we're talking productivity software, we're talking about a specific kind of UM suite of applications that people, usually within office environments, rely upon on a daily basis. So things like document word processing programs, spreadsheet programs, presentation programs, uh, sometimes some other like file management systems, things like that.

That's really what we're looking at here. And uh and as we said before, most of the time, back in the you know, the late eighties, early nineties, these were programs that existed on your computer. Everything existed there. If you wanted to send someone something from your computer, you essentially created a copy of it and send it to them. So uh, then that you would have two copies of the same document out That's going to be important later on when we get into collaboration. UM. But that's kind

of the model that that everyone was used to. Cloud computing moves all of these over into the cloud. These these applications, like Chris said, are hosted on on other machines, and you can access these applications through your browser. In some cases, you may also have to download and install a tool on your desktop to um to be able to access and interface with these these applications. Not all of them are solely cloud computing applications. Some of them

are kind of hybrids. Uh, But in general, everything you access and save and uh and and rely upon is going to be on other machines that you can tap into at any time. How it came about is well, it's kind of a gradual evolution. Really, one of the earliest, I would say, Uh. You can argue that there were tons of different ones that they came out before this, but one of the ones that was that really kind of made a big splash as far as online productivity

software goes. It was Google Docs and Spreadsheets, which eventually just became Google Docs. Now, part of that is just because it had the name Google behind it. Anything that has the name Google behind it has a certain amount of momentum already because I mean, it's an enormous company,

right right. Another part is that Google did what it does really well, and that they look out for other other applications, other companies out there to do something really well that they want to do, and then they go out and buy them. Yes. So I know there are a lot of other companies that that did the whole cloud online productivity software stuff before Google did, but most of those got bought by Google or or ended up dying out because of Google, and and in some cases

were bought out by competitors. UM. The one that that really I think kicked it off for Google was rightly UM, which was an acclaimed word processor online only word processor UM and at the time, which was I would say in the mid nineties, probably around ninety Uh well, now I'm sorry, mid two thousand's, early two thousand's UM. When it first came out, I apologized for that. UM. You know, people were talking about this because it was it was

sort of a new concept. People were really entrenched with, uh, the Microsoft Office Suite, and this was this did online cloud word processing very very well. It was an awesome tool. And then Google acquired it and people were talking about what Google was going to do with it. Well, it wasn't long after that that they added the spreadsheet application

to make it. Uh you know, they started calling it as the media will a Microsoft Office killer, right, which uh you may have noticed that Microsoft Office has not been killed yet, despite um, despite some legal setbacks which I guess we can talk about in the minute too, because we may see more of a focus put toward online productivity software simply because of some some legal issues that Microsoft is currently facing with the whole words situation.

But I can get into that a little bit later. Um. Yeah, that's a good point. And it also was what changed Google Docs to Google Docs and spreadsheets that people started calling it Google docs and spreadsheets. I do have a spreadsheet that includes many small dogs. Some of them are dogsins they are long dogs, so they are small get along, little doggie, that's right there, Yes, so anyway, yes, the

weener dogs. But uh, and eventually Google dropped the spreadsheets bits announced just Google Docs, even though it does contain applications for both not just both, I'm sorry, applications for word processing, spreadsheets and presentations. Well, they acquired other companies to to uh, to fill out the portfolio, and it's right including uh you know, Zenter and Tonic Systems UM.

And really, when you think about it, when you look back up and look at the whole Google Docs picture, they really have everything you will need to to uh you know, the business tools that you need because they've got Gmail for email, You've got your calendar, you've got word processing presentation software. Uh, you've got um your spreadsheets. You've also got other tools to like Google Wave. So it really does all these different pieces, some of which

were acquired, some of which were built in house. You know, they're very helpful to work with people collaboratively, and that's one of the unique things that Google brings to the table is the collaboration aspect. Right, well, it used to be unique. I would argue that there are a lot of other online productivity software suites out there now that are building their entire marketing strategy behind the collaborative, collaborative

nature of online computing. UM. So, when we're talking about collaborative, like I said before, when you were working on a document that was on a native word processing application on your computer and you wanted someone else to look at it, you know, you might send them in an email or whatever, but they would get a copy of your document. The original would still sit on your computer. Now, what if that person were to look at that document, make changes,

and then send it back to you. Well, there are a couple of different ways you could incorporate those changes within your own document. You could just accept the new document as the new master and you get rid of the old one. You could compare the two and then make changes on a change by change basis. But it was just kind of a clunky way of handling it, especially if you were doing a collaborative effort with multiple people.

Now you're not. Now you're looking at four or five different versions of the same document circulating out there, and then maybe coming back totally changed from what you started with. And then then it gets really kind of complex. Well, the nice thing about Google Docs and some other online productivity software out there, Uh I mean Office Live? Does this? Um? Microsoft Office Live? Yes, Microsoft Office Live. So Microsoft is in this game too, folks. Zoho does this? Think Free

does this? There are a lot of different online productivity software suites that allow line collaboration. Well, in this case, everyone's working from the same master document. It exists on the in in a certain account, and and the person who owns that account, who created that document, can designate who and who cannot um who can and who cannot access that document, And in some cases you might have

multiple levels of access. It might be these people can read the document, but they can't make any changes, or these people can make changes, but they can't invite anyone else, And then you might ultimately get to Okay, well, this person can make changes, can approve changes, and can also invite new people to participate within the collaboration. So when you do this, when people make the changes, it goes

to the master document. Everyone can see the changes, and um most of them have a way of being able to review over time what changes have been made. Google docs in particular makes this pretty easy where you can, uh, you know, if you get to if you if you created a document and then five other people have been working on it and you haven't looked at it in a couple of days, it can get really confusing when you're looking at like, okay, well who made what change?

When did it happen? Um? Do I really that one paragraph I liked is gone? Now? Do I want to try and bring it back? If I do? You know when did it go away? You can actually review the series of changes and see where that happened and UH and decide whether or not it makes sense to reincorporate

that text. And one of the neat things UH that Google added to its Google Docs that made a few headlines when when they did was the ability to work on from more than one person to work on the same document at the same time, and Google Docs would be able to keep track of what was going on UH in both instances, so rather than having to lock someone else out, say okay, well Bob needs to work

on this, Bob's checked it out. No one else can touch it until Bob checks it back into the to the system UM, which is a nice way of handling it. But this is even more elegant because it can it can identify what each person does to the document, and therefore no one's losing anything. And you know, the stuff that you just spent half an hour on doesn't get over written simply because the system can't handle multiple people making changes to it at the same time, which is

very very nice. Another issue you may think about when when we're talking about online productivity software is what happens if you don't have an Internet connection, So they're gonna be times where that happens where you're not gonna have access. Maybe you're on a flight that doesn't have WiFi yet, or maybe you're just in an area of you know, town where you have no access, or maybe the truck down the street hit the fiber optic connection and there

it goes. Maybe your neighbors finally got wise and actually put a password on their WiFi. I'm just saying it happens. So what do you do then? Do you just say, oh, well, I guess I have to wait till I get back in the office before I can work on this. Well, most of these these solutions have incorporated some form of synchronous nation software where you can work on a document offline and you can make changes to it, you can save it, and then when you reconnect to the internet,

it will automatically incorporate those changes within the document online. Now, of course, this could also cause some issues because what if you have multiple people working offline and then they all reconnect and um, I think ultimately you have to have some sort of document management hierarchy in place, where perhaps the person who created the document ultimately makes the decision of which changes go in and which ones don't because then it gets a little complex if you were

to have maybe four or five people working on something now, and that I don't think that necessarily happens that often. Perhaps you have a group of consultants working on a project, or maybe you've got several reporters all working on say a school paper, working on it within Google Docs. Perhaps then I could see where that might cause problems, But in most cases, you're that's gonna be kept to a minimum. And like I said, it's Google Docs did this with

Google Gears. That was their their Google Labs thing where you could actually access a lot of functionality on Google um within their productivity suite, just even if you weren't connected. But other ones do it to Office Live has their version, uh, you know in Zoho. And so everyone's kind of come up with their own solution to this problem so that you know, you don't feel like, well, if I lose Internet, does that mean I lose my ability to work on

whatever I was working on? Yeah, it's true enough. So, um, there are lots and lots of things you can do. I mean the uh, I think I can think of four or five in particular, whole suites of applications, most of them managed by big companies like of course there's Google Docs, there's Microsoft Office Live. UM. That Another one we talked about just now we haven't really gotten into in depth was Zoho, which is independent and they have

an amazing array of online productivity software. Yes, yes, it's all kinds of tools, notebook, contact Manager, UM, all kinds of business group application which actually groups the most common applications together into a single user interface. UH. And they have plans on eventually allowing third party applications to UM. Third parties to submit applications to their to their business groups application, so that let's say that, you know, you could really use a special kind of of newsreader that

isn't in this and it's almost like replacing your desktop. UM. Now, as far as I can tell, they haven't implemented any third party apps yet, but it's something that's in the plans UM. And it's the nice thing about Zoho. And actually, for most of these online productivity software solutions, it's free for people to use if they're using it on an individual basis. It's only when you get into organizations like companies or you know, nonprofit organizations or whatever that you

have to start looking at a subscription policy. And then that's when Zoho was like, all right, well, if you're gonna use it as an enterprise thing, then you're gonna need to to pay a certain fee per year to access all of this and uh and then you know, you might get some extra little perks that that the free users don't necessarily have access to. Yeah, yeah, I think, um,

sort of digressing for a second. I feel like this is this kind of software they have, the product basic productivity software is this is just something that people expect to see now as part of their uh, their computer suite. You know, you have your operating system, you have email, you have the web browser, and you have something that will let you write a letter to somebody and you know do some basic, uh basic productivity type work. And I think that's why these these programs are coming down.

You know, it's possible. You know, Microsoft is also offering less expensive like a home version of Office now where it hadn't before, which you had to to fork over quite a bit of cash before if you wanted a whole office suite, right, And we we should point out also that in general, these online applications tend to be a little. They don't have all the features and bells and whistles that you'll find in a desktop application. Not

not really, not all of them. I mean you'll like, like, if you were to go back to your desk and open up Microsoft Word on your desk, you would have access to way more functions that you're gonna get than if you access the online version. Now that doesn't necessarily mean these are vital functions. They may be functions that you never use. Uh, maybe that all the the ones that you have come to depend upon are fully covered

within the online version. But if you're a power user, if you're someone who's using like those really obscure functions that no one else in the world ever uses, then moving to an online software uh kind of uh environment may not be the best choice. Um, But I mean that whole the whole thing is improving anyway on online. I mean you're you're seeing like these suites get more and more functionality as time goes on, and we would

expect to see that so uh. And again, I think a lot of these companies are really starting to put their weight behind on their online presence and kind of take the focus away from the hardware stuff because look at what's selling. You've got netbooks, they're selling really well,

and now you've got smart books coming out. These are devices that are not necessarily capable of running these um these uh, these applications natively like, especially things for presentations that can take up a lot of memory depending on how complex it is. But by putting it on the web, suddenly you don't need a powerful machine to build these these presentations because it's doing all the work for you, and you don't need to hard drive space in order

to host the applications either. Yeah, that's a good point. Google Docs, for an example, gives you a gigabyte of free storage. In fact, they've opened it up now where you can if you have a Google Docs account, you have a gigabyte of free storage that you can put anything in. It doesn't have to be a Google doc to or you know, spreadsheet or presentation or whatever for it to go into their now. Granted, uh it can't. Each individual file has to be two or fifty megabytes

or smaller. But you can put up to a gigabyte for free in there, and if you want more, then you can purchase more gigabytes for about a quarter a gigabyte per year. It was. We took a look and it was five dollars for twenty gigabytes for a full year. Five bucks, five dollars. You've got twenty gigabytes of online storage. Office Live they give you five gigabytes a storage with an Office Live account, so which you know, it's just like having any other kind of live account. Um, so

that's free to sign that up to. So there's online storage has gotten to the point where you're you're essentially the message they're sending is storage is cheap. It is cheap. Now you have to worry about how secure it is and how accessible it is because if something happens with either of those services, like if you're a Microsoft customer and they have a problem with their servers, you may not be able to access your files, just like if

you were a Google customer. That's happened a couple of times in the past year where Google services kind of took a little dive briefly and people freaked out because they couldn't access their Gmail or Google docs. Um well, there are machines, and machines break and they are vulnerable to hacking attacks. Now, in general, these companies put a lot of money into keeping their their applications secure and

the data secure. But at the same time they're also huge targets, so they may be more secure than your native company. Let's say that your native company has got you know, maybe a hundred fifty employees total, and so that's a much smaller company than something like Microsoft or Google orders a magnitude smaller UH. And so let's say that your company's security isn't anywhere near Google's security or Microsoft security. But at the same time, you're under the radar.

You know, you're not going to be a huge target for ackers like Microsoft or Google. So that's something that companies and individuals have to take into consideration. Um we recently saw an issue where in another country people had their information compromised because hackers attacked Google. And in this case, it was just account information. It wasn't specific things like documents or or emails. But I mean that's something to

keep in mind whenever you're moving to an online model. Yeah, m I was gonna mention to some of the other UH productivity software out there. One that's really neat and another UH that came from an acquisition um is and it's kind of under the radar. Two is Adobe's suite, which, as far as I could tell, started with the acquisition of Buzzword, which was a flash based UM word processing programming absolutely beautiful. UM here again, this is an example

of a program that's sort of limited in features. When they first acquired Adobe didn't have a whole lot of features. You you were limited to what you could do with it. But it was absolutely fantastic to look at, and I went back to look for the do you know, for the purposes of research and um they've added at tables program and a presentations program and uh the ability to create PDFs without having to own a copy of Acrobrat Pro,

which is very nice. But there are other bits and pieces out there companies who offer productivity software that is an entire suite. UM. Coming to mind off the top of my head was thirty seven Signals. UH if you've ever heard of base camp, the project management software. They also have a client tracker called high Rise Backpack, which is uh you know, helps you organize and coordinate projects with other people, and um Campfire, which allows you to

chat with other people that you work with. This these are really useful for uh uh startups and small companies that are, you know, using the Internet to work with one another. You know people who say a who meet at a conference, for example, and one of them lives in San Francisco, the other in New York. They can use tools like this to share documents back and forth. UM,

very very highly regarded. UM. You know, and there are others you know I work dot com as Apple's um sort of shadowy, not really shadowy, that means public knowledge that it's out there, but people are speculating that I work will be more than just a way to share I work documents between different people in the future. They've been ramping up on the UH Data center space, so there's speculations that that Apple might get into this space

as well. UM and all kinds of other stuff. It's a lot of photo editing software and videos and software out there that's also online and UM, I was gonna mention very briefly, I think this would be a good

way to close that. Chris and I have worked a little bit on a Google Wave which in a way you can kind of seeing Wave being an attempt to create what will be the next generation of collaborative soft where where you can build documents, you can have an instant message, conversation between two people, you can uh kind of sort of email. It sort of does all of these things all in one. The problem is, right now

it's still in preview mode. It's not even in beta. Um, and I agree with it that it shouldn't be in beta yet because it's there's just not enough functionality there right now. Disappear without noticing. Yeah, well it's it's it's more than just being buggy. It's just that there's not enough focus yet. I think I think it's it's an amazing tool that doesn't have enough focus. So right now

it's more confusing than useful. Most people when they get Wave, the first thing they think is awesome, I've got Google Wave. And the second thing they think is how the hell am I supposed to use this thing? And then like the third or fourth thing they think is, hey, don't have a Google Wave account because because if you're you know, it's it's so confusing to the average user that I think most people quickly abandon it. But I think that could be uh kind of a glimpse at what we

will see online collaborative software. I think this word's going to be moving in the future. Yeah, I feel like I'd be remiss because I just thought of this as we were talking UM about a very unusual suite of cloud computing software, because it's not the typical productivity software that you would think of. But I was thinking of Aviary, right, are you? It's a if you because UM, when you were talking about how other there are other ways to

UH other types of image editing software. Aviary UM is strictly where where Adobe offers a version of Photoshop online, there's a cloud computing piece of software. Aviary is strictly UM. For the creative types. UM. There's a color chooser, there is a an image editor, a vector illustrator. UM. They've even offered the beginning to offer UM a sound editing program, very much like you might see UH in garage band,

where you can edit tracks UM. And it's free to get started with it, but there are certain things that become available to you. UM. The idea is it's sort of a social media project too, because you can share tracks with other people and images with other people. But if you want to keep your stuff private, you have to be a paid account holder. So and so it's kind of different. Everything you create being immediately appropriated by

everybody else go ahead. But it's fantastic stuff though. I've you know, I've played around with it some and you're going, how do they make these tools available to you in a web browser? Um? Yeah, it's pretty cool stuff. Well, and we're seeing more and more a move towards having a web browser based operating system. The Google Chromos is

going to be that. So clearly, these sorts of of services will be necessary in order to make those those machines that are running that kind of operating system a useful machine. Otherwise you've just got, you know, a bunch of chips that don't really do anything. Um. Well, I think this was a really good conversation on productivity software.

I mean, again, it sounds like it's kind of a dry topic, but this is for a lot of our nurse you guys who are in in middle school and high school in particular, this is the source of stuff that's probably going to be affecting you as you enter the workforce. A lot of these these software suites, um, are probably gonna be things that that companies start to rely on more heavily in the future, especially new companies.

Older companies tend to hang on to older software longer because it's just they've got so much stuff invested in that. But for newer companies, I think this is one of those things we're gonna see a lot more of. We're gonna see more people kind of move to this online approach, So keep your eyes open, get a little familiar with them. Most of them have the availability for you to have a free account and uh or at least a trial. Yeah you know that with limited features even for things

like study groups and stuff. I think it's really really handy. Um. But yeah, take a look at it because this stuff is this will be important later on. Trust me. I know. I was in that world for seven years and then I was free. So if any of you have any questions, comments, suggestions, anything like that, send us an email or email address is tech stuff at how stuff works dot com. Chris and I are going to get a little productive here and try and work on our next podcast, so we'll

talk to you again really soon. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com. Let us know what you think. Send an email to podcast at how stuff works dot com. Brought to you by the Reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready. Are you