Catching up

... rather breathlessly! I thought that having the office to myself for two weeks would let me catch up on all sorts of things, but I seem to be spending rather a lot of time sending out reminders to people who need to send me information to put into the freshers' information packs as well as doing loads of photocopying for said packs, so the Things have been a bit neglected.

Week 5, Thing 9 - Google docs

Again, this is something I have used in the past with the Admissions team. We thought it would be a good idea to have a web-based spreadsheet so that the Admissions Tutor and Schools Liaison Officer could enter details of their visits to schools while on the move, rather than having to wait until they were back in the office. The plan was that I would then download the spreadsheet from time to time, so that I had an up-to-date version. This was not completely successful, for two reasons:

- the AT and SLO still had to be nagged to fill in the spreadsheet, and as the nagging took place while they were in the office, it rather destroyed the point of having a web-based document;

- when I downloaded the document, any visits which had been entered since the last download had the date in the American format (mm/dd/year), so I had to check them all and manually change them.

Add to that the problems I have had recently trying (unsuccessfully) to access a spreadsheet connected to one of my book groups, and you'll see why I'm not totally enthusiastic about Google docs, although I recognise that it's a good idea in principle.

Week 5, Thing 10 - Pushnote and Evernote

Week 5, Extra Thing - Dropbox

OK - read the instructions and created an account for Pushnote, but somehow don't think the IT guys at work will take too kindly to me installing any unauthorised 'extras', so will leave this to try out on my home computer. Same applies to Dropbox - we have our own online file-sharing set up by the IT office.

And on to Week 7!