Hi, Bruce Taylor the frugal tech. I’ve taken a couple of weeks off from making YouTube videos because we’ve been working really hard on our new daily program called Frugal Tech Live. And you can see it at live.frugalbrothers.com. We broadcast everyday from one in the afternoon to 3 PM eastern standard time. You can catch it on that address or you can also check out our You Stream channel, frugaltech-live as well.
I wanted to talk to your today about a great little utility I found, it’s a beta, and it’s called Offisync. O-F-F-I-S-Y-N-C. Now this great little tool helps you synchronize your Microsoft office documents to Google Docs and it works very, very well. So if you want collaborate, share a documents, publish documents on the web and even search using Google search engine and image search abilities. It’s all cooked in to the Offisync.
So I got some information on this for you, and I will publish a link to this great little utility in the description of the video. But let me warn you right now, it is a beta product. But what this does, as you know Google came out with their same for Outlook when you get Google Laps, will synchronize your email and contacts. But it stops at that point. It doesn’t do anything with Word, Excel or PowerPoint. Well this product does. So you can save your documents in Google Docs and you can access them from any computer through the web. You can access files from any computer or with Microsoft office which is very cool. And that does work very, very well.
You can manage, create, and delete Google Docs folders right from office application so that’s all built in. you can open any Google Docs file directly from Microsoft office and that works fantastic. You can manage your Google docs file library just like you would on your own computer. So this really, really great. Now it allows you to collaborate very easily. For example when you save a file, you can actually put in the email address to somebody you want to collaborate with on that document. So all these things work great. You can work with multiple accounts. I see nothing about them charging for it anywhere at some point down the road. That might happen right now. As you can see anything about the beta expiring or expiration dates on that. I haven’t seen anything about possible pricing on this product.
It works amazingly well. Now I will tell you my biggest gripe about Google Docs is when you import a Word document with heavy formatting and at times that formatting can get lost. It gets mess up. That’s been my experience. However, I imported a very complex 33 slide PowerPoint presentation into it and it work flawlessly. So it might be kind of hit and miss. I don’t know whether that is entirely Google Docs and the conversion process or what’s going on right there. But just be aware of that.
Now if you have Microsoft office, you can also use Office Live Workspace which is also free with a 5 gigabyte capacity. And that has a plug in Microsoft for Office as well. And then you won't worry about the formatting issues. However the sharing collaboration features in Live Workspace is not nearly as easy to do as it is within Google. I’ll tell you that right now. And also Live Workspace is missing a search feature. So right now, Google Docs, I think has it over Microsoft right at the moment. But check it out for yourself.
There’s also a tool for open offices. Well, I’ll talk about that after I get to test it for a little bit. But so far so good. It works pretty doggone well, but like I said, for complex Word formatting. They may get lost in the import in the Google Docs. There might be some issues with formulas in the spreadsheet applications as well.
But as I said, within the description of the video there is a link to Offisync. Check it out. Absolutely free at this point in time. I see nothing that indicates that that’s going to change anytime soon. So get it. Play with it. If you're a Google Docs fan, this is a must have edition to your software collection.
Remember to check us out at frugal, that’s F-R-U-G-A-L, brothers.com. And check out live.frugalbrothers.com every Monday to Friday from 1 PM to 3 PM eastern standard time. I'm Bruce Taylor, your frugal tech. I always love your comment, let me hear from you. Check us out. I’ll talk to you later.
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