Patience
Active Member
- Joined
- Mar 30, 2006
- Messages
- 275
Hey all, I wonder what your thoughts are on online document sharing/collaboration? We have serious issues at work which essentially stem from not having a reliable systems for multiple users in disparate locations editing a document.
We have 6 central departments and nine regional offices, and each month or so each one needs to provide a performance monitoring report (among other things). I spent a long time setting up a template for the charity to use, but because we have serious IT issues with our shared drive which basically renders it impossible for the regional offices to access, the lovely template I created was emailed to 15 people, and ended up being messed up in 15 unique ways. I have learnt a few lessons from the exercise about creating templates for all user abilities but the real issue came when my poor colleague was expected to clean it all up and put it all back together into the single master sheet. What should have been an 'open document and print' exercise turned into a week of hair pulling and general disarray and borderline nervous breakdowns. (Myself included!)
Having had a rant about this to colleagues I decided there must be an easier way so I have been looking into Google Docs. Firstly I don't think it is sophisticated enough, as it doesn't allow Excel sheets to be imported, rather it creates a basic version of them.
Do any of you have any experience of Google Docs, or other online document sharing tools? The basics that I would like is the ability to load .xlt and .xls files onto a secure location, and allow colleagues to edit and save. Any thoughts, experiences or advice will be appreciated. Or of course if you can think of a better way then that is just great too!
We have 6 central departments and nine regional offices, and each month or so each one needs to provide a performance monitoring report (among other things). I spent a long time setting up a template for the charity to use, but because we have serious IT issues with our shared drive which basically renders it impossible for the regional offices to access, the lovely template I created was emailed to 15 people, and ended up being messed up in 15 unique ways. I have learnt a few lessons from the exercise about creating templates for all user abilities but the real issue came when my poor colleague was expected to clean it all up and put it all back together into the single master sheet. What should have been an 'open document and print' exercise turned into a week of hair pulling and general disarray and borderline nervous breakdowns. (Myself included!)
Having had a rant about this to colleagues I decided there must be an easier way so I have been looking into Google Docs. Firstly I don't think it is sophisticated enough, as it doesn't allow Excel sheets to be imported, rather it creates a basic version of them.
Do any of you have any experience of Google Docs, or other online document sharing tools? The basics that I would like is the ability to load .xlt and .xls files onto a secure location, and allow colleagues to edit and save. Any thoughts, experiences or advice will be appreciated. Or of course if you can think of a better way then that is just great too!
