Thing 6

Thing 6 is about creating and editing documents.  It is a bit ironic I am writing this blog today because my practicum site had no internet for the afternoon and all my work is in Google Drive (no work for me this afternoon)!

For Thing 6, I chose Quickoffice to explore.  Since I have been using Google Drive more steadily as it is easy to share with others (no worry of virus transfer - it's happened to me before) and I also have one computer with a faulty Office Suite I have not fixed as of now (crashing and losing work within items).  I was interested to see how this integrates with Google on an Apple Device.

The things I like:  I like that I can access and view all my Drive items in one place.  The titles are easy to read and navigate.  I like that I can create Office documents, should I chose to for any number of reasons.  I like that the app will navigate you directly to your documents in the Google Drive app.  I like the concept of Microsoft Office ON mobile Apple devices.  I like the "Track Changes" feature in Word documents as well as the "Comments" option.  I ALSO like the amount of editing choices, text size, spell check, that sort of thing.

The thing I DIDN'T like:  I needed the Google Drive app installed ALSO in order to access my "stuff".  I could have just used Google Drive when I started my app exploration if I had know this.  I don't really know "what" to do with my Office Documents.  From what digging I could find within the app, it looks like you COULD use other cloud storage than Google Drive but that will be going away in the end of March and was not free.  It looks like Microsoft has it's own app, OneDrive for access to SkyDrive.  I guess you could e-mail documents to someone from your device, but I don't have e-mail linked on my phone right now so I did not try that feature.  Again, you could print the document but I do not have an Airprint compatible printer.

I mentioned that I might use Quickoffice for note taking in Thing 5.  I think I would use this for longer more detailed notes that would be easily accessible in Google Drive - like some idea I was fleshing out or a detailed note I wanted that could be available to me anywhere with Internet service.

Unless you are creating, editing and delivering the document from the device, I don't think Quickoffice has great value unless you are a die-hard Office user (and in that case you might have a product like a Surface Tablet). Then again, Apple products are not always "apples to apples" so perhaps this app has more/better features on the iPad than the iPhone.