Our call for speakers, for example, is actually a Google Docs form embedded on a page, with the information people submit saved on the backend as a spreadsheet. That’s why as I’ve gotten involved with the Modern Media Man Summit (a cool conference, click the link and check it out!) I have been appreciative of our shared Google Docs archive and materials. Unless you have a round-robin sharing approach, which can take weeks to fully resolve, it’s exceptionally hard to incorporate feedback from more than one person in a coherent fashion. Where this gets even more difficult is when you want to share a document - or spreadsheet or presentation file - with more than one person simultaneously. And that was during the era where you needed to be paranoid about the size of your file attachments too. Sharing documents has always been crude, at best, and for many of my books the projects were characterized by lots and lots of “.doc” files emailed back and forth. Heck, I’ve built more spreadsheets in Microsoft Excel than I even want to count, and will confess that I enjoy the process, strangely enough. Here at Ask Dave Taylor I’m pretty agnostic about basic office computing tools, whether it’s an operating system (I lean more towards Mac OS X but have Windows XP, Vista and Win7 systems around, along with some Linux gear), word processing tools or even a spreadsheet.
