Thing 14: Online Productivity Tools

I already use My Yahoo! at home and love it. I have pages set up for news headlines and weather, a page for TV listings (I really miss my digital cable and DVR), and a page for movie times. It is great and makes it easy to find info I want at home with just a click.

I have also been using Yahoo calendar since about 2003. It is great for keeping track of things and very easy to search. It also shows up on my yahoo page and in my widgets on my desktop at home.

At work, there is a calendar built in to the e-mail (outlook) so I use that as an organizer for desk time and projects. And at home, I use the yahoo calendar for reminders of personal events. It is also helpful getting reminder e-mails about birthdays for family I’d rather forget.

I signed up for a Remember the Milk account. I don’t think I will use it because I already put events in my Yahoo or work calendar so I don’t really want to spend time adding events to yet another program.

I looked at the document types Zamzar will convert. I thought it would be helpful when patrons need to print a document saved with Microsoft works and we can’t open it with Microsoft word (converter installation problems) but there is a delay in getting the new file through e-mail.

I looked at Backpack and it combines the features of the others into one system. It would be good if I didn’t already use Yahoo Calendar, MyYahoo, and outlook. I think someone could spend a lot of time adding events to all these different organizers and calendars. I think there is sometimes an easy way to add all the events from one system to another, or at least there was when I looked into switching to google calendar. At home, I started using google docs to share a house hunting list with others. It is very easy to use and has most of the features available in word processing programs.