Here is a link to the famous Google main page. Above, after quite a lot of learning, I found a fat marker tool to mark up screen shots for purposes of drawing attention to some part of a picture.
If you go to the linked page and click on the right-most of the circled words, the word "more", a column of additional link-labels appears. At the bottom of that column are the words "even more". Click on those to get to this page listing MOST of Google's free services and possibilities.
Of course, you can get to the page from the link right here but it pays to know how to find the page from the Google main page. Then, you can get to the list of options from any computer anywhere.
In my opinion, Word and Excel are still the best word processor and spreadsheet for general purposes. If you do specialized work routinely, you may find modifying some of the many options in those Microsoft Office programs is an aid in getting done what you want quickly and easily. However, for many purposes, the Google Docs option of 'Document' is fully adequate.
The Google Docs are saved in Google's computers and are also available from any computer connected to the internet, or "in the cloud" as computer experts like you and me say for short. Google Docs also offers a spreadsheet, a form (used to mail some questions to contacts, Google collects their answers, and shows them to you in a table), and presentation software, much like Microsoft Powerpoint. The Google presentation software can be rather easily transported a Google (free) web site page, where it will be available for you and others.
On the Google options page, I count 49 links. That is a whale of a lot of possibilities and I probably have not used half of them. However, like a great painting or movie, every service has a purpose and spending time exploring what they are for is worth doing once in a while.
I find it a useful rule of thumb that what I get an idea to do is often an idea that others also have. That means that Google or iPad or the worldwide web may already be offering just what I need, maybe even in a form that is fairly easy to master and at a price that appeals to me.
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Bill
Main blog: Fear, Fun and Filoz
Main web site: Kirbyvariety
