solutions

You’ve probably heard of Writely and other similar web-based document creation and collaboration tools. Well, apart from being absolutely thrilled about finally having an easy way to create and share documents between workgroups or committee members across the country (or continent, as the case may be), last night I realized that these tools also fill a very immediate public-service need: instant wordprocessing for library patrons in libraries where no productivity software is available! (duh, I know). What a nice to change to be able to say to patrons, “no, we don’t have Word on our computers, but I can show you a way to take that Word file on your flash drive and edit it online.” Writely has a great set of features and includes much of the formatting functionality that Word provides (via recognizable icons), making the interface transtition a fairly smooth one (a comprehensive review of Writely is available at TechCrunch).

Who doesn’t love solutions?