Access and save Zoho Office documents in Microsoft Office - Lifehacker

Well, as I posted yesterday about Zoho making moves, today Lifehacker puts out into about a new plugin which enables Word and Excel to open/save devices from/to Zoho online.  Pretty nifty.  I’ve always wanted an online space to which I could save through a network link (not on campus, but my own space) without the whole FTP setup.  This is moving in the right direction.

The question is, how many of these online office or storage repositories will follow suit (or may have and I haven’t seen them).

UPDATE: Had a faculty member stop by at the end of lunch, so I took a moment, after they left, to download and test this puppy.  I’m thinking it could be very useful for faculty/students writing as a group.  I’m wondering what the options are for versioning and check-out for individual documents.

Pretty simple.  Downloaded the plugin.  Created a Zoho account (it is free).  Had to quit Outlook so that it could install.  The plugin adds a new toolbar to Word (haven’t tested Excel yet).  I selected Settings and entered my new login info.   Selected Remember me and clicked Save.

The one non-intuitive aspect was logging into Zoho in Word.  You click the Zoho Writer dropdown and select  login.  Zoho shows a little bar and takes about 15 seconds to login (different network speeds may effect this).

I entered some text and selected Save in Zoho Writer.  A window came up requiring me to save the file locally.  I saved it to the desktop and tried again.  Got a request: This document si not available in Zoho Writer.  Do you want to add it?  I clicked Yes and up it loaded.

Now for the real test.  What does it look like?  So, I opened up Zoho and ws already logged in.  I clicked on Zoho Writer and it took about 40 seconds for the app to load.  Once it did, there was my new document in the left My Docs panel.  I clicked on the title and Zoho opened it in a new tabbed document (next to the original blank document) with all of the toolbars for working on the device.

Pretty nifty.  Don’t have time to test this with groups, but it may be worth looking into as time permits.

NMC Virtual Worlds

A Second Live, you attractive vixen you.  If only I had more time.  But, I get in there every so often.  And I have to commend the NMC for setting up a service.  So often, good support, even just someone to answer some newbie questions, can be so important.  So, starting a support service to help institutions grow an Second Life presence to assist with instruction (if I’m reading this correctly) is just wonderful.

Can’t wait to see what they develop over time.

BrainMeld - Bridging The Gap Between Gaming and Education

As we prepare a further experiment with gaming in education, someone announced a new resource on the NMC list today. A quick glance shows some depth and breadth, so it may have some success. And, it always helps to have a good quote on any site:

Video games aren’t for us.
They’re here to entertain the television.
-Mel Brooks

Just kicking off a little late. People can’t find parking on UR campus. Boy, that is a surprise.

- CS2 has been updated for publishing to mobile devices (not truly new, but one of the mentions)
- Adobe Bridge designed to be a complete image browser/manager but not editor.
- Something called Version Q, which is installed into the system preferences, keeps track of versions of your images. It will, actively, maintain copies of each version of the file as you edit over time. Only located in Adobe Bridge in CS2.
- Batch rename function allows you to rename image files. Start at a specific number and set the number of digits used for each (1 vs 01 vw 001 for example).

Humor: Presenter ran into issues. Explained she did not ask the blessings of the Demo-god. Promised to sacrifice a chicken during the break if things don’t get better. Must remember to ask Kevin if there is room in the budget for chickens as I get closer to the big workshop I am to present.

- Photoshop: Filter > Vanishing point - Allows you to devine planes in your image. From here, she made a selection of a window on one wal. The selection follows the plane. Copy and drag the selection along the plane. this also causes the selection to increase/decrease as it movos toward/from the horizon point. She then shifts the other plane, which is placed on another wall, and the selection reverses and follows the plane to resize appropriately and create a 2nd window.

- Another Vanishing Point demo - Image of stone bench, copies in some text to a different layer. Defines the plane herself rather than use the created plane. Resize the grids if you wish. Grid covers top of bench. She pulls on one side and the grid draws down along the side of the bench (kind of like water pouring over). Adds text layer adn draws onto bench top. Text fits to grid with closer letters slightly larger. Puls text off side and the image draws down along side of bench. Very nice.

Had some fun this morning. I have a meeting (in a short 45 minutes) with a faculty member and student to discuss and possibly give a brief tutorial on developing 3D shapes. Haven’t used 3DS Max for awhile. Maybe 8-9 months. And then it was version 6, I only installed 7 on my PC yesterday.

But, I surprised myself. Remember more than I thought. And was able to find helpful tips online and in the tutorials book for Max 6, which worked fine. Had about an hour to play catch up, and catch up I did. See the attached image for the little scene I built.

Thanks to BindyEye for the helpful, and free, materials from which I grabbed the water material. (http://www.3dkingdom.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=695)

Oh, and the kicker is, I did this remoting from my Mac to my PC. Gotta love it.

Dallas Morning News | News for Dallas, Texas | Lifestyles: Solutions

I really enjoyed this articles point about taking time (measured in months or even years) to truly develop an organized workflow. I’ve read David Allen’s Getting Things Done about 1.5 times (read it once and have re-read several sections) and have many of his suggestions built into my daily organization and workflow. But, it is difficult and patience has many rewards.

I especially enjoyed the comment on why it is so important to do some self-study to discover why you need to make changes. I truly believe, without having a real, true and deep motivation to succeed in developing an effective workflow, you will always sell out to the short-term gain. After another rushed back-to-school effort at work, I held myself together rather well. I was not able to keep everything on my computer, but did manage to hold the requests together. From here, the semester should roll rather well with the system in place and ready for some nudges here and there.