Tech Blog

[#1]

It is no secret that I have little love for MS Office. I'm essentially forced to use it on the always annoying "because I have to work with my publisher…" reason (which if I didn't really like my publisher and writing books for a living would be even more of a pain), but last week was the final straw. I needed to get a document out for a class I was teaching the next day and Word 2008 decided to completely, totally, beyond-all-hope-of-recovery corrupt the file. That was it, I was done. The third file in a month to have this happen (the first was the address list for my upcoming wedding, which made my fiancée almost lose her mind) and I'd had it. So I decided to cut the cord (so to speak) and switch to iWork.

Yeah, yeah Apple fanboy all you want, but honestly it's been great. Edited old Word docs in Pages, no problem. Created some spiffy presentations for class and a talk in Keynote. Oh, shared them on iWork.com beta too…

Did I mention editing them on my iPad? Yeah, not bad.

Oh, I know these apps aren't perfect. I haven't tried Numbers yet…but I did decide to just make the leap of faith and tell my Mac to open all Word docs and PowerPoint files in Pages and Keynote respectively. The thing is I hate being forced to use something that I not only don't like, but that also makes more work for me.

I still have to edit book chapters in Word … but at least for the rest of what I do, it's iWorking for me.

[#2]

I went one step further... I got a PC. ;-)