Online Productivity Tools

Do you see free online tools like these eventually replacing expensive software like MS Office?

Yes I do. I used the Google Calendar (http://www.google.com/calendar/) and added my days off and special events for the month of May 2010. I found this calendar to be very user friendly and it was comparable to both Outlook Calendar and Sharepoint Calendar that we use here at the branch. You can choose all day or timed events; recurring events; synch the events to your Outlook Calendar at work and even choose the country and time zone that you live in to co-ordinate the calendar to Canadian holidays and mountain standard time.

I have also used Open Office (http://www.openoffice.org/) for word processing (comparable to Microsoft Word) and spreadsheets (comparable to Microsoft Excel) in the past. These applications were both very close to the Microsoft equivalents and can easily be downloaded for free from the website. Because of the availability of very good, easy to use, free software programs from the internet; I see these applications becoming more popular than expensive programs from more traditional software providers.