File converters

That was a fun exercise! Gmail offers to open an attachment as a Google document but I thought I should follow instructions and download to my computer and then upload into Google docs. Was still waiting an houir later! However when I automatically opened the file as a Google doc it had certainly changed some elements, bullets, spacing etc.

Using gmail and google docs together is a good way of sharing files and cutting some corners and may prove useful if people are having difficulties with attachments but it is not for everyone. Our half an hour time limit on the public internet stations affords us little opportunity to help with tough file conversion problems e.g. documents created in older programmes, and wps and png files. Knowing about Zamzar and Convert.files means at least we can explain these facilities to our customers.
Open Office is a good suite of open source programmes that can be saved as word, excel, ppt docs. I think it is important that we remember the formats we want when saving our docs to avoid having to convert later but sometimes you just want to push the button when you've finshed composing!