Collaborate: join the debate

In organising the recent joint Assessment and Metadata & Digital Repository SIG Meeting, it was necessary to share details of those attending, to spread the work involved in e-mailing, badge-making, etc.

I found it easy to use the Google Spreadsheets feature; a beta service, it lets you create/upload a spreadsheet and share with other users. Different options allow others to view or edit the file, and it shows who’s looking at the same time – allowing real-time chat while you’re working on it. There’s also the chance to work with a collaborative word processor, which can be used to save documents in formats such as Word, PDF and OpenOffice. Formerly known as Writely, the word processor is now part of Google’s ‘document suite’.

It’s interesting to see the continuation of free rival software to expensive office suites but doubly so when you consider this is purely a web application. Still in beta stage, there is enough functionality available to create usable and shareable documents – and the online storage means you never have to worry about which copy is the latest one.

Pop over to http://docs.google.com/ and have a look. You’ll need a Google account, which you may have already (Google Calendar, Mail, etc).

Slides and audio: the perfect marriage?

We have the Metadata/Assessment SIG Meeting this week and we will, as usual, be offering downloads of the presentations in slides and audio format.

For a change, I’d like to also make them available as a combined download, so that you can watch the slides change in sync with the audio. I’ve managed to do this in PowerPoint by breaking up the audio file and attaching each segment to the appropriate slide, but ideally, I’d like the audio file just to run continuously with the slides alternating as required. I can get the slides to change at the required time; I just need to be able to attach one audio file to the whole set of slides, rather than chopping them up.

Can anybody help? I’m not sure if the IT dept would buy Breeze etc. so I’m restricted to this approach.