Online docs tool

For the next three weeks, office workers across the country will have visions of buzzer-beaters dancing in their heads. It's NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament time, and that means brackets will be zipping through e-mail systems in organizations large and small. There are dozens of sites that let you make your tournament choices online, whether to test your basketball-prediction acumen against the masses, or to recruit friends and coworkers in a private pool. You can even use Google's Basketball Bracket Battle gadget to place your choices on your iGoogle page. After you select the "Create a bracket on iGoogle" link, the gadget is added to your iGoogle page, and you're invited to join a league, or to form a league of your own. ***

The first few times I worked on Word files in the OpenOffice.org Writer program, I was satisfied if the documents opened at all. That's a long way from being able to trust the open-source app with a Word file from your boss that you need to work on and return with all functions and formatting intact. These steps won't guarantee trouble-free file transfers between Word and OOo Writer, but they'll help you prevent some of the most common conversion glitches. Keep it simple: Word files with complex graphics, nested tables, fancy fonts and formatting, and OLE Objects belong in Word and Word only. OOo Writer uses public-domain fonts primarily, and many of the fonts in Word are proprietary. If you know you'll be moving files between the word processors regularly, use only common fonts, such as Arial, Helvetica, and Times Roman. Keep in mind, however, that fonts may share the same name and still be incompatible (Garamond is an example). ***

There can be no doubt why Google has acquired Zenter, one of many tools for creating online slideshows and presentations. The site hadn’t entered private beta (there was an “enter your email” form on the homepage), but clearly the name will now be dropped, and the features and team amalgamated into Google’s upcoming Powerpoint challenger. It’s the same thing they did with Writely, which eventually became the cornerstone of the oddly named Google Docs and Spreadsheets. Signs of that product are already abundant: there’s now a Powerpoint preview in Gmail, for instance. ***