Cooling off to ThinkFree

I don't know if it's because they are still in beta or it's summer or what.

First, my initial enthusiasm was based on their compatibility with MSWord. I tried google docs and I also tried Zoho - neither one preserves the formatting that was in my original word document, but ThinkFree does that - beautifully. And then you start to edit it and the formatting spazzes on you. For example, I tried to change the bullets in a single paragraph, but it went in and converted all my numbered lists to bullets. And my numbered lists are a little complex so no way do I want to go in and re-format them in a clunky online word-processing program. I approached it in a couple of different ways, but every time I changed a bullet the whole document was afffected.

Second, I've had some difficulties getting the collaboration settings in order - I really wanted to use ThinkFree in a "wiki" sort of way, and allow others to edit the lab online and see how it evolved. Not sure anyone would be interested in this type of work, but it shouldn't be that much effort to set it up and see if there are takers. But the collaboration settings are not intuitive and not user friendly. Very few options and not easy to navigate to the place where those settings are. Along the same lines, the "send invitation" function was not working for me last night as I was trying to figure out what an invited user would experience using my wife as a guinea pig.

Third, the whole process is still too slow. I have broadband and there's a huge loading time (relatively speaking) for the JAVA application that lets you edit the file. Of course, this might be a minor detail if everything else worked like a charm once you invested that time in waiting for it. Unfortunately, I've spent far more time trying to figure it out than just about anybody I might hope to bring into the process, and I'm still frustrated by the quirks and bugs.

Lastly, and this may have to do with my computer rather than ThinkFree, but on my home computer I was unable to save edited changes. The program just hangs. Tried several different times. Oddly, it works on the computer at school, so there may be some security settings or something getting in the way on my computer, but there are no warnings or troubleshooting guidelines for this possibility. I didn't have any trouble on the same computer with google docs.

With any luck, these are beta problems that will be ironed out, but I'm not optimistic at the moment. I will keep checking in on them and see what happens by summer's end.