Wednesday, January 31, 2007

OK, I'm totally lost with this stuff. I don't use anything besides occasionally a word processor. I don't understand the meaning of many of the terms and endings(?) that are used such as 'ajax, htm, html, PDF, .ppt, .pps or .odp. When it says you need firefox I don't have a clue if I have it. Its hard enough with photos and music and they only have about 4 or 5 different endings and I guess at it. Even as I opened the file to this document the choices to save were confusing. I have no idea if I wanted to save this document would I save it as a html or rtf or word or openoffice or pdf. Whats the difference and how does average Karens know which to use.

Now that I've vented my frustrations I see why people who know what they are doing when find this a great help. I would be useful for people in the same office building and would be a must have for people working from different buildings or even states. The time and ease of working on a project together would be a great benefit to all companies.

2 comments:

Bobbi Newman said...

Karen,
I think the important thing is you're willing to explore it and to learn. There is a lot to learn in the lessons and all of it wont be applicable to you, at least not right away. Also even thought you're frustrated you're able to see the potential for it, that's important!

Robin said...

I know that this can be frustrating - but fortunately we have each other to answer questions!! One of the best resources I've ever seen for file endings (or extensions) is http://whatis.techtarget.com/fileFormatA/0,289933,sid9,00.html which claims to list every file format in the world and its extension. Honestly - I hadn't a clue what .odp was until I looked it up - and then found that it wasn't listed at that resource. I did finally find out (http://filext.com/detaillist.php?extdetail=.odp&Search=Search) that the file extension is used in Open Office - a free Office suite (like Microsoft Word/Excel/PowerPoint/Access/etc.). So, if you happen to use that particular program and want to save a document in that file format, you can!
AJAX is the only term you mentioned that "isn't" a file format, and it is a set of different technologies that make web pages more "2.0ish". For stuff like that, I like using Google's "define" syntax. Just go to google, type in define: AJAX and see the *hundreds* of definitions that pop up from around the web.