If you’re constantly nagged by writer’s block or struggle to find the motivation to start your work, the LifeClever weblog has a tip to help you get started. Instead of launching an imposing behemoth like Microsoft Word, call up your humble email program and begin your next writing piece as a simple email…It’s my favorite psychological trick for fooling the brain into thinking a writing task is less critical than it is.
In addition to being more convenient and relieving pressure, LifeClever argues that using email to begin your work helps make your writing more concise and sound more conversational.
Unstuck Your Writing With an Email [LifeClever]Typos are bad enough when they result in gibberish like “procedurw,” but words that are close together and technically correct—like “manager” and “manger”—will easily slip by Word’s spell check. If you find yourself making those kind of situational typos often, the Productivity Portfolio blog can walk you through creating an “Exclude Dictionary” to have Word’s checker prompt you whenever it finds certain words. That way, you’re the one who decides whether you meant the guy who deploys and manages work or the staple of nativity scenes. What are your biggest spell-check frustrations? Offer up your knuckle-whitening gripes in the comments.
Catch Mistakes with Word Exclude Dictionary [Productivity Portfolio via TheJobBored]Windows/Mac/Linux: The OpenOffice.org2GoogleDocs extension imports documents from Google Docs and Spreadsheets to OpenOffice.org and exports from OO.org to GDocs so you can work with your docs both online and off as you see fit. Whether you’re primarily a Google Docs or OO.org fan, this desktop-to-web integration seems like an excellent way to take your docs with you whether you’re online or off, and if nothing else is a quick and simple way to backup your local documents to the internet. The OpenOffice.org2GoogleDocs extension is free, works anywhere you’ve installed OpenOffice.org (Windows, Mac, or Linux). Web site DocSyncer is looking to do similar things for your Microsoft Office docs, but right now it’s in an invite-only beta. OO.org2GDocs is here right now.
OpenOffice.org2GoogleDocs [OpenOffice.org Extensions]Windows only: Thumb drive application packages like the Portable Apps Suite are great for taking your full-featured programs wherever you go, but those with smaller drives or working on slower computers might feel overwhelmed. Enter Floppy Office, a package smaller than 2 MB that contains a rich text editor, POP/IMAP email client, PDF creator, spreadsheet program and 10 more applications. All of them get the job done with minimal overhead, and most can be run without installation. Floppy Office is a free download that runs on Windows systems only. For more useful to-go tools, check out must-have portable apps.
Floppy Office [via Office Tweaks]Buzzword, the online word processor acquired by Adobe earlier this month, is now open for a public “preview.” There isn’t a wealth of features not available in Google Docs or Zoho, but there are a few noticeable differences. The most obvious is the minimalist, Flash-based interface that swings toolbar menus around as you select them. The fonts are also unique—Buzzword uses seven smoothed-out Adobe varieties that venture outside the standard set. The webapp offers all the document saving/printing/sharing features of its brethren, but adds a commenting system for shared documents. Buzzword requires a free sign-up to use.
Buzzword [via Download Squad]Windows/Mac/Linux: Add clip art, advanced PDF functions, and in-editor Wikipedia searching to open source office suite OpenOffice.org with OxygenOffice Professional, a modified installation package and extension. Along with adding roughly 3,400 clip art files and templates, OxygenOffice’s extensions also add support for Microsoft’s Visual Basic for Applications in the Calc spreadsheet program and conversion tools for the Office Open XML format used in Office 2007. Combined with the Writer’s Tools package, this gives OO.org a number of exclusive features.
