by Bret Capranica | May 25, 2009 | Featured Articles, Ordinary Pastor, Pastoral Ministry, Technology
Here’s the last installment on the technology series: An area where I will be sticking with the paid versions is Groove. What, you don”™t know what Groove is? You need to. Groove is a collaboration software tool that comes in the new Office 07 suite. I can create multiple workspaces, invite who I want to them, assign permissions and begin sharing any sort of document with whomever I want (of course, they must also own and install Groove). If they make changes to the document, it synchronizes the doc for any who are a part of the workspace. You can even create files on your desktop to be “Grooved” and share those files with those you want so that you don”™t have to recreate or upload files to a separate workspace. The only problem with this is that the 64 bit version of Groove does not work with Vista and Microsoft has no plans to make it work. Go figure. This was a major bummer for me. For pastoral ministry this has become invaluable. Our pastoral team collaborates with one of our members who actually puts up a copy of the bulletin each week and we all add our two cents. I do this also with our Sunday School bulletin, PowerPoint presentations, and a vast array of documents I want to share with others. I looked into Zoho”™s Sharepoint-like site, but it simply was not as easy to use or set up. Groove has been a pleasure to use. What about note taking? When Office 07 came out I became hooked to One Note. However, I think the free...
by Bret Capranica | May 22, 2009 | Featured Articles, Ordinary Pastor, Pastoral Ministry, Technology
I”™m going to wrap up (belatedly) my little series on pastoral ministry and the quest for inexpensive technology. Honestly, this is not really an issue for some pastors (or others). Some are in the position where expense is not really an issue. Or they are willing to forgo something else in order to have the better technology. After evaluating the free side of life, I think it is worth spending some money in order to have the better technology and thus a more productive time accomplishing what you do and yet there are a few apps. Let me start with productivity suites. Word Processing, Number Crunching and Presentations. Hands down, MS Office: Word, Excel, and PowerPoint are your best bets (all of these in the world of PC). For a basic suite, of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote (more on this one later), you”™ll pay about $150.00. If you are a student, you can get the Ultimate Office suite for about $60.00. That”™s really the way to go for the power and ease of use you will gain over the zero-priced material like OpenOffice.org. Why pay the money for these? Word is the universal powerhouse of word processing. Other programs, including WordPerfect and Pages with the Mac, have to adjust to it. It is the standard platform. Office has become much more user friendly. Though it did take me awhile to adjust to the new ribbon format, the UI is much cleaner, easier to use, faster to navigate, and even pleasing to the eyes. As said before, OpenOffice reminds me of Windows 98. In Word (Excel, PowerPoint) you can...
by Bret Capranica | Mar 30, 2009 | Featured Articles, Pastoral Ministry, Technology, Time/Life Management
I’m seriously considering leaving the world of Microsoft behind and going for something less expensive, easier to use, and more portable? Does anything out there exist like this? And if I leave my Office 2007 behind, will I be left behind in a whirlwind of little productivity? I really do enjoy using Microsoft Office 2007. It has been a very helpful system for me since the day it came out. They’ve really done a bang-up job on the bells and whistles. I love being able to post blog entries from Word. The visual enhancements to pictures, charts, and graphs are so far beyond previous versions of Office (not near the quality of the Mac world, but then again, few ordinary pastors can afford to live in the Mac world). I’m addicted to Outlook. I’ve never quite understood why people are down on Outlook. It’s been my right hand man for years. Outlook is one of the best organizational tools I have employed in ministry. I could go on. I really enjoy Office. But there is one thing I do not like about it. It is expensive. Whether the Mac version or the PC version, it is simply downright expensive. Until recently, Microsoft had us right where they wanted us. There were no other truly inexpensive options. True, Word Perfect was out there, but then again, you were stuck in the Corel Corral and could not interact with the rest of the world who was using and sharing Word docs. That may not be so now. Google is hot on their trail. Calendar is excellent and now boasts of offline...
