Thing #18

The great thing about both Open Office and Google Docs is the accessibility and the interactiveness of both. These are aspects completely missing in Microsoft Word which is neither free (and therefore less accessible) or interactive (you can produce a static project that could then be emailed and changed and emailed again and changed...and eventually you end up with multiple copies not knowing which is the most recent). A problem comes in the fact that Microsoft Word is so well-known and these two free alternatives are not. That means a learning curve would need to take place. As with all of these tools, playing around with them is necessary to encourage people to acutally utilize these tools and resources.