I have used Google Docs for word
processing before, but I have not really messed around with its spreadsheets,
so I figured now is as good a time as ever!
Being a physics teacher (and having taking numerous physics classes in
undergrad) I have used Excel for a variety of things. I even made a spreadsheet for my college job
that would automatically update the needed orders and used conditional
formatting to highlight when we were running low on filters. From what I have been able to see so far,
Google Docs spreadsheets seem to be quite capable of everything I typically use
spreadsheets for. Various equations work
well, including basic if-then statements, and conditional formatting seems
pretty easy. One odd thing that I have
found so far is if I want to subtract the value of one cell from another, I
cannot simply click on the first cell, hit the “-“ and then select the second
cell. It just replaces the first cell! Works fine for addition, multiplication, and division,
just not subtraction. Weird.
Overall, it
looks like a rather solid spreadsheet editor.
Have not been able to see if it can handle macros, but Microsoft Excel
cannot handle them as well as it used to, either.
I do not
believe I have ever used an online image editor before, so I didn’t really know
what to expect. I have used Photoshop a
little before, and I also use GIMP, an open source Photoshop-replacement. Most of the editing that I have done using
Photoshop and GIMP could be done in PicMonkey.
That is, things like rotating, cropping, adjusting some colors, etc.,
were pretty easy in PicMonkey. I like
the overall layout of the site, with the left toolbar providing several
different sub-menus. Some of the tools
were fairly common, and some were things that you would never see labeled as
such in a professional editing program.
For example, to the best of my knowledge, there are no options for specifically
highlighting your hair or giving yourself a spray-tan (though, may I say, it
made a picture of me taken last winter look much more summery). From what I can see, it kind of “dumbs down” some
of the more common uses of professional programs so that we non-professionals
can easily do the basics without having to know much or do much research.
I have had a chance to use GIMP for
more complex uses such as merging layers, setting alpha levels, and adjusting
transparency of layers. From what I can
tell, these options are not available in PicMonkey. But, honestly, for the average user, how many
of us really need to do these tasks? The
only reason I did these tasks is because I was bored in the summer and wanted
to customize our school’s logo for my classroom site. For the average user, such as myself, it
looks as though PicMonkey can accomplish most of the tasks we would need.
No comments:
Post a Comment