Lotus Notes 8 goes well beyond the standard capability of allowing users to view attachments. You can open, modify, and share documents without needing a license for any additional software. It's interesting to view the results of a forecasting spreadsheet. It's highly productive to be able to see the formulas behind the numbers. You can even change some of the numbers that you don't agree with and immediately see how that affects the entire forecast.
Lotus Notes 8 software includes a major new set of capabilities called the IBM productivity tools. These productivity tools include a word processor (Lotus Documents), a spreadsheet application (Lotus Spreadsheets) and a presentation application (Lotus Presentations). The IBM productivity tools support the ISO and IEC OpenDopcument Format (ODF) international standard for document editing and storage.
What's all this mean to you? Well, it means that when you're using Notes 8 software, you have a complete set of office productivity tools at your fingertips. You can create, edit, save, and share documents without ever leaving the Notes 8 user interface. You can open your existing documents from a variety of file formats (see below). And the best news of all, the IBM productivity tools are included at no additional charge with your existing Notes 8 license software .
From your Notes 8 interface, you create a new document by clicking on “File” - “New” and selecting which type of document you want to create:
Check out this shortcut: If you're working on document in one of the IBM productivity tools, you can create a new document by simply pressing Ctrl+N.
The Notes 8 “Open” button is pre-configured to allow you to launch any of the productivity tools.
One capability that may not be immediately obvious is that you can export any document that you have opened in the productivity tools as a PDF. This makes it possible to share with anyone an uneditable version of your document. You'll find this option under the File menu.
Dwight Morse | 7 September 2007 07:09:54 AM ET | | (0)
