Today’s post is written by one of our new writers in OU’s AFROTC office, Angela Carlington, and is a great, how-to follow-up to Introduction to Cloud-Based Productivity Tools for Education published earlier this week.
If you’re looking for a way to collaborate more effectively, consider iCloud. Recently, we’ve been using iCloud in the Air Force ROTC office to share and collaborate on documents. Using iCloud helps us to easily work on the same document without excessive emails back and forth and works with iPad, MAC, or PC. iPad users can download the “Pages” app and all others can use Microsoft Word to create the document. Here’s a guide to getting started with iCloud:
- First, save the document you’d like to collaborate on to your desktop.
- Second, create your iCloud account at www.icloud.com or just login with your Apple ID.
- Next, sign into iCloud and navigate to “Pages” for word documents, “Numbers” for spreadsheets or “Keynote” for presentations.
- Drag the document from your desktop into the iCloud window.
- Lastly, double-click on the document you want to share/collaborate on, select “share document”
at the top right of the document, and then email the link. Your colleagues will get an email entitled “I’ve shared “X document” using Numbers/Pages/Keynote” and you’ll also know you’ve successfully shared the document when you see little people appear in the top right-hand corner.
Not everyone has to collaborate at the same time, just let your colleagues know to have their input done by a certain time to complete the project. One nice aspect of iCloud is that your colleagues do not need to have an account to access, edit or download the document.
Let me know how iCloud works for you! Happy Clouding.
* Photo taken by Dennis Vu
