I go straight up Word, brah.

Unless I’m rollin Mac style, then I go Word for Mac.

I do this for compatibility sake, more than anything. I produce some snappy handouts, complete with shading and the like. I’d use more Google Docs but the formatting messes up too much.

Nicer stuff, though, with links and the whatnot.

Then again, Crucial Thought isn’t in your ‘roll.

Love your stuff, Dan.

Chris Craft

For anything that’s going to be copied and distributed to my students, I have to stick to black-and-white … so Word it is. I’ve tried OpenOffice, and it’s fine, but I already have Word and so does my school, so …

Otherwise, it’s going on the website … in which case more attention to design and color come into play.

For presentations, wikis and GoogleDocs have been useful. I’ve yet to take advantage of SlideShare because I’m just not a big PowerPoint person (though perhaps I should reconsider). Plus, I like that participants can correct or add to my presentation notes.

Either way, space and lists are my friends when my goal is to communicate a certain set of ideas.

Open Office, since it comes with a fine free equations editor. My school doesn’t have mathtype, and in any case I like Open Office’s non-WYSIWYG

I use Word for almost everything, but we’ve purchased Math Type as a school.

I use Sketchpad and Fathom alot – Fathom for its nice, but simple, data displays. For graphing of functions and the like, I use Graphe Easy.

Oops.

http://www.crucialthought.com

Brand new, just consolidated my blogs down to one recently.

Chris Craft

Greetings,
I use Open Office for most of my handouts. In the past I’ve used, Word, Diploma 6 and sometimes the Brownstone Equation Editor.
Chris

But ever since I learned about equation field codes in Microsoft Word I’ve switched and never looked back. Field codes is not the same as Equation Editor; Equation Editor/MathType is not efficient. Learning to use field codes allows you to do everything on the keyboard, so it’s fast (no stopping to mouse). It sets your work in the same font as the rest of your document (give it up for Comic Sans!). This means you can resize and make other typographic changes to the entire sheet at once. (So overheads in 22pt type are easy). If you use equation editor, you are stuck individually resizing each object. Search Word help for “eq” to learn more.

I like to provide collaborating teachers with a document I’ve written that describes how to do use them. Feel free to remix, rework, whatever with attribution.

I’ll second (or third, or fourth..) using Excel.

I find it a lot easier to line things up in Excel over Word. I still do give out some hand written worksheets every now and then though. Can’t mess the formatting up on that.

My geek cred is shot: I do all my worksheets with Word, MathType, and screen shots from OSX Grapher.

But since I got that Latex plugin on my blog, I’ve been wanting to switch over to some kind of Latex formatter. I just can’t figure out if there’s any easy way to get diagrams into the mix. I remember in college that some kids figured out how to use Latex to type up their homework so that it looked just like the stuff the profs were handing out. At the time, I thought they were dorks. Which was true, but I still should have learned that stuff and I didn’t. Maybe over the summer…

Pages, my friend, Pages. Since you’re already a Keynote user who is into graphic design, I suspect you may already use this.

Pages has everything I need and none of the zillions of “features” of Word that I don’t need. And I find that working with text and graphics in Pages is way easier than in word. Obviously, the fact that nobody else uses it can be an issue for some people, but I manage to work around it most of the time.

To mrc: there is. You can draw your diagrams in xfig (which I believe is free) or anything really that’ll save a diagram in eps, jpg, pdf, gif … You then just use something like \include, or \import to put them in. Latex is cool, and math is pretty :)

As it has been stated, Word, Excel, PPT, and I am starting to use publisher. I use excel for everything since I do quite abit of mail merge, data entry and it works great. Coming from an administrators point of view using these programs is simple since every one seems to know how to open, use, and change most of them.
I am excited about google docs and the possibility of using it for some data gathering in one place.
Brian