Before you go to Installationtown, there are a few things to keep in mind about putting Office on your netbook, namely speed and space.

On the speed side, although the system requirements for Office 2007 say you need at least 256 MB of memory in the netbook, 512 MB makes the program less sluggish. More memory is also recommended for Office features like Instant Search, so having more memory installed in your netbook helps zip things along.

As for space matters, the Office installation files need at least 1.5 GB of your netbook’s disk space. If you have a regular 80 or 160 GB hard drive, this isn’t as painful as someone with an 8 or 16 GB solid-state drive. (After you install Office, though, you can dump the downloaded installer files and grab some of that disk turf back. Just trash the Downloads folder left behind on your desktop or in whichever folder you use to store downloaded files.)

You have at least a couple ways to get the Office programs on your little laptop:

Microsoft has a thing for multiple editions of its programs: two editions of Windows XP, four main editions of Windows Vista, six assorted worldwide editions of Windows 7, and four versions of Microsoft Office 2007. The Office editions vary by the different combinations of included programs. But even the most basic one—Home and Student Edition—comes with Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. The more expensive business-oriented Office packages include corporate tools like the Access database program.

But remember that you can choose what gets installed. Click the Install Now button if you want to put everything on the netbook. Click the Customize button on the installer’s dialog box if you want to get picky. Want Word but feel the need to leave Excel and PowerPoint at home? Just tell the installer so.

Once you install Office, summon your program of choice from Start→All Programs→Microsoft Office→Microsoft Office Word 2007 (or Excel, or PowerPoint) to get rolling. Or, if you want to add your most-used programs to your Start menu where you can easily find them, right-click each program’s name in the All Programs submenu and choose “Pin to Start Menu.”

Microsoft Office on the netbook works just like Microsoft Office on a desktop or full-sized laptop except that you have less of a screen to see it on. And it may be a tad slower, depending on the amount of memory you have installed on the netbook.

If you’re already an Office power user, you’re ready to jump right in now. If you’re still a bit of a novice, check out one of many large, heavy books on the subject, like Office 2007: The Missing Manual (www.missingmanuals.com). No matter what your familiarity, here are some quick tricks you can do right now to make Office 2007 on the netbook a little easier to use:

Getting your own chunk of the Office Live Workspace action is simple:

When you’re done using your workspace for the day, log out. You can always come back to it by signing in at http://workspace.officelive.com with the name and password you used when you set up your Office Live Workspace account.

The good news for Ubuntu Linux netbookers is that OpenOffice.org is already installed on your computer. It’s part of Ubuntu, and you can find it on your system at Applications→Office (or Applications→Graphics if you’re looking for the Draw program).

If you have a Windows netbook, you can download the suite at http://download.openoffice.org. You need at least 650 MB of drive space to handle the installation files, but after you install Open-Office.org, you can toss those installers and only give up 44 MB. The suite can run on 256 MB of memory, but 512 MB is recommended. Once you install it, choose Start→All Programs→OpenOffice.org and open the program within the suite you want to use.

As with an open-source software project, there are a couple things to remember when using OpenOffice.org. First, the software is still a work-in-progress—a very advanced work-in-progress, but a few bugs and glitches may remain. Second, there’s no free 90-day phone and email support like Microsoft offers.

OpenOffice.org has tons of support documents, forums, and a Frequently Asked Questions page at http://support.openoffice.org/index.html, but no nice person on the other end of the telephone line to gently guide you through your problem, even at $49 a call like Microsoft charges after the first 90 days. (The OpenOffice.org support page lists consultants you can hire, though.)

With so many major corporations, schools, and individuals using Microsoft Word, chances are someday someone will send you a Word doc. If you have Version 3 of OpenOffice.org, double-click the document and see if Writer jumps up to open it. If it doesn’t, choose File→Open in Writer, navigate to the document, and open it that way. Documents in older versions of Word should open just fine in OpenOffice.org 3 as well.

But while OpenOffice.org lets you open and edit the files, it doesn’t let you save files in Word 2007’s .docx format. You can, however, save them in the old standby .doc format, which just about every version of Microsoft Word can open.

Once you log in, you see your own little workspace. The pane on the left shows the location and ownership of all your files, while the main part of the browser window displays all the file names. The blue menu bar above it all offers the following choices:

When you create a new document, spreadsheet, or presentation, the browser window becomes a blank canvas, ready for you to type text or enter formulas. The menus along the top of the screen offer most of the standard commands you’d expect to find in office software (cut, copy, paste, save, check spelling, word count, and so on), plus text-formatting tools and commands for inserting tables, comments, images, and links into the file.

“Sure,” you say, “Google Docs is great—as long as you have an Internet connection. But when you can’t get on the Web, you’re toast.”

Well, not exactly. Thanks to some nifty technology powered by the Google Gears software, you can have copies of your Google Docs files synchronized between the Web and your hard drive. So if the Internet goes down (or you’re on an airplane), you can still work on your documents.

To use Google Docs offline, first get Google Gears going on your netbook:

Google Gears is now ready to go, snagging copies of your files behind the scenes as you work. Even if you’re cut off from the Internet, you can still get to your files by clicking the Google Docs shortcut on your desktop or by pointing your web browser to http://docs.google.com. When you regain Internet access, the document on your netbook updates itself on the Google Docs site.

Whether you realize it or not, your netbook has at least one address book on it already. Here, you can add new contacts or import ones from other computers and programs (Managing Contacts Between Web and Netbook).

If you have Microsoft Office on your netbook, you probably use Outlook, the suite’s email and personal organizer program. If you haven’t used Outlook before, start up the program and click the Contacts button, then choose New→Contact to create a contact file.

If you use a web-based email service like Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, America Online, or Gmail, your contacts are right there, whenever you log into your account. In fact, web-based mail is the easiest way to corral your contacts, because they live in the magic cloud and you can get the same fully updated information with your netbook, or indeed, any Internet-connected computer.

To get to the contacts area of most webmail services, log into your mail account and click the Contacts link or tab. To add a new person to the list, click the Add or New button in the contacts area to pull up a blank form that you can then fill in with all of the person’s information.

Are your contacts where you need them to be? If you want to get existing contacts onto your netbook, you probably fall into one of three categories:

The next few pages tell you how to sling that address book around to the Web and back—or just onto the netbook if you want.

If you use the same email-and-contacts program in both places, copying your contacts between computers is a breeze. For example, you may have Microsoft Outlook on both your desktop PC and your spiffy little netbook. If so, moving a copy of your contacts files goes something like this:

The steps are slightly different if you’re transferring contacts between different programs, but the concept is the same. There’s a format that most contacts program can read, called Comma Separated Values, or CSV for short. (As you might expect from the name, the individual bits of information in a .csv file—like first name, last name, email address, and so on—are separated by commas.)

In many cases, you can export your contacts as a big .csv file from one program, copy it onto a USB drive, connect that drive to the netbook, and then use the mail program’s import command to pull in that same .csv file.

Having your contacts on your netbook’s hard drive means they’re always at your fingertips, even without an Internet connection. But say you want to put them up on the Web too, either as a backup or to move more of your life online. Even if you haven’t done much with the contacts in your Gmail, AOL, Yahoo, or Hotmail account, you can pull the contacts out of Outlook (or wherever you keep them) and import the names and addresses into your webmail account.

Gmail, Yahoo, and Hotmail let you import contacts from other programs as long as you’ve exported the information as a .csv file. Here’s how:

Now, when you open your webmail’s contacts file, you should find plenty of friends there.

If you have a smartphone or personal organizer that you want to connect and sync to your Windows netbook, you shouldn’t have a problem as long as you can run the device’s synching software on your netbook. If you don’t have a CD drive for the netbook, you can download the software:

If you want to sync the gadget with two computers (the netbook and your other one), check the sync program’s settings or manual for using the device with multiple machines. Some may just sync up automatically and use timestamps to sort things out, while others may need more fiddling to add the device and, say, have it work with multiple Outlook profiles.

Connecting a phone or PDA to an Ubuntu Linux netbook is considerably trickier, and some devices like the Blackberry don’t work at all (unless you do some major tinkering). However, Ubuntu does come with a program called the Gnome Pilot for setting up and syncing with Palm devices with the Evolution program. Connect your Palm handheld and choose System→Preferences→PalmOS Devices to get started with the Gnome Pilot setup assistant.

Even if you don’t use a webmail service, there are plenty of ways to keep your address book online where you can always get to it. There are also services, both free and paid, that synchronize your contacts across multiple computers so your address book is current, no matter where you update it.

Here are some of the options out there:

Plenty of other online address books are out there, and your mobile phone carrier may even have a syncing solution as well, like Nokia’s Ovi service (www.ovi.com). And where there are contacts, there are usually calendars.

Windows XP doesn’t include a calendar program (Outlook Express is sadly lacking in this department compared to its beefier, more expensive cousin, Outlook), but you can find plenty of freebies at shareware download sites.

If you’ve ponied up the big bucks for Microsoft Office, then you have the mighty Outlook at you disposal. You can see your daily, weekly, and monthly schedules with the click of the Outlook window’s Calendar button. You make a new entry on the calendar by choosing New→Appointment and filling out the box with the date, time, name of the event, notes, and so on.

The toolbar in the Appointment window has controls that let you set an alarm to warn you—five minutes to two days ahead of time—that this event’s looming. If it’s a standing meeting or appointment, click the Recurrence button in the toolbar to schedule it in advance—and all at once.

Outlook has a handy search box that lets you rifle through your schedule to see where you were on a given day or where you’ll be a few days from now. Like contacts, Outlook calendars can sync up with a number of portable gadgets, including Windows Mobile devices and iPhones.

Basically the open-source version of Outlook for Linux, Evolution handles mail, contacts, and calendars—plus other digital scraps of information like memos and task lists. If you need to start making sense of your schedule, choose Applications→Office→Evolution and click the Calendars button in the main window. Choose New→Appointment to make a new entry and fill out all the pertinent information like date, time, and location.

If the event is a regular one, like a staff meeting or therapy session, click the Recurrence button at the top of the window. A box opens where you can automatically schedule the appointment at the proper intervals instead of plotting it on the calendar one instance at a time.

Buttons along the top of the Evolution Calendar toolbar let you see your day, work week, overall week, and month. You can search for appointments by name, flip through the calendar day by day with the Next and Previous buttons, and jump back to the present by clicking the Today button.

If you have one already, you can also pull in a synchronized copy of your online Google Calendar (Online Calendars) to display within Evolution, too:

Because they’re accessible from any number of computers and by any number of people, online calendars have become very popular over the past few years. The next section describes some of the more popular options, in case you’d like to sign up for one yourself.

Another thing online calendars are good at? Sharing. Each one described in the previous section offers a link or tab that lets you share your calendar online with specified friends, people on your contacts list, or the world at large.

With most calendar sites, you can also subscribe to public calendars other people have put on the Web. These calendars can be of anything—shared calendars from friends and family, Federal holidays, religious holidays, World Cup match schedules (which are religious holidays for some people), rock-band tour dates, and more.

You can also add public calendars (even to programs like Outlook and Evolution) by supplying the calendar’s URL when you add a new calendar. Apple’s iCal program has inspired a number of public calendars that you can download as an .ics file, (the common format used for shared online calendars) and import into other online calendar sites at http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/calendars/.

To add a public calendar, look for a Subscribe link on your calendar page and see what the site has to choose from. In Google Calendar, for example, you add a public calendar in the Other Calendars area on the left side of the screen. Click the Add button and choose “Add a public calendar” to see a catalog of calendars you can subscribe to. In Windows Live Calendar, click the Subscribe link at the top of the page to go to a page that lets you paste in a public calendar’s URL or import an .ics file.