Upfront confession: I like chromebooks or at least some of them. So, can a chromebook actually serve a telecommuter or entrepreneur as well as it serves a K-12 student? I parked my Windows laptop and desktop for a few days to find out. And any home office worth the name has a Wi-Fi network now. Others, though, have at least a vague notion of what it means to have a Google account (likely for Gmail) and some online storage, or have even played with creating and saving word processing files, spreadsheets, and presentations in Google Docs, Google Sheets, and Google Slides. Many are as clueless as the questioners you can see on any chromebook vendor's website or Amazon listing: 'Does it come with Word, Excel, Skype, iTunes, and Firefox?' (No, no, no, no, and forget it.) Normally, my computer buying advice is probably a lot like yours: get 8GB or more of RAM instead of 4GB, steer clear of Celerons and Pentiums but a Core i5 will probably do (unless you need a Core i7 for rendering video or CAD drawings), bonus points for solid-state storage, and so on.īut, also like you, I get inquiries from friends and family members tempted by ultra-low prices and curious about chromebooks. The monitor uproar, however, got me thinking about a different way of making do: using the least powerful and pricey computer that makes sense for a home office.

(I explored that last one in last week's column and, sheesh, did I hear from burly developers and day traders who snarled that I'd pry their second through sixth monitors from their cold, dead hands.) Many of the stories I hear from home office workers are stories of doing more with less: packing a corporate office park's worth of productivity into a corner of a spare room, maintaining the Web presence of a company 10 times your size, arranging apps on one big monitor instead of two small ones. How to Set Up Two-Factor Authentication.How to Record the Screen on Your Windows PC or Mac.How to Convert YouTube Videos to MP3 Files.How to Save Money on Your Cell Phone Bill.

How to Free Up Space on Your iPhone or iPad.How to Block Robotexts and Spam Messages.

Can you use excel on a chromebook