Via Mashable, Zoho Writer Gets More Professional:
“Zoho has added a couple new options for its web-based document creation tool, Zoho Writer. None of the changes are all that significant, but I think Zoho missed out on some potential here.”
I’ve just had a quick look at this tool and was pleasantly surprised with what they’ve done with it. I use Google Documents quite frequently, and yet find its lack of functionality somewhat irritating.
Zoho Writer by contrast seems to offer a substantially deeper toolset that is much more comparable to offline word processing applications such as OpenOffice and Word. For example, whereas Google Docs offers a paltry WYSIWYG toolbar with sparse formatting options, Zoho Writer has several rows of options that include a variety of functions – including notably TABLES. For some incredible reason, Google Docs doesn’t have this yet, which never ceases to amaze me.
Add to this functions that are increasingly becoming web-standards, such as tagging and folksonomic identifiers, and at least on the surface you have something that’s quite useful.
I for one am on so many different machines from day to day that web-based documentation programs such as Writely and Google Docs are really valuable because they help minimise version control problems. I use wiki’s quite frequently as well, but wiki’s aren’t appropriate for everything – take sensitive information for example.
The main gripe that I have about Zoho Writer is the fact that its use of Google Gears doesn’t enable offline editing. It’s nice to be able to unplug after work and read the same document on the way home – but to me without an edit option it offers no major benefit. In fact it’s several extra steps to view that a PDF doesn’t require. Why offer offline functionality if it’s only in a static form?
Hopefully this is something in the works, because it’s severely lacking in the current web-wide offerings. For me personally, the first application that offers this is going to be the one I go with as my online word processing program of choice.
If you’re going to compete with the offline Big Boys, you can’t overlook offline activities.
