Online Alternative to Word
Monday, December 26th 2005 | Ismael Ghalimi
A word processor is the most frequently used office productivity application, and therefore deserves special attention when trying to find a working online alternative. Following the advices of my good friends Assaf and Jeff, I have experimented with a couple online word processors: Zoho Writer from AdventNet and Writely from Upstartle.
Zoho Writer is part of the extensive Zoho suite of online services which will be covered in details with future posts. The Googlish look-and-feel makes it a great complement to Gmail, while the WYSIWYG editor is very close to Microsoft Word’s user interface, therefore creates a feeling of instant user familiarity. Off-the-line integration with popular blogging services such as Blogger, LiveJournal and TypePad demonstrates a clear understanding of what I will now refer to as online service convergence. The AJAX user interface is fairly responsive, while document sharing and publishing could hardly be any easier. Even though import/export with Microsoft Word has yet to be made to work for complex documents as Jeff recently pointed out, at first sight Zoho looks like a great candidate.
Writely is a similar online service developed by Upstartle. Even though its feature set is similar to Zoho Writer’s, the user interface is nowhere near as good. Drop-down menus did not seem to work with Firefox on Mac OS X and the look-and-feel bears no resemblance to any other major office productivity application I have ever used. Two pop-up windows are required for creating a new document, one for naming the document and the other for editing it, making user workflow unnecessarily complex. This first lukewarm experience leads me to discard Writely as a legitimate candidate until the user interface improves significantly.
Many more such services are being released every day and I will not even try to keep up with all of them. Instead, I will document my experience using one of them — Zoho Writer — on a daily basis and identifying ways to integrate it with the rest of my stack, especially Gmail and Salesforce.com.
Entry filed under: Office 2.0
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[…] First, HTML was originally designed to publish textual information and tables were added as a way to format tabular data, not to develop complex spreadsheets, therefore online word processors today are an order of magnitude more advanced than online spreadsheet editors. […]
[…] Nevertheless, if you’re looking for a simple way to manage tabular data and sum some columns up, a couple of options are emerging today. Among them, Num Sum offers what TrimPath describes as a free bite-sized, sharable social spreadsheets. Hardly an Excel killer, but a good start nevertheless. Many thanks to Rob Boothby at Innovation Creators for his excellent Web Office Directory of online services that pointed me to Num Sum and some other new services. I should also mention Zoho WebSheet, which is currently under development but has been reviewed already by Stowe Boyd on Corante. If it’s as good as Zoho Writer, which was reviewed earlier, we might have something interesting there. […]
[…] Ability to share your data. When all your data is available online, multiple people can get access to it at the same time, from anywhere. Document sharing and publishing options available with online word processors such as Zoho Writer featured earlier are so effective that you will soon wonder how you managed to get your work done with a desktop word processor and all your documents locked up into your personal hard drive. […]
[…] The people at AdventNet have been busy as of late. Following the development of the amazingly effective Zoho Writer, they have been working on the long-anticipated Zoho Websheet, which is the best Office 2.0 alternative I know to Microsoft Excel. The service still is in beta test, but you should expect a release very soon now. […]
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