Zoho Writer Review (iHCPL Week 8 #19)

So today I’m trying out Zoho Writer to see how it works. I’ve used Google docs in the past and while I found it useful for collaboration, when it came to crunch time and I needed to get my document edited quickly and reading for print, I went back into Microsoft Word to create the final product.

Just from the looks of it, Zoho Writer seems to be much more robust than Google docs (formerly called “Writely”). Some of the features in Zoho Writer that you won’t find in Google docs include:

• Page Setup
• Web publishing
• Library of Templates
• Tables and Images
• Special Characters, subscripts and superscripts
• Comments
• And more!

Even with all the functionality, I have to wonder why I would really want to use a web-based app when I have a perfectly good software app on my computer. Zoho answers this (for me, at least) in their FAQ. The 2 main qualities I like are:

1. The ability to use Zoho to post to my blog (I’ve discovered that Blogger just doesn’t have much along the lines of text editing options – WordPress is slightly better in that regard, but Zoho has even BETTER text editing).
2. Viewing my documents’ revision history – nice to be able to see how I’ve improved the document over time. And if I discover that some of the changes I made aren’t the best, I can go back to a previous version.

Now, on to try to actually post from Zoho Writer and see if this functionality proves its worth!

Toodle-oo!

Note: I did successfully publish my document to my blog. I chose to publish it as a draft so that I could go back and make any changes to it before I actually posted it. Zoho allowed me to choose tags for my post (from the ones that I had already used – I couldn’t create a new one). The title of the post was taken directly from the filename of the document, so if you didn’t take that into account when saving your document, you’d need to change the title when you checked the post in your blog (I had to do this). The confirmation from Zoho to show that my document had been added to my blog was not very visible, so I had one of those moments of “did it work? I can’t tell? What’s going on?” before I saw the teeny note at the top of the page stating it had posted. Well, I guess I can’t be too picky when I’m getting something for free!