Let's Try Zoho Writer

Is the face of writing and doing office work moving to the web?
by Charlie Leck

I'm pounding out this morning's blog on Zoho Writer on http://www.zoho.com/.

I read about Zoho in an article in this morning's NYTimes and thought, "Why not? We'll give it a try."

"The best online word processor, however, may be the one from a tiny company, Zoho, a nimble innovator. Zoho Writer is running close enough to Word to imagine that it and other online word processors will be able to do most everything that Word can do, and more.

Zoho Writer handles the basics and provides many advanced functions without breaking a sweat — like the ability to edit a document when page breaks are displayed. Google Docs can’t. Writer works even when one is offline, thanks to open source technology developed by Google, and used by Zoho in its word processor four months before Google used it."

I left out the quote about it being absolutely free. Is this really the wave of the future? The very nice introduction and explanation of how this word processor works tells me that I can save a document both on-line and on my computer. That's interesting! Instant backup! So, I just went ahead and saved this document. So far, I'm just saved on-line. I'll need to figure out the next step.

The interface on this word-processor is nice and clean and straightforward. You don't spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to use it. It seems simple to put words in italics or to underline them or to make them bold. (Be aware that my blogger service doesn't like underlined words, so that particular word will not appear underlined in the blog. It is here in this text.)

Spell-checking is easy and fast and smooth.

There's a post-to-blog-feature that I'll try out when I'm done here and feel this document is ready to put up.

It also appears to be quite easy to create a template from this document, so that whenever I sit down to write my blog I'll just need to open that template and this structure will be instantly read

Zoho offers lots of other services, too -- project managers, calendars, data bases and all the items that come in Microsoft Office. As best I can tell, they are all free to individuals who create accounts with Zoho.

What's this FOR FREE business?
I'm not smart enough to have figured this out yet, but you can bet companies like ZOHO aren't losing money. You can see that by examining how big and how rich GOOGLE is.

All I know is that I spent nearly $600 to get the MICROSOFT OFFICE package that I have (professional), and now-a-days it may be totally unnecessary.

If you're in the market for a word processor, and if you have high-speed Internet service, I think this may be the way to go.

Moving it on to my blog!
This worked okay. There were some spacing problems but I always have those. I think I've become a ZOHO fan. I'm certainly going to try it out for a while -- anyway!