Zoho upgrades Web word processor with good UI (two of them!)

Zoho is improving its online word processor, Writer, with a revised user interface and a few new useful features.

The interface change is a have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too experiment. The new "MenuTab" UI gives you drop-down choices from the top level of the menu, but you can also press on a top-level menu choice to display an icon bar with identical options. The icon bar is nothing like Micrsoft Office 2007's tab bar, which supports many more options and has more complicated different ways to use it.

MenuTab is a curious design, but it does work. And users who grow accustomed to using the system in one mode likely won't see much of, or be bothered by, the parallel other mode.

Zoho Writer 2 is really easy to use in spite of a redundant interface.

(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman / CNET Networks)

Zoho is said to offer simultaneous collaborative editing, as Google Docs does, but when I tested the app I found it far too easy to over-write another user's edits. I do hope this gets fixed very soon. The service also offers a text chat window for collaborating editors. And there's full revision and change tracking in each document, should you ever want to undo the changes someone has made to your doc.

The new version has good sharing options for documents. You post directly to a few different blogging services from Zoho Writer, which is a very nice feature for bloggers. You can also edit in a print view, which shows you page breaks an margins. It's a good working display; even if you never plan to print the document you're working on, you may find the extra white space and page breaks help you focus on your text.

Zoho Writer users Google Gears to give users offline access to their files. Users can sign in using Google or Yahoo credentials. Real geeks may like the embedded LaTeX equation editor.

I find Zoho Writer 2.0 to be a strong word processor that's incredibly easy to learn and use, even more so than Google Docs. The dangerous collaboration function means I can't recommend this product, yet, as a workgroup app. But I wrote this review solo in Zoho, and it didn't give me a minute of confusion or trouble.

[Goodbye Helicopter]

but why does anybody need to be connected to the internet to do any word processing?!
or anything else that doesn't require sending data packets?!?!

just another app on the web to be on the web. No reason. No purpose.

POOF.
You lost your connection.
You lost data real fast.
LAME.

[3rdalbum]

Mr Goodbye Helicopter: Please read the article before commenting. "Zoho Writer users Google Gears to give users offline access to their files.". That means if you lose your connection, you can still work on your data until reconnection, or save it out to your hard disk.

Also, although the article is about Zoho's new UI, it does mention a feature that online word processors have that isn't matched by their offline counterparts. Why don't you READ THE ARTICLE and find out what it is.

[Pank2008]

In a company which has been using MS Office for ages, its very hard to shift to a new word processor. We use HyperOffice to collaborate on MS Office files, and dont really miss having a purely online word processor much, since most systems have MS Office installed locally. Also, we hope that the launch of Office 14 will give us the added benefit of purely online access to documents.

[forever4now]

Online office products allow you to edit & share documents, independent of the device you are using (smartphone, netbook, notebook, ...) and the OS the device is running (Windows, OS X, Linux, Android, Blackberry, ...). They also eliminate the need to pay ongoing license fees & maintenance costs associated with Windows & Microsoft Office products. If you want to remain locked-in to Microsoft solutions & the expenses associated with them, you can. Others can use these alternate solutions.

[Pank2008]

the fact is, most companies HAVE already purchased licenses for MS Office, and MS Office files dont really need ongoing maintenance. Yes i agree, platform independent access is an added benefit. But practically speaking, we dont often encounter a situation where we want to open and work an MS Office file remotely (which we do through HyperOffice), but cannot, because the local system doesnt have MS Office installed (even on Mac devices) . In fact, even on mobile phones like iPhone and BlackBerry we can view the documents, if not edit them.

[sparestore]

Am I missing something here ? I have been using the open source FCKEditor for years now in rich text fields on the web, it has many more functions then either Google or this joke, 80% already there and the rest are simple to add as it is open source

Why they cant make something as decent I do not know