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Zoho Writer: Here, There and Everywhere
March 12, 2007

As your students and library users begin upgrading to Microsoft Vista and Office 2007, are you prepared to deal with the completely incompatible file types? Or maybe your school has a policy that restricts the use of external drives or e-mail and students are constantly struggling to move work back and forth between school and home? Do any of your students head to a library, after-school care program, or some other place before they make it home? Any of these would be reason enough to take a look at Zoho Writer, an online word processor available from Zoho as part of their online office suite.

While the idea of an online word processor is pretty cool on its own, Zoho Writer provides much more than just a website where you can type. Compatibility with Microsoft Word allows Zoho Writer to import and export in the .doc format to maintain continuity in your documents. Even more important for this discussion, however, is the ease of use that Zoho's interface offers. For anyone familiar with an offline word processor, most of the menu items and toolbar buttons will be found in the expected locations. The application easily handles tables, bullets, and basic fonts and formatting; about the only thing it doesn't offer is mail merge. It does, however, support version histories, spell check, and word count. If you or students are working on a collaborative project, documents can be shared as read only or read/write.

So instead of simply moving a document back and forth on an external drive (or worse, via e-mail) why not try uploading it to Zoho Writer and having full access from any computer that can access the Internet? Setting up an account is very easy - go to http://writer.zoho.com and fill in a username and your e-mail address. As with most of the sites that will be reviewed here, I have been a long time user of this site and have not had any spam problems. In fact, this has become one of my top web applications. It certainly isn't an accident that a Zoho product was the first product discussed on this new blog!

How might you use an online word processor? What benefits or problems could you see from this?

Posted by Chris Harris on March 12, 2007 | Comments (0)