Again, a surprising number of entries. A few hours of looking around turns up ajaxWrite, Google’s Writely, RallyPoint, ThinkFree,
Writeboard, and Zoho Writer. I probably missed a couple. Right off the bat, though, Rallypoint and Writeboard are out. The
former just announced they’re closing their project, and the latter is a Windows Notepad competitor, not a Microsoft Word
contender.
ajaxWrite is cool, it loads super-fast, and simply turns your Firefox window into a word processing toolbar and screen. A
little austere, but most of the tools you’d expect from a Web word processor are there. Google Writely looks extremely friendly
and has a Word 97-ish look and feel. Zoho Writer is similar to Writely in that respect but has one feature I didn’t find anywhere
else: spell check. Hey, I’m an English major, but I’m also post-40 and the memory is going. Every safeguard helps.
Other than that, Google Writely and Zoho Writer are practically feature clones of each other -- a good list of fonts (although
nothing like Word), the ability to create styles and templates, cut and paste from your desktop, import Word and OpenOffice
doc formats, print previews -- all the basics. In addition, both offer integrated sharing, in which you can e-mail invitees
to take a look at or modify your documents from a shared storage repository. And both offer direct blogging tools, where you
can create your blog posts with these slightly richer tools, rather than more Spartan text toolkits you get from Blogger or
WordPress.
Bottom line: Aside from the sharing, HTML conversion, and blogging tools, it’s like working in Word 97 or 98 — right down
to the flakiness (little things, such as trying to create columns by tabbing across a page, always one or two spaces of difference
between a tab point on one line and a tab point on another). In fact, tab guidelines at the top of the doc, like what Word
has, is something all these tools could use. Surprising, how much you miss those.
Importing my existing docs went great, until I had to import our small company’s business plan for some revisions. That meant
nonstandard margins, different style headings, and loads of tables. Surprisingly, Zoho handled the tables just fine, but lost
out on the margins and styles a bit. Tried it in Writely just for fun with a similar result.
I could have worked around that, but the real problem was when I made the modifications and saved the document back into Word
format. Opening the doc again upstairs on my Word-equipped PC showed a few things that didn’t come out the way I wanted. That’s
a real problem. If your clients, partners, cell mates, or whatever can’t open your Word documents and see the same thing you
saw in Zoho, it may still get the message across, but it just doesn’t look professional. When that doc got zapped back to
me by my partner, it was a Johnny Walker moment.
Wednesday: Spreadsheets
I hate spreadsheets. In our company, I’m the face guy, the talker, and the writer. My partner does the spreadsheets. I tried
to enlist him for this piece, but he threw a stapler at my head, so I stopped asking. Instead, I pulled out my invoicing history
spreadsheet -- the one I avoid like the Black Plague -- and determined to update the sucker.
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