Writely is quite all right

Stan Beer
Monday, 21 August 2006 21:45

Your IT - Home IT

Last week, I started using Google's online wordprocessor Writely, which recently became available once again to beta users. So far, I'm finding it difficult to think of a reason why I wouldn't want to use this product wherever an online connection is available.

There is no question that when it comes to range of features Microsoft Word or even the Open Office.org wordprocessor is better. They have a larger range of fonts, more options for setting up your page and so on.

However, for the 90% of us - the journalists, letter writers, home users and even casual business users - Writely does the job we need it to do.

The Writely user interface is simple. It has all the necessary features that most of us use in a wordprocessor, including a good range of fonts, spell checker, an undo and redo function, cut and paste, bullets, numbering, tables and so on. You can set background and text colors.

Most of us are lazy and forget to save our work regularly - or at least I am. Writely takes that into account, saving your work continually every  30 seconds or so. It also allows you to save and open the document you're working on to disk in Word, OpenOffice, Rich Text Format and PDF.

Writely also provides the sort of responsiveness that one would expect from a desktop product on a reasonably good internet connection.

A few of the added features that look interesting are the collaboration function, which allows users to invite others to work on the same document in real time and an automatic blog poster.

It's now more than a week that I've been using this beta product and I've yet to find a reason not to continue using it. Of course without a net connection it's useless. Then again, I do 99% of my wtriting while I'm on the net.