Zoho Writer Rocks!

I wrote this in Zoho writer. Yep, this stuff that you're reading right now. One of the coolest features of the Zoho Writer web service is the ability to publish documents to blogs. Just take your time, write your stuff, edit and update to your heart's content and when you're happy with it publish directly to your blog! Blogger, Wordpress and a couple other services have built-in support and you can add more as required.

Beyond blogging, Zoho Writer is by far the best online word processor around. Google's Writely comes in close, but falls short of the speed and ease of organizing content that Zoho provides. The tabbed left pane lists all your private & shared documents, templates and even deleted documents. The best part about this though, is the ability to create smart tabs by adding certain tags to the left pane. As you assign these tags to documents, they automatically start appearing in those lists. An outstanding use of the tagging concept over the traditional hierarchical folder structure.

The editor doesn't leave much to be expected and has all the basic features you would want in a word processor. Adding a table can be slightly tricky, but is not so much of a pain once you get used to it. The ability to decide what buttons you want on the control bar is a big bonus. The auto-save works brilliantly, eliminating the worry of losing out on an hour's work because you lost power or your internet connection without manually saving.

Beyond everything else the area where Zoho Writer shines most though, is in what you can do with the documents you write. Along with the usual PDF publishing, there is support for exporting files to MS Word DOC & OpenOffice SXW formats. You can make your document public for everyone on Zoho to view or publish it to your blog as I mentioned earlier. Or, you could just email a copy of it as inline text or as attachments (in DOC, SXW, PDF or HTML formats).

In conclusion, Zoho Writer rocks! It provides the best online document creation and management experience out there, and does it well. That it has a few siblings spreading similar goodwill in other domains is just the icing on the cake.