Tag: Word

Online Wordprocessing

TechCrunch » Blog Archive » Writely - Process Words with your Browser

Imagine Word, but as an ajax browser application that was free. And allowed tagging of documents. And you could set reader permissions for each document you create and allow others to edit the document, or just read it. That’s what Writely is.

I have been thinking about this a lot recently.  I have found myself using my web browser to do everything in my computing life and expect more and more.  I use Google Calendar, Google Talk, Gmail, Writely and Google Spreadsheet for my day to day activities.  Even this blog post is being doing from a Firefox web browser extension (Peformancing).  I find this allows me to use whatever computing platform is available (OS X, Windows, Linux) to get my work done.  How soon before I not longer need the use of a desktop app?  What does this mean for rich client applications like Word and Excel?  I never did need all the functionality of Word or Excel.

powered by performancing firefox

Web 2.0 again

After discovering the ITRedux web site I decided to try out a few of the apps recommended on the site. I liked iRows and was quite impressed with it especially when I found out it could handle chart and graphs! The features are fairly basic but useable. One problem for me was when I imported Excel work books with multiple sheets and graphs. iRows chose to break the worksheets out into multiple workbooks and I lost the linkage between the sheets. I have not fully tested Zohosheet.

I had already tested Writely, which I like a lot, so I tested Zohowriter. I had no problem importing existing Word documents but I feel that Writely does a better job of emulating a real word processor.

I also tested Thumbtack, an online presentation system. There is no current ability to import Powerpoint slides. Slides must be created from scratch and there is not way to include graphs from a spreadsheet although one can import images.

I look forward to using these tools on a daily basis and see what works and what does not.