Thursday, August 31, 2006
I, Writely
byI missed my chance at climbing aboard the Writely bandwagon prior to its purchase by Google and subsequent lock down on new accounts. This was mainly due to the fact that, for all practical purposes, I have no real use for a word processor, so I wasn’t too interested. When Writely opened for new accounts last week, I figured I should take a look as I had only heard good things about it. I have to say, Writely didn’t fail to impress.
While my writing consists mostly of email, blog entries and coding, I do have Microsoft Office installed and from time to time do use it for short documents or to work on documents with co-workers. Of the thousands of features available, I mainly use the bold, bullet point list, indent and, well, not much else to tell you the truth. I’m not sure who uses all that other stuff they have in there, but whoever that is...more power to them. In fact, most people I know claim to have absolutely no control over Word, and using it makes them cringe.
Writely was a dream to use and worked just as smoothly as any desktop word processors I’ve used. Sure, they have more features than I will probably need, but some people actually underline words, change font colors or any of the other 10-15 features available. There are two features that I found very useful, tagging and posting directly to a blog.
Tagging works just as it would on any other site, you can add as many tags to your document that you want in order to help classify it and store it. Want to find everything you’ve written for work? Select ‘work’ from your tag menu and there are all of your documents that have been tagged as ‘work’. Posting to your blog is a nice feature, I would think, if you’re a writer who also blogs, allowing you to keep all your written work in one central location. The way it is now, you might have all your blog postings stored at your blog while some articles you’ve written for magazines and your screenplay are in your documents folder. If you’re worried about being able to share your work with others because they use Word, don’t be. Writely provides numerous formats to export your work, including the popular Word format as well as HTML and PDF.
I almost forgot to mention what made Writely exciting in the first place, its collaborative document sharing. Any document you create can be shared with anybody you choose, you can even publish it for everybody to see. When sharing a document, you can choose to let people view it only or give them the ability to make changes. Rather than emailing a copy of your Word file around and hoping you’re always editing the latest version, you can let Writely manage that and never worry that you’re editing the wrong revision of a document.
Even though I don’t require the formatting features of a word processor too often, I think I’ll be removing Word from my PowerBook and relying on Writely from now on.
