Whenever anyone talks about Office suites such as Microsoft Office, Openoffice, or Apple iWorks the first thing we think of is the Word Processor, a spreadsheet like Excel, or an email client such as Microsoft’s Outlook.
Since moving to Zoho the first tool that was used is the Word Processor. Zoho’s word processor is called Writer which offers all of the tools that the average user might need; such as mail merges, lists, basic formatting of font, and font size, and Writer is also able to export your files to formats like PDF, DOCX, DOC, ODF, RTF, TXT, HTML.
What about your existing documents? So far Zoho has handled the import of my Word DOCX files without a problem.
One great feature is the ability to share your documents with the other users in your organization or the ability to let the world have access via a URL.
Another great feature is the ability to open up documents and work on them from wherever you might be at the time and no longer having to worry if you’re on a Windows, Linux, or OSX computer, because the documents are edited and viewed in the web browser, and testing shows that Zoho’s business tools run fine in Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera, and Safari.
But with all the good that comes along with this product there are a few issues. Printing for one has been somewhat of a challenge; it seems that printing from different web browsers can give different results, and a clunky way of working around this issue is to export the file to the desktop as a PDF file and then printing. Way to many steps to print, and hopefully that will be addressed in future versions.
One other issue occurred while using Safari as the web browser running on Apple OSX where everything seemed to lock up whenever we tried to paste text into Writer from another source, such as another web page or a text document, which produced an error that stated the file, could not be saved. To break out of the error we had to exit Safari, restart the Safari web browser, log back into Zoho, where it was discovered that all of the last updates to the document were gone, even though the Zoho FAQ page claims that there is an auto save feature in Writer to prevent data loss, but in this instance it did not work. Not much fun there and it only happened once so maybe it was a fluke, because this article was completed on my new Mac. Interesting that on the FAQ page that Apple’s Safari web browser is not listed as a supported browser.
In the next article MLD Services looks at Zoho Writer in more detail.
