Writely: An Online Word Processor

Posted by Andy Atkinson on 1/31/2006

Writely (writely.com) is an online word processor that works like Microsoft Word. Since it is online, you can avoid a lot of the hassle associated with collaborative document editing that you may have encountered with a standalone word processor. Writely supports exporting and importing of Microsoft Word, RTF, and OpenOffice formats. From your account page, you can export multiple documents as a ZIP file, useful for example, in a situation where you are writing documentation for a product that is spread across many documents. You can also export as a PDF file for a fee, a feature added late last year. The import/export functionality works well should you decide to import a Word document, or if you decide to work on a document with Writely then take your document offline.

Writely.com logo

Writely has all of the basic features of a word processor that I have needed: spell check, text styling and sizing, line spacing control, multiple fonts, and more. Grammar check is not currently available, but is likely a feature that will be added before the product comes out of beta. I think spellcheck and grammar check have a chance to become much more useful than the comparitively static offering of a standalone application, since the entire user community can "Add to dictionary" or improve the grammar editing ability. Hopefully Writely and other tools reach the critical mass to make this possible.

I've been testing Writely with other users as a collaborative authoring tool for a university class of mine, and have found it to be quite useful. Microsoft Word supports "Track Changes" functionality, but this still requires moving a single document around by email or other means, where Writely can track changes and more, from just one document instance that can be shared with arbitrary contributors. Writely also supports version control to some extent, which allows you to view two versions of the same document. Previous changes, such as the addition or subtraction of a paragraph, will be highlighted or shown with strike through text, which makes it very easy to see what changes other authors have made.

Setting up collaboration was very simple. The original document author supplies the email addresses of the people he or she wants to invite to collaborate. The invitees receive an email informing them to sign-up for an account so that they can begin editing the document. Once they do, each author is able to see a "Legend" that shows which color corresponds to each author of the document. This way you can view your document with different highlighted sections and strikethrough text showing the contribution of each author.

Since the application is a web application, there is a lot of support for HTML elements, such as blockquotes, links, and tables. Writely also has a "Tag" menu option that lets you create tags for sections of your document, or tags that can be applied to the whole document itself. If you have many documents associated with your account, you can quickly supply tags for your documents to give them some metadata, making them easy to organize, browse, and share, should you decide to mark your documents as public. A note on browser compatibility: much of the functionality of Writely depends on how the JavaScript, HTML, CSS, and other code interacts with the web browser, so not surprisingly, Writely supports a number of the free, interoperable browsers, namely the Mozilla family of browsers. Safari on OS X is not currently supported. Safari support is likely on the way, but in the meantime, just use Firefox on your systems where you will use Writely.

Writely supports Mozilla browsers

Writely also supports bookmarks, which are not web bookmarks, but instead are bookmarks that can be placed into the documents themselves. This can be helpful if your document is quite large. Writely also supports keyboard shortcuts. On a PC you can use "Ctrl + S" to save, or formatting shortcuts like "Ctrl + B" or "Ctrl + I" for bold and italicized text, giving Writely a desktop application "feel." Writely also generates an email address for you that you can use to "E-mail in" documents to your account. For the latest on Writely features and updates, check their blog.

Writely supports bookmarks within your documents

Security is also a major issue, since you may consider working on a sensitive document. Writely touts their layered security model, but I couldn't find a more technical explanation of how they are handling secure document access. They do mention that search engine spiders will not crawl your documents, so they cannot be found on search engines like Google. If you make your document public however, or link to it from another web page, your document could get indexed and become searchable.

If you subscribe to the RSS feed of your document (a cool feature) however, your RSS feed could be indexed with by a service like Bloglines, meaning your document could be discovered by other users (assuming your document has been marked as public). Writely has disabled RSS feed generation and subscription for private documents to address this concern. This Writely help page has more information on RSS security.

Lots of revisions!

View many revisions of your document

A major feature of Writely is that it supports at least 15 revisions of your document, as indicated in the screenshot below. The changes might be major or minor, but having document version browsing available means you can reincorporate a section that you might have removed several versions ago, and can avoid saving off several versions of the same document manually. You can also use the "Compare two revisions" tool, to clearly show where changes between the versions are, through use of highlighting and strikethrough text styling.

Compare two revisions

Communication with the developers

I sent in a feature suggestion via the "report a bug" form, and got an immediate response. I've posted the thread below. My original message:

These aren't bugs, but suggestions. Is there a print preview? So far all I can do is open in Word to get a print preview, (to see how many pages my document is)...it would be nice to get one from within Writely as a pop-up window. How about making changes to the CSS so that spellcheck shows highlighted words like Gmail instead of underlined words? I find the underlined red words to be difficult to spot some times, where the highlighted words pop out much more. Amazing product, still conducting tests!

Response from a Writely representative:

Here's the workaround for print preview: 1) Select "View for printing" from the Edit drop-down menu 2) Do a print preview of that page from within your browser. Thanks also for the highlighting vs. red underline suggestion! Cheers, jen.

My follow-up with the Writely rep.:

Wow, impressive feedback response. I really like this product, now that I am working collaboratively with other students for a software engineering design paper (appropriate huh?). Another thing I wondered about was "shared dictionaries" --either with the entire Writely community, or among collaborators on a specific document. I find myself exporting the custom.dictionary file or whatever it is called from Word so that every time I hit "Add to dictionary", the additions move with me on future installations of MS Office. The ability to centralize this in a database among many Writely users, or a specific document, would be *very* nice. Dictionary suggestions would *really* improve over time, as the community would be doing most of the leg work of adding to the dictionary. Not sure if that has been addressed already or is slotted for a future release. Thanks for the response!

Finally, another response from Writely...

That's a really cool idea!! I'll make sure that one's on our list.

This is clearly a dynamic and accessible development team, which makes it even more fun to use and review, since they seem to be actively seeking suggestions and criticisms.

Writely is certainly poised to gain first-movers advantage by creating a competitive online word processor to Microsoft Word. Many people will be interested in researching alternatives to the expensive and large (and often overkill) word processor Microsoft Word, and many non-profit or school organizations could certainly take advantage of a free word processor, without the installation and maintenance of a standalone application, even a free one like OpenOffice. Writely has some competition in Zoho Writer, another product that is receiving some buzz. Despite the ability of these applications to replace Microsoft Word, the venerable columnist John C. Dvorak thinks Microsoft need not worry:

The point at which Microsoft would get worried is when users say, "If the Net goes down, or there is a problem with my connection, I can then go back to using Word." When Microsoft people hear that, that's when they should get worried. The only application that has achieved that kind of status is e-mail where you can say, "Well, if my e-mail stops working, I can always use the Post Office."

The gist is that the Internet is not very reliable, and this young product has yet to prove itself and its performance when thousands of users are using it concurrently.

Writely plans to release its product from the Beta state when enough users vote that they feel it is of sufficient quality to be "released." One has to assume there is a small rip on Google in their "Vote..." window (seen below), a company that leaves many of its products in a very long beta. This is a refreshing way to give the users control of when an application is ready for primetime.

Try out Writely and vote on whether it should be released from beta

Writely allows you to focus on the content you are creating, not the application that is facilitating the content creation. After all, it doesn't matter what tool you use to get the job done as long as it's done. If you are moving between Windows, OS X, and Linux as I am, you will really appreciate the fact that you don't have word processing software to install and maintain on different machines and in different environments.

About the author(s)

Andy Atkinson works as a software developer in the Minneapolis area, with experience in desktop and web application development, and interest in iPhone and Android platforms. He has also been a hardware geek since he built his first computer. He runs Windows, OS X, and Linux, and is always working on getting more comfortable on the command line.

He founded Pain in the Tech in 2005 as a way to share tips and tutorials with friends and family, and evangelize great products and services to its growing readership. Site content has always been varied, so adding multiple contributors was a natural fit. By 2008, Pain in the Tech had 7 contributors. Site ownership was transitioned to Matt Thommes in 2008.

Comments

Note: Comments may be viewed by authors, but if you have a more specific question you'd like to ask them, please email andyatkinson@gmail.com.

# at 2/2/2006 11:12 am cst

I came here after reading your comment posted in the Writely Blog; i'd like to contribute translating your review; it would help me introducing prospective italian speaking collaborators to Writely; i would suggest using Writely for such purpose, as an example of bilingual document revision activity, which i'm presently "prodding" and reporting about in the Writely Forum. - luigi

# Andy Atkinson at 2/16/2006 8:25 am cst

That would be great. Feel free to add a link or trackback to this article once your translation is complete. I can translate this article to Spanish (Castellano) if that would help your multilingual effort.

# luigi bertuzzi at 2/20/2006 12:21 am cst

I have started and published a Writely document with an "in progress" italian translation of your review; i'll be trying to use it as part of a "Learning the how-and-what of Collaborative Editing" experiment ... which (in my plans) aims to start some kind of multilingual environment; your proposed catalan version would fit in very nicely .. if the work ahead turns out to be manageable .. .. which i'm very doubtful about ... Wishful thinkers never die ;)

# at 3/9/2006 2:40 pm cst

Effective today, Google acquires Writely. Hopefully it is for the better.

# Anonymous at 3/15/2006 1:56 am cst

Andy, my Writely document (linked as the homepage of the Anonymous posting this comment) is almost finished. I have been scattering "Translator's notes" around .. for the non-English/technical reader. This comment replaces two earlier comments of mine which were wiped off by the problems you reported off-line. My translation of your article is presented as part of a "stub" idea, which requires exploring the potential of "collaborative editing" before it can be expanded by a mixed group of characters, rather than by "just an individual". Ciao - luigi

# Luigi Bertuzzi at 3/18/2006 11:31 pm cst

An interesting thread on the Writely Forum... imho - luigi

# Andy Atkinson at 3/24/2006 8:32 am cst

Another very interesting looking application is ajaxwrite.com. Their website has been getting hit with a lot of traffic, but take a minute (that's all you need!) to check this app out when you get a chance. Here's what I like:

  • very similar look and feel (lawsuit?) to MS Word
  • no registration is needed to use it
  • very lightweight (400KB)

The website and logo design could be improved and they are only supporting Firefox for reasons obvious to any web developer, but this application has a lot of potential, maybe more so than Writely, Zoho Writer, or Writeboard.

# Luigi Bertuzzi at 4/1/2006 12:43 am cst

As you say in your Writely Review:

Writely allows you to focus on the content you are creating, not the application that is facilitating the content creation. After all, it doesn’t matter what tool you use to get the job done as long as it’s done.

To me, this means one should use - if a specific collaborative test bed is not available - a general purpose collaborative test environment ... in order to allow an appreciation of which application is best suited for a collaborative task.

In addition to comparing existing tools, like Zoho Writer or ajaxwrite.com, any other new tool could be promptly tested; see for instance what i have been experiencing when i tried to use Writely with Gabbly chat

I look forward to seeing some progress in the area of developing what i call "a general purpose collaborative test environment" ... or i'll be wasting my time testing individually any new app which pops up.

# Andy Atkinson at 4/11/2006 8:54 pm cst

Can you explain this collaborative test environment idea a little more? Are you suggesting that an organization setup a public server running instances of popular web applications, or that an organization keep a running evaluation matrix of which applications are best suited to which task, or something else? Please explain.

# Luigi Bertuzzi at 4/20/2006 10:19 pm cst

A GP (General Purpose) test environment (GPTE ?) might be useful for situations where an organization does not exist, yet; BUT - if the situation may attract other people and if this getting together reaches a critical mass - an organization could stem from such circumstance; i.e.: situation + collaborative editing tools mix and match + interested people ..... At this time the above is the best - however awful - wording i may propose to explain what i have been asked by Andy; hope i can come back soon with a better explanation.

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