One Step Closer to Ditching MS Office for Zoho

Zoho today released new functionality for their nice online word processor at writer.zoho.com that allows for reading your zoho documents offline using Google Gears.

Seriously, I don't think the Zoho developers ever sleep, considering how quickly they crank out new features and apps. Right now you can only read your documents in offline mode, in a stripped-down browser interface that doesn't have any editing options. But Zoho says it plans to add offline editing in a few weeks (and until then, if you have Microsoft Word, you can use Zoho's plugin for MS Office to edit docs while offline).





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Zoho says the new offline feature works for PCs and Macs, and I tried it on both Windows XP and Vista. To use it, start up Zoho Writer and open any document. Then click on the new 'Go Offline' link at the top of the page.

The first time you click the link, you'll be prompted to install the Google Gears beta and then restart your browser. It's a very fast install.

From then on, when you click the Go Offline link, you'll see a pop-up progress meter as the site downloads your most recent documents. The default is the last 15 documents as listed in your current Sort selection, but you can choose to download between 0 and 25 documents listed in either My Docs or Shared Docs by clicking the arrow next to the link to bring up the offline settings.





After a download, you'll see a new interface for http://writer.zoho.com/offline. It's a stripped-down version of the regular Zoho window, without editing buttons. You can click on document names and the links for Go Online, Feedback and the Zoho Writer home, but that's it.

Any time after a download, you can head back to http://writer.zoho.com/offline, whether you're offline or online, and view your docs. I was able to keep the regular online interface open right next to the offline interface without any trouble. If you change any documents online, you won't see those changes in the offline interface until you next click Go Offline to re-download the docs. You don't have to first click the Go Online link in the offline interface.

When I turned off my laptop's wireless connection, I was still able to bring up the offline page without any trouble, even after turning my browser off and on.

If the planned offline editing feature works as smoothly, then Zoho just needs one more thing to become a serious all-around word processor challenger: folders. You can currently tag documents and then choose to view all documents with a particular tag as a folder, but for me that's no substitute for the usual nested folders that help me make sense of the many documents I create.

In addition to the no-connection-needed reading, Zoho also snuck in a new feature to add comments to documents. If you click a new speech-bubble icon button or right-click and choose Add Comment, you're supposed to see a comment icon appear in the document itself. But the feature doesn't seem to be working correctly for me, since I don't see any comment bubbles in my document.

Comments aside, I'm impressed with both Zoho and Google here, and I'd sure like to see this offline trend continue. If you're interested in what else Google Gears may enable, my colleague Eric Dahl has written about it, as has our editor-in-chief Harry McCracken.

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