Zoho writer

Zoho Writer introduces MenuTab -- a refreshing, elegant and intuitive toolbar with menu items neatly grouped in context based tabs. The simplified toolbar makes the end-users task that much easier in creating and formatting documents. Users also have the flexibility of navigating around any of the tab features with a single click of a mouse.

The menu items in the toolbar are arranged under different tabs based on the actions they perform. The tabs are:

1. Format Tab

Create documents on the fly using our WYSIWYG friendly editor and format the text contents as you like it with the options available under "Format Tab".

You can:

• Choose from the list of font faces (Verdana, Arial, Times New Roman etc) and apply varied font sizes too.
• Create headings for document titles and paragraphs.
• Make your text bold, italic, strike through and underline.
• Add subscripts(X₂) and superscripts(X²) to your document content.
• Highlight text using colors, fonts and styles.
• Align text as Left, Right, Center and Justified.
• Format text with bullets, numbering, indents

Alternatively, you can also make use of the following shortcut keys.

2. MenuTab – Dropdown Menu in the Tab

Each tab in the toolbar comes with a drop down arrow that lists the features in the form of pull-down menu. Browse through the features and apply them to your document at the same time, using the pull-down menu, without having to navigate away from the existing highlighted tab

3. Insert Tab

The insert tab, as the names suggests, provides for a list of tools that helps in creating a polished document. You can add images, tables, link to a web page, use cool smileys and do much more. Here's a comprehensive list of menu items in the "Insert" tab:

• Insert/Modify Image - Spice up your document by adding pictures/graphics.
• Table - Add tables with specified rows and columns. Modify them according to your liking using "Table Properties" option.
• Table of Contents - Create a table of contents based on the heading levels and insert them in any section of the document.
• Links/Anchors - Link text to external sites or other pages within your document. Add anchors to navigate to a particular section of your document.
• Horizontal Rule - Insert a horizontal line between sections of your document and make it easily readable.
• Page Break - Define the length of your pages. User the page break option to manually insert page breaks anywhere in your documents.
• Special Characters - Add symbols and form equations out of them, using insert special characters button.
• Equation Editor - This comes very handy for writing mathematical stuff. Students, scientists, engineers can use the equation editor for writing scientific documents involving lots of equations.
• Insert HTML - Add HTML code snippets and embed your favorite multimedia contents like videos, audios, public presentations from external sites.
• Insert Style Sheet - Lets you apply custom CSS to your document. Enter the url of the  stylesheet on the web. The style/css defined in the web url will take effect on the particular document in which it is inserted.
• Endnote/Footnote - Add references to sections in your document at the bottom of each page or at the end of the document using endnote & footnotes. Academicians & scholars find this feature very useful.
• Add Comments/Emoticons - Add contextual comments to document texts and allow others to discuss on them. Use cool emoticons too.

4. Review Tab

Once you are done with editing the document, you can make use of the tools available under review tab to re-assess the document further and check for any misspelt words or look up for synonyms.

You can:

• Spell Check your document in more than 75 languages.
• Find and Replace - Select a word or phrase in a document and replace it with something else.
• Thesaurus - Use the thesaurus as a lookup tool to view the synonyms and related words.
• History - Lists all the versions of a document. Compare any two versions of the document and find the difference between them.

5. Share Tab

Get the real benefits of working online. Share and collaborate on documents both in person and group, post them to blogs, publish them within organization or to external world. What's more, you can digitally sign your documents and email them to others, all from within Zoho Writer. Here's a list of tools under Share Tab:

• Share - Invite others to work on your documents by sharing them with individuals as well as groups.
• Publish - Make the document public and allow others to access them via a web url. A public document can be made available for viewing within an organization or the whole world.
• Post to Blog - Make use of Zoho Writer's feature rich WYSIWYG editor for publishing your documents to blog.
• Doc Roll - Use the doc roll feature for listing all your public documents to your website or blog.
• Email In / Email Out - Use the email in feature for receiving documents directly to your Zoho Writer account. Email out helps you to send Zoho Writer documents to any of your contacts' email address in various formats.
• DigiSign - Draft your contracts, NDAs, sales proposals etc in Zoho Writer and send it for your business partners' approval/digital signing with EchoSign.

6. Views Tab

Users can now avail 4 different kind of views for their document in Zoho Writer. They are:

• Normal View - Get to view more of the document in this mode. Normal view maximizes the space available for reading and editing the document.
• Page View - View the document as you would like to see it on the printed page.
• HTML Code View - All Writer documents are HTML documents. View the properly indented HTML content of the document by clicking on this button.
• Print Preview - View your documents page-wise and in print format using this button. There's a recommended print as pdf option too.

7. Page Setup Tab

Add headers/footers, define page layout, adjust line height and do much more with the tools available under Page Setup tab. Here's more:

• Headers/Footers - Define your headers/footers for a document in 1, 2 or 3 column format. Add auto-fil fields - page number, page count, author name, current date directly from the toolbar.
• Page Layout - Specify different page sizes for your document -- A4, Letter, Legal & Executive. Print them in portrait as well as landscape orientation mode.
• Line Height - Set the distance between lines inside your document. Choose from among the options - single, 1.5 and double lines.
• Page Setup - Set default font face, size, background color, paper margins & language direction (RTL/LTR) for all the subsequent new documents in Zoho Writer.

Evaluation:

Zoho writer is similar in many ways to Microsoft office with the advantage of creating the documents online which gives users the flexibility of accessing the information from anywhere and gives them the ability to share and collaborate with many other users, like the ability to post on to your blog. Unlike Microsoft office, Zoho is completely free. Zoho also was an easy application to learn and navigate, sometime you feel frustrated if the internet connection is very slow or down. I was able to import other files with different formats to Zoho.  The other feature that I really liked is that Zoho offers new tab format like the newer version Microsoft word but at the same time it kept the traditional drop down menu on the toolbar. Also theset up page tab allow you to make changes without highlighting the text, you can review the page from the same menu and re-change again. The things that I did not like about Zoho were it took a long time inserting images to the document. The lack of advanced editing features that Microsoft office has ware also missing in Zoho.

link : zohowriter.com