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Friday, January 06, 2006
Getting started with Writely
Continuing the discussion on Web 2.0 services, I'm giving Writely a quick spin.
A couple things to note: First, I'm looking at Writely from the perspective of someone who regularly uses and is proficient with a word processor. In my case, WordPerfect. Not as a blogger. Not as a collaborator. Not as someone who publishes documents on the web. Second, Writely is still in beta. So, presumably, there are a lot more features in the pipeline.
After completing the sign-up process, I clicked "new" at the top of the screen. Writely presents you with a small pop-up window with a field to name the document. If desired, collaborators can be added at this point. If you use a pop-up blocker, some browser adjustments will have to be made.
After naming the document, a new window opens with a blank editing screen. Looks good. The edit interface looks much like a word processing interface. There are buttons for save and print, font and size, bold, center, and a few more. Writely also has a built-in spell checker.
This is probably a good time to mention that there are document size limitations. According to the help page, each document "can be up to 500K in length; each embedded image can be up to 2 megabytes...."
Instead of typing a document from scratch, or uploading an existing document, I simply pasted in a document from my clipboard. I added some basic formatting, for bold, center, and justification.
I wanted to change the margins, but as yet, Writely doesn't offer this. I selected a couple paragraphs and tried "increase indent." But, it only indented the selected text on the left side.
I quickly discovered that printing directly from Writely isn't an option. What you get is the entire web page as an HTML document, and not just the word processing document. This is a browser issue. Hopefully, Writely will add the ability to print documents directly from the interface in the future.
Obviously, the easy solution is to download the document to the computer and print from there. There is an action to save as PDF, but, it appears to cost money. I chose to save the document as "RTF." Instead of opening in MS Word, I was able to open it directly in WordPerfect and printed from there. Perfect!
Again, I must emphasize that Writely is still in beta at this point. However, it holds a lot of promise for the future of online word processing. I wonder what Corel is doing, if anything, towards this end. It should be quite interesting. And, definitely worth keeping up with.
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