The Hindu Business Line : Writing on the go!

You can create documents from scratch in Writely, or you can upload and download documents in popular formats such as Word, OpenOffice, RTF or HTML and edit them online. You can also e-mail your documents to your Writely account to store them and edit them later

Chennai , Aug. 18

For those of you who travel a lot but find that carrying a laptop at all times is a difficult proposition, there is a solution with Writely, an online word processing service acquired by Google in March and released as a public beta on Thursday.

Writely allows you to do a lot of things, which you commonly do with your word processing software, like create and edit documents and formatting them for ease of use.

The highlights are that it is available online and you can store all the documents online, collaborate with others on different documents, and also publish them as Web pages, documents or blog posts.

Signing up, signing in and creating new documents are a breeze, though the user interface could have been more intuitively designed in the Google mould.

You can create documents from scratch in Writely, or you can upload documents in popular formats such as Word, OpenOffice, RTF or HTML and edit them online.

You can also e-mail your documents to your Writely account to store them and edit them later. And finally, you can download the documents in various formats such as Word, OpenOffice, RTF, HTML and PDF.

The service backs up your documents frequently so that you will not be caught unawares by a power or Internet connection failure.

You can share documents individually with specific sets of people and you can collaborate in real-time.

In case of a collision between two of you while editing a document, one of you will get a message asking you to fix it.

There is a useful revision history feature which will let you know who made what changes and when, you can compare the changes made between two versions, and you can roll-back changes as you like. All versions will be retained, so if you would suddenly like to go with a newer version, you can.

Writely works with Internet Explorer, Firefox and Mozilla in Windows and Mac, but needs cookies and javascript enabled in the browser to function properly.

It offers free and unlimited storage but has a cap of 500k per file.

Although Google calendar and spreadsheets already exist, Writely is not integrated with them at this point in time, though it offers blog posting through Google Blogger and some other blogging services.

Google would have a complete online office suite if it can integrate its existing office services in a more easy-to-play-with fashion and throw in an online presentation program like S5 or Thumbstacks into the bargain.