Instructify

BY BILL FERRIS

A lot of schools and families shell out big money to Microsoft every year for MS Word. It’s my word processor of choice, but I’ve been lucky in that it came pre-installed on my computer. If I had to actually find a word processor on my own, I’d face a real dilemma: on one hand, I’ve gotten really used to Word’s format, as well as the level of formatting I can do on documents. On the other hand, I’m a cheapskate.

Longtime Instructify readers know there are a bevy of free and web-based word processors out there. Only a few of them, however, are powerful enough that I wouldn’t miss Word. I dare say that Zoho Writer is one of those few.

Zoho Writer is a free web-based word processor in the same vein as Google Docs. Longtime readers also know me as something of a Google shill, but Zoho Writer is, without a doubt, a much better word processor than Google Docs in every way.

Nifty Features

The best thing about Zoho Writer is that it works like you expect a word processor to work, rather than like an app you put up with because it’s free. Unlike Google Docs, you can very easily adjust the document layout. You’re finally free to adjust the margins, change the layout from portrait to landscape, switch to legal-sized paper, and make lots of other tweaks that you can’t make in a lot of other free writing tools. My favorite, you can adjust the line spacing, which is for some reason a hard-to-come-by feature in free word processors. Grading or editing student writing is exponentially easier if they double-space the text.

Speaking of grading, if you’re grading assignments in Zoho Writer, you’ll love the contextual comments. Much like the comments in Word 2007, you can select some text and enter a comment on it. Simple, fast, effective.

Zoho Writer also allows you to post documents directly to your blog. If you’re giving a blogging assignment, consider letting students compose their entry in Zoho Writer first to take advantage of the formatting tools and, most importantly, spell check.

Sharing and Collaboration

Like most cloud-based writing programs, Zoho Writer allows document sharing and collaboration. The functionality works much like Google Docs in that you send invitations to the folks you want to share in the fun of your particular writing project.

Import/Export

If there’s one area Zoho Writer doesn’t excel at, it’s how it plays with other word processors (to be fair, most word processors I’ve worked with have a few hiccups when reading files from another program). Zoho Writer can read Word and OpenOffice files, but gives you a few font and spacing headaches for your trouble. You can import files from Google Docs, too. However, Zoho Writer says you must “Import either zip exported from Google Docs or zip containing HTML (and corresponding image) files.” That’s basically a long way of saying, “Just copy and paste it into the document.”

Exporting files works a little better, though. Zoho Writer exports flawlessly to PDF. It can also export to Word’s DOC and DOCX formats, kinda — the resulting file looks a little wonky, but it’s salvageable. Zoho Writer claims it can export to RTF, but with the file I ended up with, you’re better off exporting to another format, or just copying and pasting and saving in RTF afterward.

Mail Merge

Zoho Writer has this feature if you want to use it. I don’t know how useful mail merge would be to teachers (newsletters, I suppose), but it’s there if you want to mess with it. Or if you don’t use mail merge but like knowing it’s available, just in case.

Overall

Yeah, you can’t beat the price, but Zoho Writer is more than just a free application. Zoho Writer is nearly as good as OpenOffice Writer, and the fact that there’s nothing to download or install makes it a viable option for classroom use.

Zoho Writer

Related stuff:

Have writing, will travel: Adobe Buzzword

Jarte: a sleek, powerful word processor

Collaborate online in real time with EtherPad

Ditch Microsoft Office: OpenOffice Provides a Free Office Suite