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The End User: A Word for the wise?
Victoria Shanon, International Herald Tribune
December 22, 2005

http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/12/21/business/ptend22.php

PARIS - Most of us are tied to Microsoft Word for oblique reasons: It's on the computer at work, people send me Word documents, it has a feature I can't find elsewhere.

Many of us also, I hazard to guess, decry our reliance on this word processor, wishing we could cut the umbilical cord that binds us to Microsoft. It is the same reasoning that makes us wish we could swear off buying Disney DVDs for our kids: They're good, and there's no real substitute, but boy I wish I weren't lining their pockets anymore.

In the world of Web 2.0 - today's shorthand for using software that lives on the Internet for what were traditionally desktop-bound applications - there is real reason to believe a worthy rival for Word will emerge.

One that I have been trying is called Writely. I am not ready to hit the delete button on my Word icon, but this Internet-based program is so good that I can see the potential in the near-term future. A comparable Web service called gOffice is not too far behind.

At www.writely.com, you sign in free (most current browsers work there, except Apple's Safari; Mac users should try the Firefox browser), and within a moment or two, you are creating a document that can be saved or sent in a variety of formats, including HTML for the Web and a version that Microsoft Word programs can read.

Just as on your PC word processor, you can change fonts and type sizesl; boldface and underline text; place pictures; change the background color; set stylesheets; check the spelling; count the words; and add bullets automatically - all your basic text management tools.

It has all of the basics - but few of the more complicated. It doesn't have a grammar checker. I couldn't make the type wrap into newspaper-like columns on a single page. There is no option for "hidden" text or big capitals at the beginning of a paragraph. The font choices are fixed, although there is a nice cross-section of about 20.

The feature limitations can be a blessing in disguise, of course: Microsoft Word is so feature-filled that it has become overly complex, with options upon preferences that many people never use - unless, of course, one of those features happens to be the one you rely on.

But Writely isn't even meant to be a word-processing software replacement.

Its goal is something else altogether: to share a text document among several writers or editors who can edit it or collaborate on it.

You can give access to your document to particular people, all of whom can call up the text on the Internet on their own Web browsers. A small button at the bottom of the page warns you if one of your invitees is currently changing the document.

And since all of the work is done on the Internet, not on your laptop or desktop computer, the files are saved on Writely's servers. That offers another benefit: You can save a document from home and gain access to it at work, for instance. Or add to it from an Internet café at every city on your vacation or business trip.

Of course, if you can't get to the Internet for whatever reason - server down, no Internet café, no wireless signal - you can't get to Writely. Is the Internet reliable, secure and ubiquitous enough to replace Microsoft Word? That is the pressing question for this and all of the other "Web services" cropping up - including Microsoft's own, an experiment called Office Live.

Writely is in a testing stage. One feature it recently added is the ability to save documents in PDF format. It also recently added support for what is called the OpenDocument format. How its parent company, a California firm called Upstartle, expects to make money is not yet clear.

Still, a lot of people will be happy with Writely. And they won't just be the same people who tried StarOffice when it was a free application from a German company, or the same people who wish for the good old days of WordPerfect, or ClarisWorks, or WordStar, or you name it. A lot of them will be Microsoft Word refugees.

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