On the Writely Beta
Got my Writely Beta invite a few moments ago. What’s Writely?…
Writely is a web-based word processor currently in beta, and soon to be integrated into Google’s suite of web applications (following a 2006 acquisition). It can be used as a collaborative text editing suite, and features access controls. Writely’s user interface is a WYSIWYG word processor that appears within a web browser. Menus, keyboard shortcuts, and dialogue boxes show up in a way similar to what you would expect on a GUI-driven word processor, such as Microsoft Word or OpenOffice.org.
From Wikipedia
Writely is pretty nice to use and a lot less flaky than some of the other online word processes available (such as FCKEditor or TinyMCE).
The first quick test I gave Writely was to see how well it could interact with the current King of offline writers Word:
Click for lager version…
As you can see it did pretty well. I threw together a quick document with an image and then used Writely’s “Save As Word” option which spits out a .doc file.. The formatting within the Word file exactly mirrored what I had done in the Writely web interface. Not bad for a beta.
Should Microsoft/OpenOffice be worried? Not yet. Browser Based office applications are still in their infancy. But imagine if they became as widely used as webmail… Also consider that these application will be FREE… Throw into the mix some kind of plug-in that would allow Word/OpenOffice to directly link into the Writely web service and you surely have a winner…
Links:
[...] For example. Word and Excel could (outside many business practices) be considered obsolete with the advent of web based alternatives such as Writely (now GoogleDocs) and Google Spreadsheets. [...]
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