This is my mini review on Writely. Once you login, you’ll see a list of documents that you recently use. The interface is simple and clean. There is no ad at the site, but this may change in the future.
The main page of Writely after login
Documents are divided into four types (or view): Active, Starred, Tagged, All Documents. Active means the documents that you recently use (within 1 month). Starred documents are documents that you marked, something like favorite/bookmark. If you are GMail user, I’m sure that you see the feature before. You can also apply tag to your document.Tagging is one of the best way to organize your files. This is because you’re not restricted to one type of tag. You can add several tags to one document. For the ‘All Documents’ tab, as the title said, it view all the documents that you created and saved. There is also a trash function where you can recover documents that you deleted.
There are three ways for you to choose from for creating a new document. You can create it on the spot, using the ‘New’ link, or you can upload a file from your document. You can upload files like txt, doc, images, etc. You can also use email to send the file to your Writely account. Writely will provide you a custom email address to receive and store the email. Writely will convert the content of the email to a document.
Uploading a document to Writely
The document editing page is quite user friendly with some basic function that normal user usually use. You can insert things like images and tables into the document. You can right click on the editing area to access some of the function that you usually use, like copy/paste/cut. Drag-and-Drop is also supported. If you want to move you picture, just drag-n-drop the image to the new location. Fonts are quite limited. Only some common fonts are available for you to use.
One of the best bout Writely is that you can share the document with other people. Just use the collaborate function. All you need to do is add the email of the person that you want to share the document with into the collaborator list. Writely will then send them an email with the link to the document. The collaborator can edit and change the content of the document that you shared with them. This function really helpful if you usually share your document with other people.
Next, you can ‘publish’ the document. It is something like publishing a web page. Writely will generate an URL to the document so that you can share the document with the public. But, of cause the public can only view it, and not edit it.
Previewing a document before publish
The next best thing bout Writely is that you can actually post the document to a blog! In fact, this post is posted using Writely! Pretty neat huh? 😉 Currently Writely support most of the blogging system that are commonly available in the internet. You can post it to blogging website such as Blogger or Typepad. If you are hosting your own blog, such as WordPress, you can also use Writely! As long as the blogging system the API, Writely should be able to post to your blog.
You need to change some settings before you can post it to your blog
Another function is the revision. Basically this is the ‘history’ of your document. Everytime the document is changed, Writely will quick save it. This quick save or something similar to a snap shot of the document can be accessed through the revision menu. Using the revision function, you can keep track of what other collaborators had changed, and if you want to revert it back, just select the version that you want. You can even compare the changes between revision so that you’ll know what had changed.
The revision/history of the document
I guess thats all that I can write now. To sum it up, Writely is quite similar to your usual web-based email. But rather than an email, now you are editing a document. You can also share the document and also publish to your blog. Even the functions inside Writely is quite limited, but for simple word processing, I think it should be enough. Now you can access your document anytime, anywhere! (as long as you have internet connection and browser xD)
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