The LaTeX Equation Editor feature in Zoho Writer comes very handy for writing mathematical stuff. It has become a useful tool for students, engineers, scientists and professors who write their papers that involves lot of equations. Now the equation editor is equipped with a nice little option that allows them to change the background color for the texts, equations and symbols. Here's how it works.

• Click on the Equation Editor button ( ) present in the 3rd row of the Zoho Writer toolbar to open the editor's dialog box .
• Click on the Page Color button from the equation editor toolbar and specify the color name inside the curly braces. The syntax of which will look similar to the one below :

The declared-color parameter can take following color values - white, black, red, green, blue, cyan, magenta & yellow. By default it takes the blue color as background if none is specified.

Do have a go at this nice little feature and we would be glad to hear your feedback and suggestions.

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We had a minor Zoho Writer update in which the issue of document content not getting displayed in Safari Browser on a Mac has been fixed. Users who have reported this particular issue in the past couple of days can try accessing Zoho Writer documents in their Safari browser and the content should come up fine for editing in the Writer editor.

Zoho Writer provides limited support for Safari browser as of now and hence some of the feature may behave inconsistently in it. We suggest Mac Users to access Zoho Writer on Firefox 2.0+ browser versions for a better experience. Full support for Safari browser will be provided in our next series of updates. It's in the works right now.

We’ve scheduled a maintenance for Zoho Business on Sunday, June 29, 2008 between 9:30 PM PDT and 11:30 PM PDT(2 hours). During this period, access to Zoho Business will not be available.

We apologize for any inconveniences that this may cause and appreciate your patience.

[Update] Maintenance has been completed successfully. Access to Zoho Business is available now.

We are pleased to announce several new enhancements to our Zoho Plugin for Microsoft Office. Users can download the new version of the plugin here. The salient features of this update are :

Option to keep a local copy

This is a nice little feature wherein users can keep a local copy of the existing document/workbook that is available in Zoho Writer & Sheet. To achieve this, users just need to enable the check box "Keep a local copy" when they are logging in to access their documents from within Microsoft Word/Excel.

There is also an option to create a new Zoho account from the Zoho Plugin credentials page. Click on the "New Zoho User? Sign Up" link to set up an account with us. This is for the users who have downloaded the plugin but are yet to sign up for Zoho Services.

Added a new tab - Local Documents

Now that the users can have a copy of the online document/workbook in their local drive, there is a new tab "Local Documents" added to the "Add-Ins" option in Word/Excel. Users can access the local copy by clicking on this particular tab. Locally downloaded documents/spreadsheets are password protected now. Users are asked to provide Zoho account password when opening a local copy of the document/spreadsheet. The enhanced security is to prevent unauthorised access.

Users also have the option to delete the local copy. Click on local documents tab from Add-Ins, select the document & choose delete button to perform the above operation.

Offline editing of documents/workbooks

User can now edit their documents/workbooks offline using the local copy and can sync up the updated offline version with the online version of the document/workbook in Zoho Writer/Sheet by connecting to the internet, signing in to their Zoho account from the Add-ins tabs in Word/Excel and then choosing the option "Save in Zoho Writer/Sheet".

Multi-user Support

Our earlier version of Office Plugin did not allow the guest user of Windows to access the documents/workbooks. Now guest users (as opposed to only allowing users with Administrator privileges previously) who have an account with Zoho can access & edit their documents/workbooks in MS Word/Excel.

Do have a go at the enhanced Zoho Office Plugin and let us know your feedback.

A few weeks back we had announced a template library feature where not only users could pickup the readymade templates for drafting their documents but can also upload and share their own templates in their areas of expertise so that others can benefit from them. Well we have had many requests from users who had come up with their own templates to add to the template library and it is quite an assortment of categories ranging from resumes, proposals & multiple-choice test to musical concert tickets. Here are few of the users who have their templates featured in the Zoho Writer template library:

1. Ritesh Kashyap and Kalleanderson with their respective resumes.

2. Pat Hypia with a sample speech outline.

3. Andy Wallace with his fundraising proposal.

4. Ross Normy with his innovative multiple-choice test on quantitative & logical ability.

 

5. And last but not the least Chuan Pai with his concert ticket template.

Ritesh, Kalleanderson, Pat, Andy, Ross and Chuan thanks a ton for contributing to the zoho writer template library. We would love to have more users contributing to the template library here.