Like with Zoho Mail and Zoho Business, Zoho Writer now sports the white background theme too. This is another move towards standardizing the UI of various Zoho services.

Test drive the latest Zoho Writer and we would be glad hearing your comments.

Note that the docx email attachment you received is now on the cloud. You can view and make changes to the document where ever you are, from any computer. And you can either share this document to the intended recipients or export it back as a docx file & send it as an email attachment (for the old-timers who still insist that you send the document as an attachment).

You can now import and export the below document formats in Zoho Writer.

Import : html, doc, docx, sxw, odt, rtf and txt
Export : html, doc, docx, sxw, odt, rtf, pdf, LaTeX and txt

What makes Zoho unique is the broad set of applications we offer. The real power of these suite of apps will be in display when the applications are integrated with each other. Integration between apps will continue to be the focus for the next year apart from enhancements to the existing ones.

On this occasion, I’d like to take a moment to thank all our users for supporting us during this marathon.

For Zoho Writer to work offline, you’ll need to have Google Gears plug-in installed in Safari. In Zoho Writer, click on the ‘Go Offline’ link at the top-right to access your documents offline. By default, we download 15 documents each from ‘My Docs’ and ‘Shared Docs’ section. You can change the default setting by clicking on the down arrow beside ‘Go Offline’ link. The documents are downloaded based on the ‘Sort Order’ in your ‘My Docs’ section.

When you are not connected to the internet, you can visit http://writer.zoho.com/offline to access and edit your documents offline. When you are back online, clicking on ‘Go Online’ will let you to synchronize the modified documents with the online versions.

Mac users, do try Zoho Writer offline on Safari. And, any guesses on the Zoho Apps that will next be available offline?

The ‘Insert HTML’ icon that can be of much use too. You can insert a sheet or chart from Zoho Sheet, a slideshow from Zoho Show or a video from YouTube. The advantage of inserting from Zoho Sheet and Show is that whenever the data in the original sheet or show changes, it gets automatically reflected in the Zoho Writer document.

Try playing with the HTML options available in Zoho Writer.

1. When a user chooses the ‘Subscribe to Zoho Newsletter’ check box when he/she registers, they are added to our Zoho CRM contacts or leads list.
2. When time comes to send the Newsletter (monthly), we log on to our Zoho CRM account, make an email template and save it
3. Then select all the contacts who are to be emailed
4. Schedule when to send the email
5. A couple of points to be noted : a) A Newsletter is typically HTML formatted and some email clients strip off formatting. So it is safe to have a version of it hosted online and point to it in the newsletter email you send. We have an online version of the Newsletter as a Zoho Writer public document. b) We have an ‘Unsubscribe’ link at the bottom of each mail. Submitting your email address there will directly opt you out of the Newsletter subscriber list that we maintain in Zoho CRM
6. Lastly, we use Zoho Mail internally. And the filters/folders option there allows us to get the Newsletter related replies (genuine replies, bounced/undelivered mails, Out of Office/Vacation replies, auto-responses etc) segregated so that we can attend to each one of them easily.

We will be sharing more such scenarios of how we are using Zoho within our organization.

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.

Here’s more screenshots & a nice video of how to use Open IT Online to view documents online with Zoho. Install the Open IT Online Firefox add-on to view/edit files directly online without downloading them.

Does Zoho offer a backup function which will let me download all my data?

We have various options depending on each Zoho service.

Zoho Writer : Offers a variety of different formats that you can export a document to - doc, docx, pdf, odf (odt), latex, sxw, html, rtf & txt. Click on Export to see the options.

Also integrates with Google Gears. Offers upto 50 documents to be downloaded to your desktop. You can access these documents from http://writer.zoho.com/offline. Click on Go Offline to download Google Gears and your Zoho Writer documents

Zoho Sheet : Click on Export. Again offers a wide variety of options from xls to pdf to ods to xml. There is also a batch export option available from the sidebar.

Zoho Show : Open a presentation. Click on Export and you will see the options available (ppt, pdf, pps and odp)

Zoho Projects : Export all your tasks as an xls or csv file. Under Tasks and Milestones, click on Export button

Zoho Creator : Export all your data as xls, pdf. Also as RSS, JSON feeds etc.

Zoho Wiki : You can download all the pages of your Wiki as a zip file. Available under Settings -> Click to download the backup

Zoho CRM : Choose the module (Leads, Contacts etc) and click on Export. You can also export all your CRM data in one go also. We charge a nominal fee of $10.

Zoho DB & Reports : Export your reports as csv, pdf or an image file

Zoho Invoice : Export each invoice, estimate as pdf. Export customer’s info as VCard (vcf).

Zoho Notebook : Has an Export as mht option. The exported page can be viewed in Internet Explorer.

We will be coming up with more export options in upcoming updates.

If you have Syncplicity installed on your computer, you can right-click on a document on your desktop and choose  the ‘Edit in Zoho’ option for editing your document. This opens up a window with the Zoho document editor. When the ‘Save’ button is hit in Zoho editor, it saves the file to your local folder and also your Syncplicity account, thus keeping your document in sync. This works with Zoho Writer & Zoho Sheet Apps now with Zoho Show to follow.

Similar editing option is also available in their online application to edit documents online. After you save the changes, the documents are saved on their servers.

And here’s a nice screencast done by the Syncplicity team, demonstrating the integration.

We’d like to thank Syncplicity for integrating Zoho. Our other API Partners are here. If you have integrated Zoho into your application, do let us know so that we can profile you here and list you as a partner in our partners page.