The best online word processor, however, may be the one from a tiny company, Zoho, a nimble innovator. Zoho Writer is running close enough to Word to imagine that it and other online word processors will be able to do most everything that Word can do, and more.

Zoho Writer handles the basics and provides many advanced functions without breaking a sweat — like the ability to edit a document when page breaks are displayed. Google Docs can’t. Writer works even when one is offline, thanks to open source technology developed by Google, and used by Zoho in its word processor four months before Google used it.

Zoho Writer also provides some esoteric features, like a choice of footnotes or endnotes, with note numbers in superscript, placed in the text. Google Docs does only footnotes and puts in a pound sign as a placeholder. You may never need to create the most complex mathematical equations, but Zoho Writer makes it easy to do so.