Zoho Writer Supports Offline Editing ... Thanks to Google Gear !

In August, Zoho Writer was available offline. However the documents were available in read-only mode when offline. With today’s update, you’ll now be able to view and edit your documents offline. This functionality is based on Google’s open source project Google Gears.

For Zoho Writer to work offline, you’ll need to have Google Gears plug-in installed on your browser (works on Firefox 1.5+, IE 6+). Click on ‘Go Offline’ to access your documents offline. By default, it downloads 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.

The following video should give you a quick overview on how this functionality works.

For better clarity, try this video. You’ll notice that not all functionalities available online are available in offline mode. This is because some of the functionalities are online specific while others will make their way into the offline mode moving forward.

Another new feature to come as part of this update is Right-to-Left language support. There are lot many users from the Middle-East who had been asking for this. Click on the ‘Page Setup’ icon (), the third from left on the Zoho Writer toolbar and you will see the language ‘Direction’ option in the pop-up window that opens.