Michael Parsons
This week I got the chance to check out Writely, the online word-processing application that was purchased by Google earlier this year. It's one of those ideas that either seems daft or makes intuitive sense, depending on your current working habits. If you write on a laptop -- or with a quill pen -- and rarely go online, it will seem rather silly. I sit in front of a Web browser on a high-speed connection most of the time, and I already rely on a host of network-dependent applications to get work done: if the network goes down, we all go for coffee.
If you're writing for an online audience, the ability to write something and then send it in a form that can easily be accessed by other people as a link in email makes a lot of sense. What takes a while to get your head around is that Writely actually sits somewhere between a word processor and a blogging application: it's not just about making a document, but about sharing that document via a form of very basic Web publishing.
Why do we write? We write to be read, and people read on paper or on screen. That means we need to publish our work in some way, whether it's by tucking that suicide note in our breast-pocket or spray-painting our tag on a subway wall. Most of us either print out our deathless prose on lavender notepaper and send it, sprinkled with rose water, to a delighted relative, or email documents as file attachments. If the document is going to be heavily revised, or if several different people are going to be updating it, you can stick it on a shared server so that everyone can get in there and mess about with it, but you immediately run into version-control problems.
Writely handles this very well. You invite people via email to become collaborators on your document, and then they can access it online, make any changes they want using their browsers, and save them. There's also a nice revisions feature that lets you see how the document has changed over time and compare versions, something the custom-built, fancy-pants content management system I work with everyday has yet to offer.
When you're finished and you want a larger group to read your document, you simply publish it, and then anyone in the world with a Web browser can access it. And it's easy to import your existing Word documents, or save Writely documents in Word format. It autosaves your file every ten seconds, so you don't need to worry about losing that thesis. The other reason that Writely makes intuitive sense is that the interface looks much like Gmail: it uses a tagging metaphor rather than folders to allow you organise your documents into different groups, and if you've figured out the Gmail interface this is all very familiar. You can also publish your article to your blog very easily, and adding hyperlinks is a doddle.
All this would be worthess if the basic word processor was a nightmare to use, but of course it's fine, because the dirty little secret of word processing is that most of what we do with a word processor is very simple. How then to explain the commanding figure of Microsoft Word, slayer of WordPerfect, top of the heap, the product of decades of market-slave research in the user dungeons of Redmond, stuffed with intricate and useless features and retailing for hundreds of pounds? If ever there was a software application strutting around in ghastly, flabby-blubber nakedness sporting nothing but its own vanity and the finest set of the Emperor's new clothes, it's Microsoft Word. I've been writing professionally for 20 years and here's what I do with Word: I set the font to Times Roman, 12 point, and I set the line spacing to 1.5, and I save files and print them. Most of the time I'd be fine using Notepad, the little applet that comes free with Windows. And if you're honest, so would you.
It probably seems that I'm a bit down on Word but that wouldn't be true: I loathe and detest it for adding useless complication to what is really for me a very basic requirement. Years of wearily trying to help other users sort out problems with margins, font sizes, pagination, page numbers, irritating spell checkers, imperialist grammar bullying and odiously patronising help interfaces have given me a breezy contempt for it. It's not all been bad. I have had my special days in Word. After two or three drinks I've been known to pull some moves and put some words in italics -- after four drinks, in bold. Once, after a lost weekend in Amsterdam with two Swedish quantity surveyors on an ether binge, I figured out how to put stuff in bullet points. When I woke up they were gone, along with my trousers, my dignity and the faintest recollection of how I'd achieved this heady feat.
In writing this column in Writely, I've chosen my font, changed the line spacing, even gone crazy and indented the paragraphs without really breaking stride. It's all straightforward, intuitive stuff. On the downside, printing doesn't look too pretty: if you're spending a lot of time collating documents, doing fancy layouts, adding images or writing book-length materials in Master Documents, then you're better off with something like Word. And according to comments on Writely's blog, getting links to people to read your document can present confusing sign-up choices, although these may vanish once Google account integration is worked out. However, these seem like problems that can be fixed, and if you're writing something like this -- short, delightfully written online prose -- then Writely makes perfect sense.
The one thing you want to do when you've written a column is check how many words you've written. A journalist I know (and an impeccable source) worked at Microsoft as a consultant several years ago, advising the company on ways to improve its software, and he asked the team why the word-count feature wasn't easier to find. He was told that this facility was a low priority because the team were so angry with the bad press they'd received that they had no wish to make life easier for members of the media. Writely passed this test with flying colours. Just go to the Edit menu and select count words (although I admit I did have to look it up in the Help menu).
Writely was put in closed beta after its purchase by Google in March, and the company is now working to integrate it with Google's membership systems and to ensure that its technology has the scale required to become the planet's free writing application. I hope they figure it out. Once it's properly integrated with Google Calendar and Gmail, I for one (along with a couple of Swedish quantity surveyors) will definitely be using Writely whenever possible. Take my Word for it. Please.
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