Online document editors

It's been a little bit more than two years now since Google merged Google Spreadsheets with Writely, and while there has been a lot of talk about online office suites, the latest data from Compete indicates that Google Docs & Spreadsheets is still mostly attracting casual users who don't spend a lot of time with the service. Also, one of the most interesting data points in the Compete study is that only about 58% of unique visitors to Docs & Spreadsheets actually used one of the available apps after visiting the site. A large number of users never makes it past the marketing pages.

Zoho on Thursday announced the availability of Zoho Docs, which will help Zoho users manage their documents centrally so they won’t need to skip from Writer, Sheet, and Show to get work done. Zoho Docs is a bit overdue, but it’s good to see the company finally moving towards improving an offering that’s still a bit all over the place.

Google has released templates for Google docs. Google has created a number of templates across it’s various offerings (documents, spreadsheets, presentations). I’m stoked to see Google roll this out - it’s another feature that levels the playing field between the on-demand offerings and Microsoft office. Have a look at the list of templates available from Google it’s pretty comprehensive already.

While you can download documents from Google Docs one-by-one, there’s no "export all" like feature that will let you backup all online documents to your hard drive in one go. A possible solution is that you select multiple files inside Google Docs browser and export them as a zip but the problem is that files get saved as HTML web pages and not in the standard .doc format.