Features I'd like to see (or not see) in Zoho writer

Features I'd like to see (or not see) in Zoho writer

​

Hi, In one of the forum notes a few days ago. One of your tech people tried to help a user but was unable to because he was wanting a function that Writer did not have. At the end of the exchange, the user said something like, we'll it's a great program and I shouldn't expect too much from it, after all it's free and just can't do so many things. The Tech person wrote back saying he was surprised to hear that because he actually thought of Writer as a very "robust" program, and he asked the user to give him a few examples of things he thought were lacking in Zoho Writer. 

​

I've lost that original exchange, and don't know the name of the person who asked the question, but here is my answer. I love Zoho and use it a lot, but if you want me to be perfectly honest about things that I would LOVE to have in it that are not, here is my list. In fact, I'm sure the list could be much longer if I had more time, but I finally need to get back to my life. 

​

I hope you take these comments as coming from a loyal supporter and not direct angry criticism, because I am not angry. I use the program daily and will continue to. But I have to admit that whenever I need a word processor for something more than the very simplist of notes, I go back to Word. I would very much prefer to stay away from the giants (Microsoft and Google), but so far Zoho is so far away from my desktop-based version of Word, that I can't quite make the leap. 

​

Best, 

​

Stan Duncan 

  1. Ability to see complex formatting on screen. Very difficult to format when you can't see the formating. It makes it hard to do two-column newsletters, for example. It also can't handle graphics. I just received a coupon for a dinner at a restaurant. It came as an attachment in Word. It has two pictures at the top left and right of the heading. Zoho garbles those graphics all over the page making it impossible to dicipher and use. 
  2. This isn't exactly a needed feature, but the bulleting is confusing and I can't get it to work (this may just be me; see below)
  3. Would love to see the auto capitalizing feature for the beginning of sentances.  
  4. Spelling auto correct.
  5. The ability to print with key strokes, rather than having to stop and pick up the mouse and click on print, would be very nice. In fact, a much richer list of key-stroke short cuts would be a real plus. 
  6. The ability to access the ribbon commands through keystrokes would be good (a slightly different suggestion than the one just above). For example, in Word, if I wished to put a word in small caps, I would highlight the word and press Alt-o-f-m. Or if I wanted to strike through I would press Alt-o-f-k. 
  7. This next issue is confusing. Many words in Writer have the red "squiggly" underlines, indicating that they are misspelled, but the word is actually spelled correctly. When I click on it and open the spell checker there's nothing listed as being incorrect. For example, the words "commands" and "beginning" in the sentences above are both flagged as mispelled, but they aren't. 
  8. Even more odd, sometimes just portions of words are flagged as misspelled. For example, the ​letters "corr" in the word "correct" above, and "por" in the word "portions" in thisparagraph have red underlines. 
  9. When I open a doc file (called "import" in Zoho) and edit it, I can't save it back to where I got it. If I press "save" it's saved in the online zoho directory (in a kind of confusing disorganized mess, but that's another story). If I try to "export" it, it goes into the download directory of mycomputer, with all of the formatting taken out of it. I have to then go into Windows Explorer and  drag and drop it back to its original directory. I wish there was a way to call up a doc file, work on it and save it back to where it came from with the original formatting.
  10. A related feature that would be nice would be to be able to open up online documents from other programs. I keep most of my documents on Microsoft's Skydrive. I've created an app on Writer that will go to the Skydrive directory list, but I can't get the two to relate to one another. If I want a file from a Skydrive directory, I have to download it as a word doc, save it on my hard drive (which I was attempting to avoid by using Skydrive) and then "import" it into Zoho. It's so tedious and complicated that it kind of takes all of the joy out of word processing. 
  11. In Word, when you have a bulleted list, and you press enter at the end of a line, it creates a new bulleted line just below it. With Zoho Writer, it just creates another line, without the bullet. This is slightly disconcerting if you have a fresh document in Writer, but you can always go back and create another bullet (would be nice if there was a non-mouse key-stroke for this). But if you have opened a Word Doc and try a carriage return after an already existing bulleted line, it notonly does not make another bullet, it steadfastly refuses to allow one. If you try to create a bullet by going to the bullet function on the ribbon, it creates one with a different sized bullet and adifferent level of indentation. In fact often (perhaps because it uses different codes than Word tocreate the document) Zoho  places the bullet into the sentence itself at about letter four or five.Very frustrating. I have worked with it for weeks and read everything I can find on it from Zoho, and I so far have totally failed to find any way of fixing this. It's a real mess for formatting. 
  12. This next issue may just be a casualty of Writer being online instead of tied to a computer.However, it is frustrating that the screen is unable to keep up with my typing. I type pretty fast, and often when Writer struggles to catch up, it leaves out letters from my words. I don't know if you can fix that, but it is a problem.  
  13. Writer does one thing that has so far baffled me. When I try to change the line spacing in one section, it frequently (maybe usually) changes the line spacing in another instead. For example, if I want there to be a 12 pt space after paragraphs in the body of a letter, but zero pt spacing in the letterhead at the top, I will highlight the text paragraphs, go to Page Setup > Page Format. Click on "Space after paragraph," click the down arrow to something like .6 or .12. Click Apply and Close. Then, when I go back to my document, the Letter Head at the top has a widened space after each paragraph mark, and the text I had highlighted to change remains unchanged. It has so far eluded me as to why. I'm sure that there is some obscure, arcane reason for the way this is set up and if I will just discover the logic behind the programmers setting it up that way I can lick it, but for now it has beaten me. I cannot figure it out. 
  14. I would like Writer to also have an auto date fill-in function where I can start the month and it would fill it in for me. I never know what the date is, and this would be a real help. 
  15. The margins are near impossible to set by hand. I would love to be able to slide the margin ​lines back and forth and have them lock in place. But it almost never happens. They over shoot or undershoot and it is VERY difficult (sometimes impossible) to get a margin to line up with the indentation that I want. Sometimes I have just saved the document. Copied the text, opened Word (or Word Perfect), pasted the text. Formatted the margins. Copied the text again, opened Writer, and pasted the text back in again. It's faster to do my formatting in another program and bring it into Writer than it is to fight with Writer to figure out how to over rule its rules. 
  16. Similarly, I have yet to figure out how to make line or paragraph spacing work when Writer does not want to make the change. I have clicked on every button in Page Setup or Insert or formatand nothing seems to dislodge Writer from its own preference until it is ready (usuallywhen I get mad and turn it off and then back on again). This may not be appropriate for a list of features that I would like to see, but it is a problem.)

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