Writely.com

by David Welch

Students and professionals alike are often in situations where they must work together in teams, combining their efforts to ultimately produce a single written document. If you’ve ever been in such a situation, you are already familiar with the difficulty in coordinating a group of people to work on an assignment that only one can write at a time. While one is writing, the rest of the team is waiting patiently. After one finishes, it is sent to another team member who makes changes and passes it to yet another member. It circulates among the team, each adding and changing the document one at a time, creating confusion and inefficiency. Even with only two people, passing a single document back and forth becomes a game of electronic tag. Could there be a way for everyone to work on the document without this hassle? This is one of the advantages of using Writely.com. Writely is a website that allows you to create and edit documents while allowing other people to access them and edit them simultaneously. This eliminates the need to forward documents to different people through e-mail and allows changes to be made by all writers at the same time, even if they are far away from each other.

Writely may be a useful alternative to expensive word processing programs. The options for editing a document are as nearly abundant as any commercial writing program. For example, you can add images, insert tables, and create bullet point lists. In fact, because it limits these features to what is most important and intuitive to the user, most will find it easier to use than many commercial word processing programs. The various options to modify a document are evident and accessible; such as inserting special characters, changing the font colors, or using the spell checker. Also, the site is online so your personal documents can be accessed from any computer with an internet connection.

Documents can begin from scratch or be uploaded from text files, MS Word documents, or from other common sources. Once a document has begun, collaborators can be invited simply by inputting their e-mails. Collaborators have the same abilities as the user who created the document; they can edit it, add or remove other collaborators, or publish it. The only option that is restricted from them is to remove the original creator of the document from accessing it.

This unique feature is what makes Writely so useful in a variety of ways. Students could receive instantaneous feedback from their peers by allowing them to view and leave comments on their writing. With students who are doing group essays or reports, Writely saves them the trouble of constantly passing the document among the collaborators forcing each to spend isolated time on it while the others wait patiently. Writely allows all of them to modify and edit the document at the same time, making the workflow much smoother and more efficient. Teachers could use Writely to collaborate on lesson plans and activities. During business meetings, several employees could work on the meeting minutes simultaneously; updating and editing the minutes document together. Any project where the contributors are geographically dispersed makes working together much easier with Writely; whether it be collaborating on an online magazine or creating a technical guide.

When several people are editing a document at the same time, their names will be viewable on the page. Any changes another person makes to a document while you are editing it will appear every few seconds, keeping each writer up to date on the current document. During the editing phase, users can leave comments on the document. This is a great tool for proofreaders who want to point out problems with a document but allow the original writer to still change them, or for editors to explain or question changes in a document. The comments do not appear on the published document when it is finished. An additional feature of Writely allows users to return to previous versions of the same document. So if an unwanted change is made and the document is accidentally saved, users can simply revert to a previously saved version of the document before the change was made. This will definitely be an advantage in case any huge blunders are made and saved. Once the document is published, the users will be given a url address where the document can be viewed on the web. The users can decide whether to limit access to certain viewers or make it public to everyone. Also, Writely allows users to publish the document directly into their blog; this saves the hassle of copying and pasting the writing into the blog manually. Writely works with several commercial blog such as blogger or Livejournal, but can be configured to work with just about any.

Writely is a program that does many things and it might sound complicated. But the system is designed very user-friendly and intuitive. Users should have little problem quickly figuring out how to use Writely because the options are displayed in a clear and evident manner. This ease of use makes Writely accessible to both students and teachers. At this time, Writely is free for anyone to use, but this may change when the site is no longer beta testing.