It’s always exciting to bring the What’s New stories to our customers. The newest additions, the most sought-after enhancements, or the upcoming features – they have always made you love the product even more!
Today, I am happy to introduce some new additions to our online document editing tool – Zoho Writer. Because we understand the growing need for collaboration in an organization, we have added a few important features in Zoho Writer to help you work smoothly with your team inside or outside your office.
Here are some new features from the development desk:
- Engage in Interactive Comments using @Mentions
Previously, you could leave your feedback as comments and wait for the right user to see and act upon your comments. But with the latest enhancement, it is now possible to direct comments to specific users, thereby sending them an email notification. This way, your comments never go unnoticed and you can start a chain of discussion in the document. You can also mention users who are not a part of the shared document and get them involved in the reviewing process. To do so, just type @ followed by the name of the user, and an email will be triggered to the user with the comment and document link, if he/she is not already a shared user.
- Track Your Changes Across Zoho Writer and MS Word
If you frequently switch between MS Word and Zoho Writer, chances are you had fidelity issues in the past. But not anymore. We have worked really hard to make the integration seamless and give you a smooth transition. So, now all your tracked changes in the document stay intact when exported as a .docx file. It also works when you import a document with track changes to Zoho Writer.
- Proof Read with Ease
Anyone who writes long documents will appreciate the need to have a visual cue on the editor to indicate spell errors at a glance. We have now made it easier for you with spell checking icons at the end of the editor page. The icon 
indicates your document is error-free while the 
alerts you to errors in the document. You can click the icon and navigate to all the errors in your document.
You can also sift through the collected spelling errors and decide whether to ignore or accept a spelling that is recommended by Zoho Writer. These recommendations appear in a list that you can select from and change or ignore individually. Conversely, you can decide to change or ignore all of the same misspelled words simultaneously by selecting the ‘Change All’ or ‘Ignore All’ options.
Try out these features and let us know what you think. Have any suggestions or feedback for us? Share it in the comments section.
Your mention about tracking changes between Zoho and MS Word raises a question in my mind. Is it possible to use Zoho's sync feature (via Dropbox or some other utility) to allow creation and editing of documents with Word on one local machine and have those synced to my Zoho account? Suppose I want to work in MSWord on my desktop machine, storing the documents in a Dropbox folder that is synced with Zoho. Would both NEW documents and changes to EXISTING documents (creation by or editing with Word) be synced to my Zoho Folder, enabling me to open them with Zoho Writer when I have Internet connectivity? Or does this require an Export/Import set of procedures?
Hi, Yes, it is possible to sync your Dropbox folder to your Zoho account. Both new files and the changes made to the existing Dropbox folder will be synced automatically from your local machine to your Zoho online account. You can enable 'sync continuously' option for your Dropbox settings in Zoho Docs to automatically sync all your changes from Dropbox to Zoho Docs and vice-versa. Please refer the following help page for more information: https://www.zoho.com/docs/help/dropbox-sync.html You can also download the Zoho Docs for Desktop version and have all your documents synced to your personal computer, where you can view and access files offline. Here’s a link to the help file, to help you understand better. Please let me know if you need any further clarification. Thanks!