Writer steps into its sixth major version, with updates aimed at bringing more perspective to collaboration, reducing manual paperwork, and making work easier.
Over the years, the function of a word processor has matured from software used to process and format text to a personal productivity tool we use to share and discuss ideas, organize information, review content, and more.
When this familiar tool is enhanced with the right amount of innovation, a word processor can help us minimize mundane manual work, bridge communication gaps, and just make work substantially easier. It gives us something more than a “word” processor. It gives us a work processor.
Meet the new Zoho Writer.
Bringing better perspective to collaboration
We’re thrilled to introduce a new collaboration analytics tool called Engagement Insights. This brings you a great set of comprehensive, useful information about how your collaborators are interacting with your document. Learn where your document stands as a part of your project, what sections of your document have maximum engagement, and more.
When working with legal documents like proposals, this gives you an idea what sections your clients tend to consider the most crucial (or the most confusing).
Speaking of working with clients, you can now restrict the visibility of comments to specific people, user roles, and groups. Have parallel conversations with your internal and external teams simultaneously, while still maintaining complete confidentiality.
Continue reading about our collaboration updates
Document automation, now driven by templates
Another area where Writer could make a huge difference is in minimizing the amount of copy/pasting, manual editing, and duplication of content involved in generating contracts, proposals, letters, and customized marketing materials.
To make things substantially easier for everyone, we’re introducing a new Prepare Template flow you can use to configure document templates for workflow automation, and later connect it to a data source—like Zoho CRM or a third-party application—via native Zoho integrations, Deluge Custom Functions, or REST APIs.
From start to end, you can now prepare and configure:
📩 Merge templates: To bring data from other apps, spreadsheets, or a CSV file
🗳 Form-driven templates: To generate documents as someone submits a form via Zoho Forms
🖋 Sign templates: To send documents for signing and approval only
📝 Fillable templates: To publish fillable copies of a document others can fill and submit
Once you’re done with the document content, you can configure how you want the template to behave each time a merge is initiated.
Continue reading about our automation updates
Easier ways to organize and edit content
What better way to make work easier than by reducing the number of steps involved in something we do over and over every day?
For starters, you can now easily move sections around by dragging and dropping them in the Document Navigator panel. Click and hold on a heading and move it up or down. All paragraphs following with that heading will be moved as well. Handy, isn’t it?
There’s also a new Multi-page view that lets you view and edit multiple pages at the same time. Take a quick look at the formatting consistency of your document before you share or print it.
Continue reading about our editing updates
A great, cross-platform PDF Form alternative
Currently, to create and distribute a fillable document, you have to fiddle around with Microsoft Word’s Developer options, use multiple versions of a PDF reader, or take your document from your word processor to a third-party PDF form service.
It could be easier, and with Writer, it is.
Today, we’re announcing a brand-new form of fillable documents in Writer, that:
✅ Works instantly across operating systems, without additional installations
📨 Integrates natively with email, electronic signature, and cloud storage services
🔒 Better manages digital rights for the forms currently in circulation
📝 Works with your word processor right out of the box.
This is a great time saver for HR or Finance executives. Employees can now fill out information in the corporate forms themselves and submit it back to the executives, all without having to print or send attached documents back and forth.
Continue reading about our interactive document update
Reducing formatting and customization headaches
A lot of you told us how you still find formatting to be an alienating process. Keeping this in mind, we made some additions that will significantly smoothen this process out.
First, you can smartly extract design from an existing, well-formatted document and apply it to yours in a couple of clicks.
To help you maintain brand consistency, we’re adding a new way to bring fonts directly from your computer to Writer as well.
Continue reading about our customization updates
That’s all for now. We’d like to thank every one of you who took the time to write to us about your experiences with Writer and how we can solve certain problems for you.
Let us know in the comments below how you like the new updates. Interested in a detailed webinar? Let us know that as well.
Hope you’re staying safe.
Happy writing!
Read next: Introducing exceptional document collaboration experiences
Zoho is providing great support to startups to carry out business processes. I hope this will be part of Zoho one.
Hello, Bhavana. Thanks for the kind words! :) Yes, all these are by default part of Zoho One as well.