Writely Wrocks

I have been using Writely for several weeks now, and it's awesome. I have created 48 documents so far: documents for a consulting client, three development projects, my personal information, my children's elementary school, my son's cub scout event, and this blog entry. (Update: I created this entry in Writely, but I couldn't get Writely to post directly so had to copy/paste it to blogger.)

To a degree, Writely is like a wiki. You create documents online that can be shared and edited by others. But it's much better than any wiki I've seen: the WYSIWYG editor works well, and properly uses the full screen. And most important, it supports tables. (Once you get into it, you'll find that tables are a big pain in the neck, but they are promising upgrades for the tables support soon.) I use tables for everything, from laying out the header and footer, to presenting a great deal of the information. Their tables support for Firefox is amazing; click on a cell, and you'll get several user interface "handles" that do interesting things: delete row or column, add row or column before or after. This means of manipulating tables is much better than the contect (right click) menu.

Writely is also much better than wikis in that you can control access (both read and write) on a page-by-page basis, which is a requirement. It's important that I let some people see some pages, and other people see other pages. This fine grained permissions control is a blessing. But it's also a curse. For a single project, I have several related documents. I have to specify the sharing for each one independently, which is tedious. And their collaboration/sharing model is overly complex. Starting a project with new collaborators is full of missteps, no matter how I do it. They need to rework the presentation, so that the mental model is much streamlined.

The most significant pitfall of Writely is that they missed the main point of wikis, which is top-down design. As I write a document, it occurs to me that I should write supporting documents. I want to insert a link now, and then write the document later. This top-down methodology is the most significant innovation of wikis, and Writely missed it completely. (I am not surpsied that Microsoft SharePoint also missed it, but I wouldn't expect them to understand the importance of something so subtle. Writely, on the other hand, is at the forefront of Web 2.0, and they should know better.)

It's possible to work around these shortcomings. In fact, Writely is so useful that it's well worth working around them. Here is what I do to create each new document that is related to another. This procedure creates a new document with matching header and footer, matching tags, and matching collaborators.

1. File/Copy document
2. rename the new document
3. delete the body (preserving the header and footer)
4. save the document
5. Done
6. in the main Writely window, select (check) the new document and tag it with the relevant project
7. open the old document
8. add a link to the new document
9. Collaborate/Invite others to edit this document...
10. select the list of collaborators, and hit Ctrl-C (copy), then Cancel
11. Done
12. click on the new document
13. select Collaborate...
14. paste the list of collaborators, then Ok
15. say No, I don't want to email them
16. start editing
    

There are also a host of annoying little things. For example, there is no indication that your document has been saved, or that your latest version has been published.

The shortcomings of Writely are easy to fix, and I am sure they will. The question is, will they fix it, or will I switch to an imitator who copies Writely, and fixes it? Either way, we all benefit.

Even with the problems, Writely is well worthwhile. I am a big fan.