Hands on: Using Google's online word processor

Explore Google’s online word processor, Truetype fonts and ‘click here’ blocks

Over the years this column has been drafted on a number of word processors besides Word, including Star Office, Wordperfect, Ability Write and the near-moribund Lotus Word Pro.

But this is the first time I have used a word processor that isn’t installed on my PC. Writely – from the people who brought you Google – is a word processor that you use online in your web browser.

The good news is that it’s free to use, with a painless sign-up procedure. There are limits to the free beta accounts, such as 500KB for each document and 2MB for embedded images. But there’s no limit on the number of documents you can store.

You can collaborate on a document so that several people can edit it at the same time, which is either wonderful or totally confusing, depending on your needs and point of view.

Through an oversight I was stuck with the name ‘Untitled’ for my first Writely attempt. Then I discovered you can change the title in a box on the status bar. The ‘Save as...’ lets you save a copy to your own hard disk in Word, Open Office, Pdf and Rtf formats.

Although the facilities don’t compete with the established offline heavyweights, you can do most editing and formatting tasks, create tables, and insert images of up to 2MB. There’s a Word-style spelling checker that underlines mistakes, including the word Writely, in red. There are styles, a selection of 18 fonts, coloured text, and numbered or bulleted lists.

It’s not the only online word processor – others include Zoho Writer and Thinkfree. At the time of writing, both of these were also free, and you could join immediately. Thinkfree is rather more ambitious, and offers a whole Java-powered suite of Microsoft Office-compatible applications.

For about the past 10 years we’ve been hearing about online storage and applications being the coming thing. Now it appears to be happening. I don’t think I’d want to use it for mission-critical or high-security documents, but Writely is easy to use and great fun.

Font collections
Anyone who uses a Windows word processor will be familiar with Truetype (.ttf) fonts. They’ve been around since Windows 3.1 and provide a means of scaling type to any size and to the best capabilities of the output device, be it screen or printer. The Truetype technology was developed by Apple, believe it or not, as a rival to Adobe’s Type One or Postscript fonts.

A more recent arrival is the Open Type font, which also have the .ttf extension. This technology was a joint effort by Microsoft and Adobe to develop an open-standard successor to both Type One and Truetype, and these fonts are equally at home on Windows, Macintosh and most Unix or Linux systems.

So far, so good, but if you look in your fonts folder, you might discover yet another format with the .ttc extension. So what are these? TTC stands for Truetype Collection and, as the name suggests, these files can contain more than one font.

The idea behind this is to avoid redundancy. If two fonts share a number of identical glyphs (the actual shapes seen on screen or in print) then it makes sense to combine them. This is common in Japanese fonts where several fonts may have different kana glyphs, but share identical kanji glyphs.

Nearer home, the Cambria & Cambria Math collection (cambria.ttc) that comes with the Office 2007 Beta share many glyphs. But different spacing, so combining them in one file, saves having to define identical glyphs in separate files. You can find out more at microsoft.com/ OpenType/OTSpec/otff.htm.

Click everywhere
Although we were rather unkind about the ongoing development of Lotus Word Pro, there is one particular aspect of its Smartmaster templates that we like. ‘Click Here’ blocks can be included in a template that contains instructions for the user, for example, ‘Click here and type a title’.

When the user clicks and types, the prompt text is replaced by the typed text, while the formatting of the former is retained. It’s a fairly foolproof way of getting user input consistently formatted and in the right place.

A similar feature can be implemented in Word, with a little ingenuity and, since it has been four years since we last aired this tip, here it is again. First you need a template, so either open an existing one, or create a new one. Next you need a macro.

If the thought of this fills you with trepidation, don’t be put off. The macro doesn’t have to do anything other than exist. So, go to Tools, Macro, Macros… and in the ‘Macros in:’ box select the template in which you want the ‘Click here’ block.

Type a name for the macro, for example Donothing, then click the Create button. The VBA editor will load with the top and tail of the macro in place, plus some remarks about who created it and when. And that’s all you need, so you can close the VBA editor without typing a stroke.

Back in the document template, go to Insert, Field. Choose ‘Document Automation’ from the Categories box, then select Macrobutton in the Field Names list. You’ll see MACROBUTTON appear in the Field Codes box – depending on your version of Word you may first have to click the Field Codes button.

Add the macro name, Donothing, followed by a space, followed by the prompt text you want to appear – this can also contain spaces as only the first space is recognised as a code separator.

Click OK, then go to Tools, Option, View and make sure Field Codes is not checked. You should then see the prompt text appear in the template. You can select and format this to suit. Save the template, then create a new document based on the template.

Click on the prompt, type in the text and you’ll find the prompt will disappear, being replaced by the typed-in text in the same format. In fact, the field self-destructs, which is why you need to experiment on a document based on the template, rather than the template itself.

Another reason we revisit this trick is that reader Chris Cox asked if a similar trick could be performed in Open Office. We’ve had a look in Star Office, which should be functionally identical, and the answer is that it can – and rather more simply than Word.

Start a new document and save it as a template. Go to the Insert menu, then Fields, Other. Turn to the Functions tab, select Placeholder as the type, then Text as the Format. Type the prompt text in the Placeholder box. You can also type something in the Reference box – this will appear as a pop-up hint. Click Insert, then Close and you should see the prompt text appear, flanked by chevrons. Save the template, and the job is done.

While we’re on the subject, we may as well collect the set. With Wordperfect X3 the way to create a new template is less than obvious. Go to the File menu, then New from Project. Click the Options button, then choose ‘Create WP Template’. If the Template toolbar isn’t visible – that’s the one with ‘Build prompts…’ – then switch it on from View, Toolbars.

Click on ‘Build prompts…’ and up will come the Prompt Builder. Click the Add button and type in the prompt text. You can repeat this for various texts, and you have the option of linking to address book fields. When you have all the prompts you want, click back in the document at the point you want the prompt to appear, highlight the appropriate prompt in the list, and hit the Paste button.

Finally, we haven’t forgotten Ability Write users. Here you can use the simple expedient of typing a prompt in the correct position, instructing the user to select the prompt text and replace it with their own. And that solution will work with any word processor.

Hyperlink hint
Further to our comments in a previous Hands on Word processing on preserving Word hyperlinks, Keith Fletcher passed on a useful tip. If all the files containing hyperlinks and all the files to which they are hyperlinked are moved as a single package at the same time, then all the hyperlinks will continue to work.