Zoho Writer

I'm surprised no-one else has reviewed Zoho Writer recently. Well... It's not great word-processing software, but compared to Microsoft Word and Google Docs it's definitely better in terms of privacy. It can mess up sometimes, but as long as it works, it works. And the Android app definitely works like it should.

Issues I pointed out almost a year ago (for the online web version):

• Spelling and grammar check feature (Zia) can be off sometimes.
• ChatGPT integration (plus generative AI, Ask Zia), which requires an OpenAI key.
• Zoho logs me out every month, and they're very vague about how long each session lasts.
• The extensions and the sidebar is so annoying. I can't move it out of the way nor can I remove the extensions.
• Zoho just will not shut up about announcements and webinars. They always have to feature a notification at the top-right corner, and there's no way to turn it off. It'll just show up every time you open a document.
• Documents won't load as quickly if they have a lot of characters/pages or tables.

Another issue is that when you're logged in to your account in a private window, you need to refresh the main page for Zoho Writer every time you want to edit or even view a document.

Worked great for collaborative editing with 15-20 contributors. Was really helful for that, efficient and free. Limitations are that formatting needs to be redone in final document, and that a document got corrupted once (but you can revert to an older version). Great for the price

Zoho Writer is free, which pretty much gives it an instant advantage over Microsoft Word. The fact that it's in the cloud, so to speak, makes it more convenient than Open Office (at least in my mind). And I think Zoho offers a more detailed interface and more features than Google Docs.

Just some of my opinions. It's a very solid word processor, in my opinion.