GreenDOC: Environmentalists and Minimalists, Rejoice!

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GreenDOC: Environmentalists and Minimalists, Rejoice!

By EAN ⋅ August 28, 2007 ⋅

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Developer: N/A
Version: N/A
Price: Free
Operating Systems: Linux, Mac OS X, Windows
Check out GreenDOC here.

The Story of the Word Processor with an Identity Crisis

Hey look! It’s another new Web 2.0 word processor. Unlike so many of the other web based word processors, GreenDOC looks like it’s catering to people who just need a quick, minimalist word processor to put that final polish on their documents. Think of it as the Snipshot [review] of online word processors.

While the minimalist approach works great for an online photo editor - it falls short in the word processor marketplace. GreenDOC just leaves out too many features that are totally necessary and the entire product doesn’t really come across as a workable instrument for those of us who need to draft written works of any length.

There are several major problems with GreenDOC as a word processor. The first is the lack of a spell check. Normally this is fine for a Firefox [review] user like myself (with built in spell check) - but GreenDOC’s programmers have somehow managed to prevent my browser from spell checking the field. Sure, GreenDOC is a snap to use, but I can’t actually draft a halfway decent document without a spell checker.

Another problem is that I cannot save to my hard drive through GreenDOC. What kind of a deal is this? Do they really expect me to copy and paste my text to another word processor instead of just saving it straight away? Doesn’t that defeat the purpose of an online word processor?

Alright, one last gripe before I get into some of the good points of GreenDOC. The spiffy AJAX styled open animation is slow. Damn slow. It takes me nearly as long to type a paragraph as it does to open one of my previous documents.

You’re probably wondering what good can possibly come of GreenDOC at this point in my review. Well, there are actually a couple of cool features that I really liked. For one, I didn’t have to register to test out GreenDOC. Google Docs and Zoho Writer [review] both require registration before use, so not having to register for GreenDOC really scores the program some points. Also, there are some great formatting options on GreenDOC - some of which I would only expect to see in higher end word processors.

This leads me to a conundrum. Is GreenDOC a heavy hitter word processor that is designed to replace Word - or is it a lightweight that competes with programs like Notepad, Textedit, and Bean [review]? I want to say it’s a lightweight. But it also seems like it wants to be a heavyweight. So I’ll just call it a case of mistaken identity.

Once the guys on the GreenDOC development team take care of some of my gripes, I will be more than happy to recommend this web application to just about anyone in need of a basic word processor. However, you should just stick with more powerful online word processors like Google Docs and Zoho Writer until then.