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How many people really use all those features in Microsoft's Office suite? In all likelihood, only a fraction of those who have it installed on their PCs at home or at work. The same goes for the individual applications within Office. How many people use all the features in Word? Very few — just as not many people use all of the features in PowerPoint or Excel (if they even use them at all).

That explains part of the appeal of Web-based software, including online document editing tools such as Google's Writely . Why pay for software that you hardly ever use, especially if it just clogs up your hard drive and gobbles up all your RAM? Another point in favour of Web apps is the portability factor: they save you from having to copy a document to a thumb drive or a laptop, or send it in an email, because they are always available (anywhere you have Internet access, that is).

Writely is one of a number of Web-based word processors that have appeared on the market over the past year or so. The company was bought by the search engine giant earlier this year for an undisclosed sum, and has become part of what observers see as Google's Office-style Web suite — along with Google Spreadsheets, Google Calendar and Google Mail. The service has always been free of charge, and is now integrated with the rest of Google's products, so that if you have an account with Gmail or Google Video then the same user name and password signs you in to your Writely account.

Using Writely is pretty straightforward. You click on the words "New Document" and the screen transforms itself (using a number of Web technologies known collectively as Ajax) into a Word-style view of a blank document. You can change the font size and colour, right or left-justify the text, and do most of the other things you might be used to in Word or any of the other common word-processing programs. Writely also auto-saves the document every minute or so, in case you need to revert to an earlier version, or your Internet access suddenly gets cut off.

You can upload any text or HTML file, as well as Word documents, and you can even set Writely up so that you can email documents and then open them on the Web site. You can save documents in any of those formats too, as well as PDF (Adobe's portable document format), and the OpenOffice format, which is a free, open-source competitor to Microsoft's Office. You can also publish whatever you've written to a blog, and create an RSS (really simple syndication) feed for the document that others can subscribe to.

One of the drawbacks of Writely for heavy Word users, however, is that when you import a Microsoft Word document, you don't get all of Microsoft's formatting, nor does it import images, tables, and so on. It mostly just imports whatever text was in the document. So it probably isn't the right tool to be using on documents that have a lot of those kinds of layout and formatting features.

One of the most interesting things about Writely is that because it is a Web-based service, it allows you to share files with anyone you choose. Not only does this allow them to see the file (which can be password-protected), but it allows them to edit it as well. You can even add multiple users. Writely keeps track of the various changes made by each user so that everyone knows who did what, and so that you can revert to an earlier version of the document if you choose to do so.

Writely isn't the only online word-processing service. A company called Zoho offers an entire Web-based office-software suite that includes Zoho Writer, which is very much like Writely. And ThinkFree Office has a Web-based document-editing service, as well as a downloadable version that offers complete compatibility with Word. But the fact that Google owns Writely and is integrating it with all of its other tools will probably make some users more comfortable with using a Web-based service, since they can be reasonably sure that it — and their documents — will be available whenever they need them.

Microsoft is also reportedly looking at offering a Web-based version of its second-tier Office suite (known as Microsoft Works), but what kinds of features such a service might have is not clear. At the moment, Writely is probably the best online word-processing service out there. It may not appeal to those who are devoted to Microsoft Word and all its various bells and whistles, but then how many people really fall into that category?