Web-based word processors keep closing the gap with Microsoft Office. Since its launch, Zoho now has 650,000 users, a 30 percent increase from just last November, the company tells us. It is doing 2 million user sessions per month. And its users have created more than one million documents on Zoho Writer (1.6 million, if you include its online presentation and spreadsheet products, Zoho Show and Zoho Sheets).

Today, Zoho released an update to Zoho Writer that includes:

Docx Suppor—the ability to export documents in the new docx Word file format (this is in addition to existing support for doc, txt, html, pdf, odf, sxw, rtf files).

Thesaurus—a thesaurus in ten languages (English, Czech, German, Greek, French, Irish, Italian, Polish, Russian, and Slovak).

Groups—Now you can save emails forgroups instead of re-entering each one every time you want to share a document.

Enhanced support for Endnotes/Footnotes, Headers/Footers—Formatting is now maintained when a document is exported, as are manual page breaks.

Zoho still has along way to go to catch up to Microsoft Word, and it trails Google Docs in usage, but it is making steady progress.