Wow, this week came and went much too quickly. I must have gone through a hundred different web sites trying to find a site worthy of being site of the week. But, after all the searching, I think I’ve found something that most people will find well worth their while.
The site is called Zoho.com. Zoho offers a multitude of online tools that they have broken up into two categories called the ”Office Suite” and “Productivity Tools”.
The Office Suite includes Zoho Show (PowerPoint clone), Zoho Writer (Word) and Zoho Sheet (Excel). The Productivity Tools include Zoho Projects, Zoho Creator, Zoho Planner, Zoho Chat, and Zoho CRM.
Now if you’ve missed the boat when it comes to all the online applications, they have their ups and downs just like anything else. Some of the good things about them is all your stuff is online, which means you can access it anywhere. You also don’t have to install anything on your computer and the functionality is very similar to what most people are already used to.
However, some of the drawbacks are the same as what makes these Web2.0 apps so promising. The fact that they are online means you have to have an internet connection anytime you want to access them. What happens if the day you are suppose to give your presentation that you worked long and hard on and the network is down? Another thing is you are trusting your information and files to someone else. If the service is ever shut down or hacekd you could lose everything. There are also some features that are not yet available that would be useful.
However, for the general user who doesn’t want to spend hundreds of dollars on Microsoft Office, these apps are a great alternative (of course, so is OpenOffice).
Also be warned that I’m not going to go into the Productivity Tools for two reasons. There is just too much to cover in one post and I think the majority of users will get the most use out of the office tools.
So let’s get started.
Zoho Show
Zoho Show is their newest online app and is the equivalent of MS PowerPoint. It obviously doesn’t have all the bells and whistles as PowerPoint and the biggest thing people will miss are the fly-ins and slide transitions. Other than that, you have the normal options such as add new slides, change fonts, change the background and add pictures.
In addition to this, there are some great features that really make an online app, an online app. Being a web designer, I loved the ability to add snippets of HTML code directly into a slide…but the more I got to thinking about it, the less I could understand what someone would use it for. It suggests using it to embed charts and graphs, but it makes more sense to me just to click the “add image” button…
Under the “actions” drop down menu you can choose to make your presentations public or you can actually invite people to view it remotely. There was also an option to view the slide show as HTML, but I didn’t have much luck with this and the whole thing ended up looking a little wacky. Another nice option is the ability to Import MS PowerPoint files and OpenOffice SXI files. I didn’t test this, but it could definitely come in handy.
So, despite it’s lack of features in a few areas and a couple quirky/buggy instances, Zoho Show is well worth your time if you just need to throw a quick presentation together to show a colleague or friend across the country.
Zoho Writer
There are a ton of online word processors out in the wild, but few of them can even come close to the functionality and dependability of Zoho’s Writer. Of course you have all the basic formatting options available, but I think how perfectly everything works is what really sets this apart from other online word processors like Writely and ajaxWrite.
Of course there are all the commonly used formatting options that you would find in Word but again, it’s the new options that make these programs so useful.
Just like all apps on Zoho, you can share your Shakespearean-grade writings with other people by making them “shared” or “public”. They have even built in an auto-save function for those of us who still don’t remember to save on a regular basis (yes, I’m raising my hand too). You can also save documents as templates if you create similar papers over and over again.
Once you’re done editing your masterpiece, you can Publish it to your blog or just add it to your document roll, or as they call it, your “doc roll”. Being a blogger, I think I could really make use out of this feature. You can also export the files to just about any file format available including MS Word, SXW (OpenOffice), PDF, ODT, RTF, plain text file and HTML.
If anyone needs to do online word processing, this is the place I send them. You can’t find the functionality and available options in any other one on the web.
Zoho Sheet
This post is already getting longer than I had anticipated, so Zoho Sheet is going to get the shaft just a little bit.
Basically this is the same as MS Excel or iRows. Once again, you obviously have all the options you would expect such as formatting options, insert and delete rows/columns and insert charts.
What you may not have expected is the vast amount of built-in functions. I couldn’t find much missing between this and Excel which seems to be quite as feat because of the complex nature of some of the functions.
Well, there you have it…a much extended version of site of the week. Sorry for the length but it just goes to show the enormity of Zoho.com and how well they have put everything together. I, of course, do have one major complaint about the service though.
When I was testing everything, I had to setup an account for each different service. How come they couldn’t make it so I can sign in to Zoho.com as a whole, and then have access to the entire office suite? It would have been nice to be able to see a list of my documents–writer, sheet and show–all in the left-hand navigation.
Well, these things aren’t quite ready for prime-time quite yet. But, they are close and I would strongly recommend playing around with them and seeing if they offer enough flexibility so next time you might just not have to drop $500+ on another Microsoft product.
Check out Zoho.com now.
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