In this article I'll cover Zoho Writer, Zoho Sheet and Zoho Show - comparable to Word, Excel and PowerPoint.
Zoho Show
Users can import PowerPoint or OpenOffice presentation to Zoho Show. On the plus side, pretty much all you really need is here: text editing, a selection of fonts and symbols and the ability to import graphics. On the minus side, there are no drawing tools or animation and fonts are pretty limited, but for some presentation designers that could be a plus.
You can run Zoho Show's presentation from the internet and even use a remote - pages change with a simple key click. Presentation can be private or public, with their own URL. They can also be shared remotely - with an email invitation to those you want to view the presentation and then you control the show. Ideal for phone conferences and presentations.
Did I mention it is free?
Zoho Writer
Writer offers a pretty good interface, with your online file to the right and standard editing tools. You can import many different file types and export to Word doc, Open Office, PDF, Rich Text and Text. Writer also offers features to email, share the file, and save the file as a template.
I wrote yesterday about Zoho Writer's ability to allow multiple users to edit a document at the same time.
While Zoho offers superscripts/subscripts for manual footnotes or endnotes, why is it most of these apps don't handle footnotes or headers/footers? As you can tell, I'm nitpicking here - there's really not much to dislike about Writer.
It is also free!
Zoho Sheet
Sheet is the suite's spreadsheet application and can both import and export Excel. There are over 300 built-in functions, chart/graphing and you can assign stylesheets to worksheets. Coming soon is the ability for multiple people to edit the spreadsheet at the same time.
About the only thing that bugs me, and this is a feature of all of the online spreadsheet applications I've used, is how the function is implemented. It is easy to add a function like IPMT (calculation a payment value for a loan) by just clicking on the function. However, once I move the cursor away, there are no cues as to what variables the functions takes! How about just dropping in the cues with the function?
Zoho Sheet is also free!
Update: Arvind from Zoho answered a few questions I had about their applications:
For your free applications – what are the size/space limitations?
For now, there is no space limit. We may limit for the free personal user versions in future to say 1GB but we haven't decided on this yet
Sorry, only import is available as of now. Export to HTML will be available soon. We will be taking up export to .ppt/.sxi later
Diane:
Thanks for the mention.
When you are not very well known, there are certain set of advantages we can enjoy :). I am glad people are starting to notice the Zoho suite now.
Keep watching zoho.com. More apps are on the way.
Raju Vegesna
Zoho
Posted by: Raju Vegesna | July 12, 2006 12:20 AM | Permalink to Comment