The Zoho Office Suite: Is it Worth Your Time?

In an earlier post, I wrote about Glide 3.0, a virtual desktop that can be accessed from any computer around the world with just an internet connection, allowing people to work more freely and share files with co-workers, friends, or family.

Zoho offers a suite of applications similar to Glide’s, Microsoft’s, Apple, and Google. Like Google and Glide, Zoho is based online, allowing access to files instant and easily. Zoho can allow a business to continue to get work done even when they are traveling. Collaboration and file sharing is easy with Zoho and can be the difference between getting a project done on time or going over budget.

What you Get with Zoho

When you first visit Zoho, you will see two columns titled Productivity & Collaboration Apps and Business Apps. This gives a list of all that Zoho has to offer. You can sign up for free and take advantage of these great applications that are compatible with Microsoft Word and others.

In this post, I will briefly discuss three of the many applications, Zoho Writer, Zoho Sheet, and Zoho Show. These three are the most common apps that people using Micrsoft’s tools usually want to find an alternative. So here they are.

Zoho Writer

What can Zoho Writer do for you? Well for starters, you can access it anywhere in the world with just an internet connection. That means you can access it from your iPhone while say waiting at the airport! You can create and edit documents any way you’d like. If you are working in a group, you can allow multiple people to work and edit a document simultaneously. No longer do you have to get a Word doc from a colleague and then cut and paste into your Word doc and re-format to make it all work. If you have a lot of Word docs, and who doesn’t, and are worried about compatability, don’t! Zoho Writer allows you to import your existing Word docs, OpenOffice, text files, html, rtf, jpg, gif, and png files without problems. You can even share your documents with your friends or publish them on the web for everyone to view.

Zoho Sheet

Zoho Sheet allows you to collaborate, share your work with others just like with Zoho Writer. You can import from Excel and export it back if that is the format that is required. A new feature that has been added are Macros and Pivot Tables. To see a short tutorial on them, click here.

This application is very similar to Excel, which makes for an easy transition. I had no problems using it and find it better than Excel in a lot of ways.  Then again, to me, anything is better than Excel.

Zoho Show

Want an alternative to Power Point? If you must use a slide format, maybe give Zoho Show a try. Similar to Sheet and Writer, Show allows you to work from any computer with an internet connection. You can share and collaborate with colleagues online, editing and viewed in your browser window. You can even give presentations to clients anywhere in the world with Zoho Show. This is a good alternative to traveling or a quick presentation meeting. Another great feature is that you can embed your presentations onto your website or blog for easy viewing. This is a similar feature to SlideShare, which is more of a social media website than a productive suite of tools.

Conclusion

I give Zoho two thumbs up. I am really impressed with their suite of tools and ease of use. They have hit on the cornerstones of Web 2.0, which is collaboration and moving work online. I think Zoho is definitely worth your time. I have been using it for over a year now and enjoy that I can connect to it wherever I am in the world. It is a direct competitor of Google and its suite of applications. I will have a review of Google’s online tools soon. Stay tuned!