Thread: zoho personal

Signing up at Zoho gets you a mailbox (with unlimited storage) and 200MB of storage for online files. As well as Writer, Sheet and Show taking charge of the word processing, spreadsheet and presentations, other applications include contacts, calendar, woo creation, bookmark management, database application development and a notebook. All of this - as well as your files - are shown in the Desktop, which also features a multi-tabbed file viewer.

Zoho Writer is well equipped, with 20 typefaces, built-in styles, tables, footnotes, an equation editor and a one-click table of contents. Around 70 spelling checkers from Afrikaans to Zulu are listed, though we only tried the English version. A clever touch is a word count that runs whenever you save a document. If you have an Echosign account you can digitally sign documents such as contracts, mail them, and have them digitally signed by the recipient and returned. Import and export formats include Microsoft Office DOC and DOCX, Open Office and PDF, though you can't edit the last. In common with the other components uploaded files are scanned for viruses, and there's a per-file limit of 10MB.

The Zoho spreadsheet is the star of the show, with nearly 300 built-in functions. Although there are only 27 chart types, user comforts including autofill of series such as weekdays or months, in-cell editing, and named ranges are all present. There's support for macros, with a built-in VBA editor, and you can pull in external data from a web page, web-hosted CSV file or an RSS feed. There's also support for pivot tables. For those who aren't spreadsheet experts, these let you analyse data in ways other than the row/column layout- for example, in a sales spreadsheet, finding the best selling items in each region. Like the other Zoho components you can share spreadsheets (or ranges from sheets) with other Zoho members, or embed them in your blog. Microsoft XLSX and XLS formats are supported for import and export, as well as Open Office.

Once again, Show supports Microsoft and Open Office presentation formats, as well as being able to export to PDF or HTML. You won't, however, get sound, transitions or other animations imported as these features don't appear in Show. The layout is conventional, with a slide-sorter on the left of the current slide and a pane for notes below. To the right is a pane offering a generous collection of well designed themes and on a separate tab there's a large range of shapes, flowchart symbols and clip-art on tap. You can also upload your own images in GIF, PNG or JPG formats.

Zoho Wiki lets you create your own wiki and share it with others. You can embed other Zoho objects such as documents and spreadsheets, as well as images and Youtube videos. Zoho Creator lets you design business database applications, either from scratch or from imported spreadsheets. You can also hire developers to do this for you, or purchase ready made applications in the Zoho marketplace.

The modestly named Notebook is best described as a scrapbook in which you can combine text, images, audio, video, and more from diverse sources for sharing. Contents of a Notebook can be shared at object level, so you can for example, share a page of text or an image rather than the whole document.

Finally, Zoho offers free Microsoft Office (2000-2007) plug-ins that let you edit your Zoho-hosted files directly from within Excel or Word, and save local copies for working offline from a toolbar. When you're online again you can upload the updated files to your Zoho account.


left of the current slide and a pane for notes below. To the right is a pane offering a generous collection of well¬designed themes and on a separate tab there's a large range of shapes, flowchart symbols and clip-art on tap. You can also upload your own images in GIF, PNG or JPG formats.

Zoho Wiki lets you create your own wiki and share it with others. You can embed other Zoho objects such as documents and spreadsheets, as well as images and Youtube videos. Zoho Creator lets you design business database applications, either from scratch or from imported spreadsheets. You can also hire developers to do this for you, or purchase ready¬made applications in the Zoho marketplace.

The modestly named Notebook is best described as a scrapbook in which you can combine text, images, audio, video, and more from diverse sources for sharing. Contents of a Notebook can be shared at object level, so you can for example, share a page of text or an image rather than the whole document.

Finally, Zoho offers free Microsoft Office (2000-2007) plug-ins that let you edit your Zoho-hosted files directly from within Excel or Word, and save local copies for working offline from a toolbar. When you're online again you can upload the updated files to your Zoho account.