Working Online

5/31/09 - Version 10

The "hot thing" on the Web these days is the use of online document processors and online spreadsheets. Google's products are the best known, but for my money, the products from Zoho are generally superior. (Try both!) But why would anyone want to use them in the first place?

Why Go Online? And Why With Zoho?

Reasons To Use

The reason most commonly given is for collaboration and sharing. With both Google and Zoho, the ability to share a document among multiple users is attractive. This includes sharing by a single user with multiple computers. Working online eliminates the problems of keeping track of which data is where, synchronizing updates, etc.

A second reason is publishing. Being able to easily publish a document on the Web is very attractive. While there are lots of ways to publish on the Web, both Google and Zoho make it painless. Zoho makes it easy to share part of a spreadsheet and to create document lists (a "doc roll").

A third reason is the minimum impact on your computer! I recently had to use an old notebook while on the road, and it wasn't up to running both Firefox and NeoOffice without long and frustrating paging delays. Using online documents was much faster. This can give new life to old computers! And it may be equally attractive for the new class of sub-notebooks.

A fourth reason is that the online services probably do a better job of backing up your data!

NOTE: If the only reasons for running online are to synchronize your own computers and have backup/restore, read this.

Why Zoho?

Why do I like Zoho's products better than Google's? There are several reasons:
  1. They seem to generally run faster.
  2. They provide more standard word processing and spreadsheet features, although this changes with great frequency as both Google and Zoho continue rapid enhancement.
  3. They provide some nice "extra" features.
  4. Google imposes size and complexity restrictions on spreadsheets that are more severe than any applied by Zoho (if there are any).
Still, Google provides some nice features that aren't available, or are superior, to Zoho.
  1. Google handles PDF documents superbly.
  2. Google provides a really straightforward sorting feature for spreadsheets. Zoho provides more powerful sorting capabilities, but if you have simple sheets that require sorting, Google is far better.
  3. Google provides stock quote functions that are (subjectively) easier to use, but beware the restrictions.
  4. Google provides a simple online drawing capability.
Both Google and Zoho provide a "file manager" type interface for managing your documents.What the world really needs is a single Web file manager that will account for both Zoho and Google docs!

New Frontiers

Zoho has introduced a variant on their document processor, Zoho Wiki. While it works as a document processor, it's specialty is collaborative web site development. This is a real piece of work! It's not something I have much of a need for, but it's indicative of how much development is going on in this area. This would be a boon for small businesses. Google has a similar offering, called Google Sites. As I keep finding in comparing Zoho with Google, Google's offering is less powerful but easier to use.

Zoho Notebook is another interesting product. With Notebook, you can create notebooks that contain all the kind of things you'd expect, but also Web pages, Zoho documents, audio, and video. This is a great tool for research since you can move freely between raw data you've collected and your final output documents. Also, as far as I know, this is the only tool that allows online word processing and spreadsheet documents to be encapsulated inside a larger Web entity.

Zoho Notebook has gotten a nice boost due to Google's announced abandonment of Google Notebooks. Until recently, these were not equivalent products, despite their names. Google Notebook provided a simple way to capture and organize text from Web pages. The user has almost no control of formatting. Zoho Notebook allowed all kinds of things to be captured, but the user had complete control over formatting. For simple uses, the extra work required for formatting in Zoho Notebook was, in many cases, simply not worth it.

But now Zoho Notebook has introduced a new kind of notebook page which works very much like Google Notebooks. There are a few kinks in the implementation, but in most cases, it can be a replacement for Google Notebooks. Zoho Notebooks has the added advantage of having multi-page notebooks, with some pages having Google style text capture and others having combinations of text, graphics, video, sound, etc. What's more, these hybrid notebooks can be published

I also like Zoho Viewer. This allows you to publish most any kind of document on the Web. That is handy enough in it's own right, but I particularly like the ability to publish a document through Viewer rather than through Writer or Sheet. That's because I can publish the document, then continue working on it without publishing all of my intermediate work.

Zoho Creator is perhaps the most impressive Zoho offering. It allows you to easily construct a multi-user application based on formatted files. Old timers in the industry (like me) will be amazed at how complex applications which might require weeks or months to put online can be constructed in hours or even minutes. This is not an application which you might not need often, but when you do need it, it's stunningly good.

There's a bunch of other Zoho products that don't interest me much (with the exception of Zoho Planner), but they might interest you. It's worth taking a peek!

The Bottom Line

If you need the capabilities online documents provide, they're wonderful. Zoho's offerings have more capability and are more responsive. Of course, there is the concern that while Google is going to be here for a while, Zoho is a much smaller and less certain company. I don't worry about it too much - if Zoho gets into financial trouble, it's likely that some larger player would step in and acquire them.

Zoho Writer Hints

Keyboard Shortcuts

* Ctrl + A - Select All
* Ctrl + S - Save
* Ctrl + X - Cut
* Ctrl + C - Copy
* Ctrl + V - Paste
* Ctrl + F - Find
* Ctrl + B - Bold Text
* Ctrl + I - Italicize Text
* Ctrl + U - Underline Text
* Ctrl + L - Justify Left
* Ctrl + E - Justify Center
* Ctrl + R - Justify Right
* Ctrl + J - Justify Full
* Ctrl + Z - Undo
* Ctrl + Y - Redo
* Ctrl + K - Add /Modify Link
* Ctrl + Home - Top of the Document
* Ctrl + End - End of the Document
* Shift + Arrow keys - Select content in a document.

Document Tagging

Zoho Writer uses tags as folder concept to organize your document. At the bottom of each document there is blue tag icon (third from left), click on the tag icon to enter tags of your choice. Add the tag to the left side panel by clicking on the tag and selecting "Add to left panel" option.

You can also tag multiple documents with the same tag name and have them organized on the left side panel as folder.

Zoho Sheet Hints

Keyboard Shortcuts

Save - Ctrl+S
Copy - Ctrl+C
Cut - Ctrl+X
Paste - Ctrl+V
Bold - Ctrl+B
Italics - Ctrl+I
Underline - Ctrl+U