Week 8--Thing 18: Zoho

Trying out Zoho for the second time. Accidentally deleted the first attempt in Preview. Watch out for the Revert button.

Happily, blogger let me paste my test text into the blog, so two birds, one stone, etc., etc.

The learning curve is manageable. Anyone familiar with Word will be able to adapt easily.

The offline option requires installation of Google Gears, currently in Beta version only. Right now it only runs on Firefox, according to what I read, though it's available for Mac 10.2 and up, Windows, Windows Mobile and Linux, so it has broad platform accessibility.

The toolbar is clean, compact, and user-friendly. So far I'm finding the word processor to offer most of the most-used functions.

The sharing features look like they'll support collaborative projects well. Student group work should benefit tremendously. This is very 2.0!

The spellcheck works, though anyone wedded to Word's automatic underlining will have to switch to the "old fashioned" manual spell check method. I haven't found a grammar check yet. It it's not there, some people will either skip it, or want to copy and past their work into Word for that option. It does paste into Word.

The tagging feature is brilliant. Persons using Zoho who tag regularly will be able to find their documents easily.

The spreadsheet function is easy for me to use. I'm a basic spreadsheet user, anyway, not needing the higher calculation functions for most of what I do. An interesting test would be to see if I could use this program when importing student files from the office, which I currently do through Excel and a flash drive.

I miss the keyboard command shortcuts I get with an installed program. Everything seems to be controlled from the toolbar.

I didn't spend a lot of time with the presentation tool, but it looks okay, except I couldn't find a help section in the time I had to experiment with this. I couldn't see how to import a picture into my test show, and had to give up. I found a demo of the program on a separate page, but that didn't help while I was working on the test slide. Consequently, I won't recommend this to a beginner. ZohoShow accepts presentations from PowerPoint and OpenOffice, which is a clever way to get OpenOffice users to migrate to Zoho. My experiences with OpenOffice on the Mac have not been pretty.

All in all, Zoho has a lot to offer. Collaboration projects, tight budgets, 2.0 afficionados will all like this.

Major drawbacks are two-fold. Being web-based, Internet access is a factor. Then, there is the nagging feeling I always carry concerning any tool--email especially--that is so accessible to the world at large. I have issues with Gmail's archiving practices (see my earlier blog post), and I think Zoho may fall into the same category. Privacy is important, and I am not at all convinced that any of these tools are very secure. So, while it has a lot to offer, bottom line isI would use this tool cautiously.