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There’s a plethora of services available in Zoho, from online word processor to CRM. And each Zoho service has a separate team working on it. Naturally, each team’s priorities vary and we will see how this relates to the subject of this blog.

Recently, a user asked us the browsers supported by Zoho. The simple answer is Firefox (2.0 onwards) and Internet Explorer (6.0 onwards). But to know what browsers each Zoho service supported, we made a simple form application in Zoho Creator like below and sent it to all the teams, asking them to fill the required info.

And we heard back from all the teams within an hour! The page below lists the browsers supported by each of the Zoho services.

Another of our users asked about the languages Zoho’s UI is available in. For this, we created a Zoho Sheet and shared it with the teams. And the info got filled up as in the below Zoho Sheet.

A special mention is to be made of how Zoho Sheet handles UI translations. They have opened it up for the community to help them customize the UI for different languages. No wonder then that Zoho Sheet supports the most number of languages! (Think other Zoho teams will follow suit in adopting the same strategy)

Previous posts on the ‘How we use Zoho apps in Zoho’ topic :

• Using Zoho CRM to send our Newsletter
• Using Zoho Wiki for our Help Documentation
• Using Zoho Wiki for our Business Portals

We have used Zoho Creator extensively for solving many of our internal needs. We will profile such apps in the coming days. And to the readers of this blog, do let us know in the comments (or write to us) how you are using Zoho Creator, Zoho Sheet and other Zoho services for your personal / business needs.

Some of you may know that we recently launched Macros (and Pivot Tables) support in Zoho Sheet. With our recent update, we now have a new addition - Support for Visual Basic Macro Record & Playback in Zoho Sheet.

While writing Macros from scratch requires knowledge of Visual Basic, recording Macros for your spreadsheet just needs couple of mouse clicks. Under the Macros Menu, you’ll now see the ‘Record Macro’ option to record your Macro.

After you start recording, all the changes you make to the spreadsheet will be recorded and the appropriate Visual Basic code will be created at the back-end for you. Once you are done recording, you can view the Visual Basic Macro code and apply that Macro to other Sheets.

This video shows this functionality in action.

We have been rolling out quite a number of features and enhancements to our applications and some of them give us a great level of satisfaction.This new feature in Zoho Sheet certainly falls into this category.

The fact that Zoho Sheet is the only spreadsheet (apart from Excel) to support Visual Basic Macros says a lot about our focus on the depth of our individual applications. With feature-rich apps, we are trying to address the business needs of our user base.

Please give this new Zoho Sheet functionality a try and let us know what you think.

Related posts at : CenterNetworks, ReadWriteWeb, Profy, The Dallas Morning News, Zoli’s Blog.

We get this question quite often -

Does Zoho offer a backup function which will let me download all my data?

We have various options depending on each Zoho service.

Zoho Writer : Offers a variety of different formats that you can export a document to - doc, docx, pdf, odf (odt), latex, sxw, html, rtf & txt. Click on Export to see the options.

Also integrates with Google Gears. Offers upto 50 documents to be downloaded to your desktop. You can access these documents from http://writer.zoho.com/offline. Click on Go Offline to download Google Gears and your Zoho Writer documents

Zoho Sheet : Click on Export. Again offers a wide variety of options from xls to pdf to ods to xml. There is also a batch export option available from the sidebar.

Zoho Show : Open a presentation. Click on Export and you will see the options available (ppt, pdf, pps and odp)

Zoho Projects : Export all your tasks as an xls or csv file. Under Tasks and Milestones, click on Export button

Zoho Creator : Export all your data as xls, pdf. Also as RSS, JSON feeds etc.

Zoho Wiki : You can download all the pages of your Wiki as a zip file. Available under Settings -> Click to download the backup

Zoho CRM : Choose the module (Leads, Contacts etc) and click on Export. You can also export all your CRM data in one go also. We charge a nominal fee of $10.

Zoho DB & Reports : Export your reports as csv, pdf or an image file

Zoho Invoice : Export each invoice, estimate as pdf. Export customer’s info as VCard (vcf).

Zoho Notebook : Has an Export as mht option. The exported page can be viewed in Internet Explorer.

We will be coming up with more export options in upcoming updates.

A long time ago, I had a boss who did his main programming in Excel, except that he never thought of it as programming. He could do absolute magic with Excel, and would challenge engineers to match his productivity with the hottest programming language of that time, C++. Inspired by him, I even thought up my first start-up idea: building Excel based business applications. Just a few weeks ago, one of my investor friends was showing off his collection of Excel macros, with as much pride as he would show off his wine collection. Knowing people like that is why I am personally so thrilled with the VB macro support we unveiled in Zoho Sheet this week.

Excel macro programming (basically VB packaged with Excel) is perhaps the most under-rated languages out there. It embodies advanced functional programming techniques, yet remains extremely accessible. People who never think they have any interest in programming nevertheless churn out amazingly complex “personal apps” on Excel.

Zoho Sheet brings VB macros to the cloud. We have also launched a Wiki for people to share their macros, and learn from other people’s work. This is only the first step for us. We intend to support VB macros across the Zoho suite, particularly in Zoho Writer, and Zoho Creator. Eventually, our goal is to enable VB applications to move to the cloud easily.

Our support for VB macros is an illustration of the growing sophistication of online applications. The rapid evolution will continue, and within one, perhaps two, years online apps will look even richer than desktop apps in terms of functionality, while retaining their inherent collaborative advantage.

Rick Castellini has come up with a couple of cool screencasts for Zoho Writer & Zoho Sheet.

Zoho Writer :

Zoho Sheet :

Thanks, Rick! Expecting videos for the other Zoho services that you are using as well And to the readers of our blog, we highly recommend HelpMeRick.com. Rick and his co-blogger Adam, post excellent tips on computers there.

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Pai writes about using Zoho Creator and Zoho DB & Reports.

You can now build powerful and sharable databases online for free thanks to websites like Zoho. You don’t even need any special database development experience to create online databases that you can access any time from any browser.

Zoho DB & Reports offers the best “Free” online database service, hands down. It is extremely easy to create your own database and the performance is impressive. The databases run rather quickly which was a pleasant surprise. There doesn’t appear to be any limits in place for the number of databases you can create for free nor how large they can grow so I do not know how many records a Zoho database can contain. You can share any database with anyone you want by simply adding their email address and sending them a link.

Zoho Creator is another database creation service they offer but don’t get them confused. While they describe it as a Database Application builder, it does a lot more than that. Zoho Creator is a lot more complex than Zoho DB so it will not be as easy to use straight out of the gate. It offers an excellent interface builder for creating customized forms for your database application. They now even offer the ability to build database applications for the mobile platform and have their own API for those interested in building more complex databases.

Samuel Dean at Web Worker Daily & Rick Broida at BNET Business Hacks recommend Zoho DB & Reports too.

One of the good personal finance blogs that we follow is Ramit Sethi’s. Ramit in a latest post of his embeds Zoho Sheets to show how one can track the money being spent. Joseph (Joe) Kennedy has a nice chart of when to run your home appliances and save on your electricity bills. PGE customers in Portland, please take note. For others, you can prepare a similar chart. Publish it in your blog and it’ll benefit you & your readers. From Joe’s post,

Running at the wrong time of day can cost double or triple what it costs to run in off-peak hours. At current rates, that can add up to a few dollars a month. Granted, it’s not always convenient to do a few loads of laundry after 10pm. But, if you run one load a night, to keep up with the laundry generated, that wouldn’t be so bad.

As an aside, I love zoho.com. Dump Microsoft Office. Zoho is online. It’s free. It lets you save your documents into a format compatible with office. And easily embeds in your blogs. Nearly a dozen other tools, as well.

Ranjan Verma twittered about a Zoho Creator app which will search/compare different mutual funds. Hope we will get to see it in his blog (another one I follow for tips on personal finance & stocks!) soon.

Consulting Pulse writes about the Web 2.0 technologies & programs they use and which of them are worth paying for. About Zoho, they have this to say:

What did I ever do without an online word processor? Just one year ago I was happy wandering along in desktop land with my version of word, then I came across this in an internet search.

Absolutely changed the way I work! Today ALL of my documents are backed up on Zoho, all of my reports are there, I write the first drafts of my posts there and I am starting to use other elements of the service as well. For example, I am dead keen to learn about their project management software and will probably be starting a project there shortly.

If (when?) I ever go into business for myself Zoho will probably be my office productivity suite of choice.

Shameless Reviews (what a name!) on Zoho:

Everyone knows that MS Office XP dents the pocket. Worse with MS Office Vista. You’ll gurgle money to the tune of $300 for a bloated app that tends to require patch after patch. What would you give to have the functionality of MS Office without the price tag? (free) Visit Zoho Office. Don’t worry, you aren’t buying MS Office software online at some discount shop. You’re actually going to word process and spreadsheet your data fully online.

Imagine: now my laptop need to strain and groan under 2GB of bloatware! Once you zoho [Note to Zoli : here’s one more person using Zoho as a verb!], there’s no coming back. I know I’m hooked

Thanks to all the bloggers above for using Zoho! Be it a program to monitor your weight, tracking your monthly spend, reducing your electricity charges, investing in the right MF, backing-up your documents / database or managing your projects, remember, Zoho is there to help you out

ps : Site24×7, our website monitoring service is offering a 40% discount till this month end. Head there if you want your website(s) availability monitored round-the-clock.

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DigitalBucket, an online storage vendor recently integrated Zoho Apps into their application. If you have Documents or spreadsheets uploaded to their application, you can view, edit and save them within their application using Zoho. Presentations can also be viewed within their app.

They have a neat application with good functionality. We’d like to thank them for their integration.

Other online storage vendors who integrated Zoho into their application includes, Box.net, OmniDrive, MyDataBus, Steekr, FileDen etc.

If you’d like to integrate Zoho into your App, we’d love to work with you and offer our support. Also, we plan to extend our API for other applications soon.

Yesterday, we rolled out an update to Zoho Sheet that includes Image Upload, Safari Support etc. There is one other important concept that was part of the update….community driven translation on the user interface. This is a new way of translating web applications at the UI level, driven by the community. The experiment starts with Zoho Sheet.

Check out http://translate.sheet.zoho.com/

If you want to help translate Zoho Sheet in your language, select ‘WYSIWYG‘ mode for the language and you’ll be directed to Zoho Sheet user interface where you can start translating right within the application.

The translation process is very simple. Move your mouse on the word you want to translate and an ‘Edit’ icon appears. Click on the icon to specify the translated word and click save. Thats it. You can continue this process to translate all words. Words highlighted in yellow are the non-translated words and the ones highlighted in blue are the translated ones. If you can’t translate all words, just save it and leave the other part for other users to translate. If you are an expert in translation, we also have ‘Power Mode’ to do quick translation.

We also maintain history of all the previous translated versions for each language. Once the translation reaches about 80-90%, we plan to add it to supported languages list in Sheet.

While we currently support 13 languages in Zoho Sheet, we thought it might be better to give you the control to translate the application in the language you want. If you don’t find your language in the list, let us know and we’ll add it.

The below video gives you a quick overview of how this works.

Please do give this new concept a try and let us know what you think.

Zoho Applications (Writer, Sheet and Show) are now available on Facebook and we are excited about this. We got several requests from many users and well wishers like Krish asking us to do this integration. Considering the fact that 30% of our users are students, we couldn’t resist.

So, what can you do with this application?

You can now create documents, spreadsheets and presentations from Facebook. You can also view and edit all your existing documents, spreadsheets and presentations (both personal and shared) from Zoho Writer, Sheet and Show. Here is a quick screenshot.

This makes Zoho the first office app on Facebook. Do give it a try and add it to your profile. This application provides a good view of all your documents in a single page.

Talking about providing all documents in a single page, let me pre-announce something else here. We are working on way to better organize your documents in a single place (compared to our application specific organization). We will reveal more details on this soon.

Meanwhile, do give our new Facebook app a try and let us know what you think.

Richard Brandt at MIT Technology Review has an article on Zoho titled “Can Zoho beat Google?“. From the article :

Zoho has become a prolific designer of online software tools, releasing at least one new product every month for more than a year. It boasts 15 product offerings so far, including a word processor, a spreadsheet, a presentation tool, a Wiki, a project manager, a customer-relationship management (CRM) tool, a database, and a project-planning tool. Bloggers who have tried the software say it’s more robust than online applications offered by Google, and it offers better collaboration capabilities (for example, it lets multiple people work on a document simultaneously or sync spreadsheets with remote data from websites) than products from Microsoft. Zoho’s fans see it as the model for a new generation of Web-based applications that could displace expensive software sold by Microsoft.

Zoho is the suite to beat. A Gartner report released on March 12 placed Zoho at the top of its list of “Cool Vendors in Web 2.0,” five companies that offer “a glimpse into the future of enterprise innovations.” Says Gartner analyst Nick Gall, “Zoho is ahead in the user community and in the technology.”

Thanks to Richard Brandt & MIT! In other news, The Social Computing Magazine has a write-up on Zoho Notebook titled “Zoho Notebook: One-Stop Business Collaboration Tool“. And in a blog post on Zoho Notebook at weblogg-ed, Melinda Miller has this to say about Zoho Polls in the comments :

I really like zoho polls. One of my 4th grade teachers used it in class one time so now I use it all the time with my staff. We voted on our theme for next year, planning for next year’s holiday party, and staff shirt preferences. Here is a link to my school blog with the zoho poll embeded.

In a post titled “CRM on the Cheap“, Davey Moyers writes,

Looking for an inexpensive, robust CRM program? Why not check out Zoho CRM. The price is right, free for three users. I have been giving this system a test drive, and there’s power under the hood. Full CRM functionality. It lacks mobile capability or offline use, but otherwise this is a solid player for the individual sales rep or small team. It also boast Outlook synchronization that is as good as the competitors in this space. The features I especially find appealing are lead management, opportunity management, and sales quotes…. I spent four years using salesforce.com on a daily basis, and I would pit this program against salesforce.com in all categories save one. Offline and mobile are not yet offered. However, the print templates on Zoho are much better than salesforce.com. So you plan it, print it, execute it. Whatever “it” is.

Amit Agarwal has a nice post explaining how to embed Zoho Sheet’s charts in one’s blog. Zoho Chat’s shoutbox feature (embedding a chat window in your website) has been put to good use by a community named Cerebrals Hens Network. Cool background options, guys! And our recent REST API release got noted by Thomas Willingham & Go To India Web 2.0.

Thanks, one & all

Ryan McIntyre has a neatly done brief history of Excite presentation as an embedded Zoho Show slide show. ‘Connected Internet‘ recommends Zoho as one of the top 5 web apps that an enterprise can use. Here’s what the blog says about Zoho :

After trying them all, i am pretty much convinced that Zoho is currently the most advanced Office 2.0 suite in the market. What i like the most about Zoho, is that although it runs on the web, its set of features is rich, and would satisfy even the most enthusiastic MS Office user. In my opinion, Zoho Writer (the word processor) and Zoho sheets (the Excel like spreadsheet) are excellent choices for organizations that would like to cut their MS Office expenses (they are 100% free). I also like Zoho Creator, a nifty application that allows you to create database applications in minutes. If you don’t like to work on your office productivity suite on the web, you’ll enjoy Zoho Desktopize, a widget that allows you to work in selected Zoho applications in a desktop environment.

bemaNetwork, a group of experts for fighting SPAM write this about Zoho in their blog:

I have used several of the app’s myself and they are great, AJAX is being used here in force and it works marvelously. I am very impressed with the UI, the performance and what it delivers for the cost. Zoho.com we really appreciate these tools that you have made available, and want to share that with our members and friends. We hope that everyone that finds zoho will love these programs and use them everyday to replace your office or other productivity software, and maybe win a piece back for the developers!Great Job guys, we all love it!

We earlier wrote about Rick Roche and the surveys he does for his library. He is out with the results for his core biography survey. Wanna do such a survey? Try it with Zoho Creator. It is simple and easy.

Thanks, all

I am glad to announce yet another API partner for Zoho (Sheet) - Kearen. Kearen recently integrated Zoho into their Dashboard application. For those of you who don’t know Kearen, they offer dynamic data visualization solutions. In plain English, they gather data from multiple sources (like databases, Spreadsheets, XML etc) and show visually rich dashboards (built in Flash) integrating the data. This one liner does not do justice to what they do. I recommend taking a peek at their website for more details.

With this integration, Kearen users can bring in data directly from Zoho Sheet as another source (thanks to our API) and view it in their desktop. Rob Griebel from Kearen created this short video showcasing this integration.

We just rolled out an important update in Zoho Sheet. The key features include

- Collaborative Editing
- Zoho Chat Integration
- Extended API
- Open Document Sheet Support

Collaborative Editing:

With this update, multiple users can work on the same spreadsheet at the same time. When you open a spreadsheet that someone is working on, you’ll see a small message informing this.

From then on, all the changes made by multiple users will be reflected immediately.

Zoho Chat Integration

If you want to chat with the users working on the sheet, just click on the chat icon () at the bottom right corner and it’ll open up the chat interface.

APIs

We also extended our APIs for Zoho Sheet for reading more granular data like a cell or cell range. APIs are now available in 3 formats - XML, CSV and JSON (also JSONP). Complete API documentation is available here.

The following video demonstrates these functionalities.

Do give these new features a try and let us know what you think.

Update: I forgot to mention another significant feature we added with this update - OpenDocument Sheet (.ods) Support. Now you can import and export .ods sheets into Zoho Sheet. Thanks Samy for observing this.

We just rolled out an important update for Zoho Sheet improving our charting features. With this update, you can now create 21 different types of charts in Zoho Sheet (previously we had 4 types of charts).

Of course, all these charts are embeddable. I created a sample chart below from this page using our ‘link external data‘ feature.So the graph will be updated every hour if the data changes.

There are more features coming…stay tuned. Please do give this a try and let us know what you think.

Last week we added a new feature in Zoho Sheet which helps you to sync up with data available in the form of HTML tables in public web pages. We had this syncing up with public CSV files earlier, and now we have added support for tables of data in web pages. So if you want to have your spreadsheet filled in with data automatically updated from a particular web page and do some analysis on it, then this would be quite useful. If you have used Web Query in Excel, then you will be able to relate to this feature.

Here is a sample spreadsheet which makes use of web query:

In the above spreadsheet, the exchange rates are fetched daily from http://x-rates.com. Based on the exchange rate, the total sales in USD is calculated (refer cell F21).

And here is how you can configure your spreadsheet to make use of this feature. Use the ‘Link External Data’ feature available under the ‘More Actions’ menu.

How are you using this feature? Share your story on our discussion forums.

Apart from this, we have improved the page loading speed (especially when you login). More performance improvements are coming.

With nothing much to do this weekend due to rain, I decided to play with my Wii. After enabling wireless access on Wii, I installed ‘Internet Channel (Trail Version)’ as another channel (This basically is a customized Opera Browser for Wii). What surprised me is that this is a fully functional web browser (unlike other mini versions). Why do I say this?

Well, you know that the Zoho applications are JavaScript/AJAX intensive. These Zoho apps (I tested Writer, Sheet & Show) worked perfect including dragging and dropping of charts in Sheet.

Zoho Notebook is another JavaScript intensive application. When I try Notebook in Opera on WinXP, I cant draw lines or move content around. But surprisingly, even drawing lines (and dragging objects) worked perfectly on Opera for Wii. Below are some screenshots.

Of course, I do not expect people using Zoho or other web apps on their TV/Wii or iPods…but as I said earlier, this is fun.

Shailendra at ‘ApniTally’ has a good demo for Tally 9 created in Zoho Show, explaining users how to create a payslip.

Miriam at ‘illuminea blog’ is using Zoho Planner and notes that it is a cool tool. More at her blog.

Helene Blowers at Learning 2.0 has a nice podcast titled “Web Applications - Taking Productivity beyond the Desktop”. To quote her, “With Zoho and web-based applications, the possibilities are endless”. Thanks Helene. Click here for more.

Friends at Jambav are using Zoho Sheet and Zoho Creator for their checklists and surveys.

How are you using Zoho?