Week 8, Thing 18: online office tools

Google Office has improved a lot since I last used it. The spreadsheets are much more sophisticated now, with many more functions. I tend to make large Excel files with a bunch of worksheets and a lot of hyperlinks that need to update as totals update, and Google Spreadsheets now has this function! Love the freezing rows, too. Here's my Google spreadsheet: http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=phsMokIEfqvQLatATqhaQLA

I'm not nearly so enthused about Google Docs. I'm a power Word user and I use track changes extensively while editing, use a lot of find and replace with wildcards, and do tons of formatting. But if Google Docs can dream up a better system than Word's endnotes and footnotes, I'd be all for it (no endnotes or footnotes now). And they do have keyboard shortcuts, which I depend on--I can be soooo much faster if I don't have to take my fingers off the keyboard. The sharing features are very cool--RSS feed for changes, email, invite collaborators, create an event with collaborators in Google Calendar (one of the few Google features I don't use--I have to use Outlook for my calendar because it synchronizes with my PDA). And as you can see, I published a document directly to my blog (below). But the export functions are also very nice. They're good tools for a lot of projects.

Hey, this is web 2.0: the Internet is your computer. :-)

Zoho: the word processor style is nicer than Google Docs. (I feel so disloyal! I love you for everything else, Google!) It's more familiar (i.e., looks more like word. :-) It's nice that the HTML tools are right up front--especially layers. I like using layers, especially after building my latest website in Dreamweaver. The template library isn't as big as Micro$oft, but it is also FREE and is just a cool feature. Ooh, you can email docs into your Zoho account. Neato! And again, great sharing and exporting tools. No RSS though.

Zoho Sheet is okay. I don't think it's as easy to use as Google Spreadsheet, but carrying over the basic layout from the word processor is efficient and helps you use the whole suite.

Zoho Show--enhh. Yawn. Without cool templates, it's very, very dull. The good thing would be that you can import PowerPoint files and then export them as HTML or make them publicly available or embed them in a website. But to actually create workable presentations would be mighty difficult.

Zoho Notebook, Zoho's answer to MS OneNote, is really pretty cool, cool enough that I installed the Firefox plugin to play with it some more. For some reason, the images I inserted by URL didn't work, but video worked fine, and there's way cool stuff you can add to your notebook, like RSS feeds, audio, and other files, and you can publish the page online or to your blog and share it with friends.

My Zoho Notebook:


Zoho Wiki, Planner, Chat, and Meeting look like great integrated products, but I'm not so much interested in them. But Zoho Creator, a database program, is definitely something I'm going to look more into. You can create web forms with it and I think it might be an easy way to create an online patron request form. Maybe.

Let's see if the form I made works--try it out! It should email the results of the form to me, so I'm going to try it out myself after I post.


Okay, I officially love Zoho Creator. That was a ten-minute form, tops. :-) Zoho might get my vote for office-type applications, even though I still think Google Spreadsheets is the better Excel knockoff. This kind of FREE software is great for sharing documents between colleagues, for our patrons to be able to save their stuff without having to bring a disk or drive, and heck, for building web forms. I'm really excited about the web forms. I've never bothered learning to do them before, but this is soooo easy. All these options!!

Update: MY FORM WORKED! Thank you, Zoho!