Fri, 01 Sep 2006
Zoho, the Good and Bad
Zoho is a web based office suite of useful applications.
I came to know about Zoho and thought of giving it a try. I summarize
the goods and bads of zoho as below.
Why I like Zoho :
- Whenever I create documents, spread sheets at my workplace, I have
to send them via email or have to copy it in a thumb drive to
read/edit them at my home. Most of the time I just forget to copy
it. Sometimes I send email to exploit Gmail's 2GB free space but
will end up having so many with different dates but with slight
modifications and sorting and finding them is another hassle.
- In my workplace I use Japanese Microsoft Office 2003 whereas I am
using english version of Office XP. Though there are not many
problems with 2003 and XP versions, sometimes I end up with
different fonts, double byte character alignment problems.
- Zoho is free of course.
- Very fewer menus which is enough most of the time for normal users.
- Zoho writer is very fast and sometimes I feel it is a desktop application.
- Good support for Japanese double byte characters.
- It is good that a medium sized Indian company has produced a very
good and innovative product competing with the stanford brains of Google.
- Most of the features of Zoho writer are in par with Google's
Writely and beats that in few areas.
Why I dislike Zoho (Mostly Zoho Spreadsheet):
- First of all I hate to create individual accounts to use Zoho
writer, spreadsheet etc and remember all the passwords.
- Some Zoho applications use email id whereas some other
applications use just a plain name. I created accounts for all
their free applications and luckily got a single user name. But
when I try to post a bug in their forum, I was suppose to sign up
(Why again ?) but someone else has taken my user name.
- The application generally takes lot of time and check your
patience to load even with a fibre optical broad band connection
in Japan.
- There is no cursor displayed in the user name, password and other
input fields (sometimes)and you never know what are you doing
currently (Zoho writer is fine). (I am using Firefox and I don't
think it is a browser specific problem)
- When I try to save the application, open a document, the browser
simply freezes and sometimes I am not able to do anything other
than simply gaze at the screen.
- Not much support (almost no) for unicode or double byte characters
like Japanese with Zoho spreadsheet. I am able to import a already
created spreadsheet after a hard time and warning messages with
??????????????? display. I am able to open and see the
contents. If I input any Japanese characters in the same sheet, it
displays nice while entering but only to be later converted to
??????, whereas the Japanese characters I created thro' MS Office
shows correctly.
- If you enter the wrong password in several attempts (thrice ?),
the system locks the password but how come you know that? keep
entering some wrong password and stare at the browser window to
read the instantly vanishing error message (too much AJAX?)
- If I type something in a new sheet and press TAB, it moves to the
next cell easily. But with a 136KB spreadsheet (of course with
japanese contents), even if I enter a alphanumeric character and
hit TAB, it takes a long time to move to the next cell.
- I can type english alpha numeric characters with the focus on a
cell. But to type Japanese characters, I have to click on a cell
with the cursor positioned before typing anything.
What I expect from Zoho
- Most products are developed primarily for the english speaking
community and fail to realize the importance of unicode and double
byte character support. I would like Zoho (spreadsheet) to make
improvements in this area.
- If there is a way to change the menus to a different language like
Japanese or Tamil depending on the user preference, it will
attract a much larger user space.
[/work]
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