Standard & Poor's publishes the Case-Shiller® Home Price Indices on the last Tuesday of every month. The indices are calculated from data on repeat sales of single family homes. The indices are normalized to have a value of 100 in the first quarter of 2000. It is calculated monthly using a three-month moving average and published with a two month lag. We imported the data released today into Zoho Reports and created a few charts to see how the house prices have performed over the years.

There's also a separate chart that plots the Composite 10 and Composite 20 (an aggregate of 10 and 20 cities respectively) index values.


Inferences from the above charts

• West
  • Los Angeles, followed by San Diego are the cities where the prices peaked much (indices of around 275 and 250 respectively)
  • In Seattle and Portland, the prices peaked almost a year late when compared to other cities in the West (around Sep 2007 as against Sep 2006)
  • There was a mini bubble in Los Angeles in 1989-1990
    
• Midwest
  • Chicago and Minneapolis have seen the maximum rises
  • In Detroit, prices have fallen the most (given the state of the auto industry there)
    
  • Prices in Cleveland have almost remained level (just went up by 20 points)
    
• Northeast
  • During the bubble years, New York's prices rose at a faster rate than Boston's (from 1999 to 2004, prices rose almost at the same rate in both the cities)
  • In the 1987-1996 time period, prices haven't varied much in the two cities
    
• South
  • Prices rose the most in Miami, followed by Washington DC and Tampa
  • Like with Cleveland in the Northeast, prices in Charlotte, Dallas & Atlanta didn't rise by much
  • There was a brief bubble in 1989-90 in Washington, DC
• General
• The indices for many of the cities are showing a small uptick for April 2009
• Almost every region in the US has got uniformly affected by the current housing bubble
  

Do let us know your own inferences from the above. The data is available here. Play with it and create as many charts as you like. For example, the below is an interactive chart of how the indices in the Midwest cities have been since Jan 2001.


We will be updating the data on the last Tuesday of every month. The charts embedded above being dynamic will change automatically.

Related Links

• Screencast - How to Import data into Zoho Reports
  
• Screencast - How to Create Charts in Zoho Reports
  

Rabbit is a web-based operating system that connects people, processes and content, combining the power of social networking into an enterprise environment. A key component of Rabbit is its information sharing capabilities, which let users work on documents they’ve uploaded to Rabbit’s web workspace, and share this with other users. Rabbit has selected Zoho for this because of Zoho's proven ability to provide high levels of functionality and performance, and to provide a smooth transition for enterprise users from working locally on the desktop to working on the web.

All documents, spreadsheets and presentations uploaded and stored in Rabbit can be opened using Zoho. The documents and spreadsheets can be edited and saved back where as the presentations can be viewed. Below is a screenshot of files in Rabbit being opened using Zoho.



New documents and spreadsheets can be created too from inside Rabbit by invoking Zoho Writer and Sheet. This video by the Rabbit team explains the functionality in detail.

Rabbit has a 14-day trial. Try them out.

The latest update to Zoho Docs brings in a good many business-centric features. Let's see them in detail.

Groups Dashboard
When you login to Zoho Docs, you'll see 3 tabs - Desktop, Groups, Tags (with Desktop being open by default). Clicking on the Groups tab will get you a page where you can add Personal Groups & Organization Groups. For creating a group, you just need to give the email addresses of those you would like to be part of that group. You can originate a group chat, send a group mail & see the group's member details from the Groups dashboard. You can also view the files belonging to each group.


Note that only business users can see their organization groups and the administrator has the permission to create such groups. Non-business (Personal) users won't be seeing the organization groups.

Business Pricing Plan
We have introduced a new pricing plan for businesses. Plans starts as low as $9 per month for 15 GB disk space and 3 users.


Admin Console
As you can see from the pricing page above, the Administrator buying a business account gets an Admin Console from where the organization's Zoho Docs account can be configured / controlled. Features of this admin console include,

• Uploading a customized logo
• Registering for a new domain or configuring your present domain
• Adding the organization's users. This includes LDAP support & importing a bulk user list from a comma separated file
• Defining user role policies (whether a user can export/publish documents, create personal/org groups etc)
• Defining trusted IPs (IPs from where the organization's members can access the account)
  

A slideshow done in Zoho Show about this update below.

Test the new features in Zoho Docs & do let us know the features you would like to have.

As you may know, you can share the reports and tables with your colleagues & contacts in Zoho Reports, your effective online reporting & business intelligence service. And this makes collaboration a lot easier. Zoho Reports now provides fine-grained permission options while sharing. When you share a report or a table, you now have the choice to specify what can be done with the table/report by the user to whom its shared. Let's illustrate this with an example.

The following example consists of US GDP data (in actual and chained year 2000 dollars) over the years. For sharing the chart, click on Share -> Share this View to New Users.


In the dialog box that opens, give the email addresses of those you want to share the report with.


Now comes the exciting part. In the Permissions tab, you can specify what the shared users can do with the report you share with them. Whether they can Export the report's data and whether they can view the underlying data etc.


Similarly, there are permission options when sharing a table too. Like you can specify whether a table's data can be exported or modified (appending or modifying rows etc).


Supposing you want to share a number of tables/reports, you can do so from the Share option in the Explorer view. Check the Tables and Reports that you want to share, click on Share -> Share this View to New Users and choose the appropriate permission options.


Whether the sharing notification email is to be sent can be specified too.


Also, such fine-grained permissions can be provided when sharing with the Database Group. You can define a Database Group consisting of a set of email addresses. This feature comes in handy when sharing reports & tables to the same set of users (than sharing to the individual email addresses each time).


Try the new fine-grained sharing permission options in Zoho Reports & do let us know your feedback.

Related Links

1. Dynamic Chart Filtering and URL Data type in Zoho Reports
2. Zoho Reports : Pivot Table Enhancements
3. Quickly Generate Similar Reports in Zoho Reports
   

The latest update of Zoho Reports brings in dynamic filter in live charts and support for URL (HyperLink) as a datatype.

Dynamic Filtering in Live Chart     

Say you are analyzing how the various campaigns of your Google Adwords account have performed using your Adwords Reporting database in Zoho Reports. Let's say you have three campaigns for mountain bikes, one each for the Europe and the US and one for other countries/continents. And you want to look at the data from Europe and the USA alone. You can mouse over on the chart legend and uncheck that data alone.


Zoho Reports hides that particular data and will dynamically regenerate the chart with the remaining data.



You can click on the same checkbox again to see the hidden data back.



You can hide multiple data lines too. For example, you can see the data for the US alone (hiding Europe and Others) by clicking on the yellow checkbox as shown below.





The dynamic filter functionality is available on charts that are embedded in any of your web applications or blogs too. Embedding the chart used in the above screenshots below. Go ahead, click on the checkboxes and try the functionality yourselves.

URL Data Type

Zoho Reports now supports URL (hyper links) data type. You can now set a column data type as URL and store accessible web URL addresses in those columns. When you view the data, Zoho Reports automatically places a HTML link sign besides URLs, clicking on which will open the URL in a new browser tab.



Like what you see and interested in knowing more about how Zoho Reports can help you analyze your business data? Contact us for a personalized demo.

Related Links

• Measure your Google Adwords Campaign Performance with Zoho Reports
• See how Zoho Reports compares with a spreadsheet like Microsoft Excel

Rafe Needleman who hosts the Webware 100 awards every year has announced the winners for 2009. We'd asked you to vote for Zoho in this year's Webware 100 awards and you've responded enthusiastically!! Thanks for making Zoho a winner in the Productivity category. And congratulations to all Webware 100 winners!

Related Posts

1. Zoho : Webware 100 2008 Winner!
2. Zoho in PCWorld’s "The 100 Best Products of 2008"

We are delighted to announce that Zoho is one of the winners of TiE50 for 2009! The TiE50 awards are announced by TiE (The Indus Entrepreneurs), a global, not-for-profit organization dedicated to fostering entrepreneurs across its international network. See the full list of winners here. Congrats to all the winners!

The TiEcon 2009 conference is being held on May 15-16, 2009 at the Santa Clara Convention Center, Santa Clara, CA. Zoho is one of the event's sponsors and our CEO Sridhar Vembu will be speaking at the conference.

Humyo provides an online storage and backup service for both businesses and personal users. All documents, spreadsheets, presentations uploaded to Humyo can now be viewed, edited & saved back online using the Zoho API.

The below screenshot lists files in my Humyo account and right-clicking on a spreasheet file opens up a dialog as shown.


Clicking on the Open this document option will open the file in a new Zoho pop-up window, in this case Zoho Sheet's.



Likewise, documents (doc, odt etc) will get opened in Zoho Writer and presentations (ppt, pps, odp etc) in Zoho Show. The embedded video below by the Humyo team explains the functionality in detail.


Give Humyo a try.

The latest Zoho Reports update brings in the 'Query over Query' functionality, which has been one of the top request from our users. You can now have SELECT queries that combine already existing Query Tables. Let's see an example of how this comes in handy. Say you have a Sales table with sales figures for various customers, products, regions etc across years.



Say you would like to know who your Top 10 customers with respect to sales value were in 2006. Your query table would look like,



The above Query Table in 'View Mode' with the top 10 customers arranged in alphabetical order.



And now you want to know how much you sold to those top customers of 2006 in 2008. This is where the new functionality will come in handy. You will arrive with the required data by joining the base Sales table with the above top 10 customers of 2006 Query Table. The new Query Table will look like,



The above Query Table in 'View Mode' with the customer names in alphabetical order.



You can save the resultant query table and create the necessary reports over it.

With this new "Query over Query" feature, you can create very powerful reporting queries on your data and use it for your report generation and analytics. It also helps in organizing your queries into reusable functional units. To know more about how to create a Query Table, checkout this video.

Other Enhancements
Previously, direct import was restricted to CSV files. And you had to do a copy-paste from Microft Excel (XLS) files. From now on, you can directly import XLS files too.



Also, for xls, html files larger than 3 MB, you can now zip them and import into Zoho Reports.

Try these new features in Zoho Reports and let us know your feedback comments.

Related Posts

• Zoho Reports : Pivot Table Enhancements
• Relational Data Modeling in Zoho Reports
  
• Quickly Generate Similar Reports in Zoho Reports