Zoho Sheet was painfully slow for around 6 hours from Sunday 8:30 pm PST to Monday 2:30 am PST. We apologize for the slow response time. This happened basically due to a huge number of requests (hundreds of thousands) to couple of public spreadsheets which were linked to from a popular website. We restored the site to normalcy by redirecting public spreadsheet views to a different part of the infrastructure there by reducing load on our servers serving regular users.

We hadn't anticipated that a spreadsheet (we are not talking about a popular video here!) would get hundreds of thousands of views in a matter of a few hours. We are working to speed up and avoid such performance bottlenecks when public spreadsheets become very popular. It is not a difficult problem to solve (caching), just one we didn't anticipate.

Again, we apologize for the intermittent issues and slow response times in Zoho Sheet last night. Until we put in a permanent solution (about 2 weeks), please contact us at support to let us know if you expect your spreadsheet or document is going to get a lot of page views, so we can plan ahead and redirect the traffic accordingly.

Zoho Sheet has this "Link External Data" functionality, which can be used to mashup with data on the web. It can sync your Zoho spreadsheet with data in public CSV files, HTML tables and RSS feeds. Zoho Sheet will basically fetch data periodically from the configured URL and update the spreadsheet automatically. You can then analyze on the external data by applying formulas or drawing charts. You can also publish / embed the resultant chart or a specific range or the whole spreadsheet. It gives you ample possibilities to mashup data from the web. A word of caution: While fetching data periodically from external websites, especially HTML pages, make sure you agree to the terms and conditions of the website.

Here is a short presentation which walks you through the various steps involved in configuring External Data in Zoho Sheet. It takes an example of automatic import of data from a public Zoho Creator view. The same can be done on a private Zoho Creator view by enabling private permalinks in Zoho Creator.

(view the presentation in full screen for better clarity)

Are you using this feature already? If so, let us know how you are using it.

After our Macros and Pivot Tables update in April, we did couple of updates in Zoho Sheet and here are the highlights.

New Theme - Mint Blue

The first thing you are likely to notice is that Zoho Sheet now sports a light blue theme as in the screenshot below (click on image to enlarge). This blue theme has been made as the default theme. You can select the various themes from the Themes menu at the top.

Public Spreadsheet URLs

We have made the URL of your public spreadsheets much shorter and much more readable. For example: http://sheet.zoho.com/public/sripathyramesh/crm-calculator. Your existing public URLs and embedded spreadsheets will continue to work as well.

We have also provided a page for an user's public spreadsheets. For example http://sheet.zoho.com/public/dreamisle/ lists the public spreadsheets of dreamisle and you can find some nice spreadsheet puzzles there. There is also an RSS feed provided for an user's public spreadsheets.

You can now export a public spreadsheet by appending .filetype at the end of the URL. For example: http://sheet.zoho.com/public/username/documentname.xls will export the spreadsheet to XLS format. Supported extensions include xls, sxc, csv, html and pdf.

We also show the number of views of a public spreadsheet. They are available at the top of a public spreadsheet. We have been tracking views since the last 3 months.

Charting Enhancements:

We have done some enhancements to our charting engine.

- You can draw charts on a different sheet in the same workbook.
- Charts on discontiguous data ranges are supported as well.
- The Y-Axis scale of charts will automatically be adjusted depending on the values.
- We have also changed the default chart colors as seen in the above screenshot.

More enhancements in Charting on the way.

Other Enhancements:

• Zoho Sheet is now available in Norwegian language thanks to our users who translated them. Zoho Sheet is now available in 20 languages.
• Auto Sum functionality has been enhanced. It will now automatically select the range at the top or left, when you press the Auto Sum (Sigma) button or use the shortcut Alt+=.
• Some performance improvements have been done in Formula Recalculation and Range selections.
• Some fixes have gone in too.

Read our What's New page for more detailed information.

Keep using Zoho Sheet and let us know your feedback.

We added a new feature in Zoho Viewer last week which allows users to set an expiry time on the documents uploaded in Zoho Viewer. After the specified time, the document will automatically be deleted from our servers and the link to the document will cease to work. You can also set the document not to expire at all. Refer the image below on the choices available.

The expiry information is available via the Info link in the document page.

Other updates in the last few months include:

1) Japanese version of Zoho Viewer. If you access Zoho Viewer with your browser's locale set as Japanese, then you will see the Japanese version. It was launched in December.

2) A new Slideshow link for ppt/pps/odp/sxi files, which enables you to run a slideshow in full screen mode.

Here is our introductory blog post on the Zoho Viewer. Do try out Zoho Viewer and let us know your feedback.