New in Zoho Creator: Searchable Lookup, Exposed Formula Field and Flexible Custom Actions

January 24, 2012 | By raagavan

There has been plenty of activity going on at Zoho Creator lately; regarding Forms, Views, and everything database. The changes they bring are intended to achieve greater convenience in terms of usability, and it comes as a result of increasing responsiveness and customization. To name a few,

Searchable lookup:

You know Look-up fields. That list which you use to pick values from fields on other forms? It just got better. If you are looking up tens of records, then it wouldn’t make a big difference, but if you have tens of thousands of records, then you’d have known how long the browser takes to load them all.

Not any more, no matter how many records you have. We’ve given it auto-complete feature. In addition to the pick-list, you can also type the value.…

How Zoho Creator found its way into a Business School Curriculum : A Success Story

October 4, 2011 | By Aparna

Time and again, businesses from varied backgrounds deploy customized Zoho Creator applications for their varied needs. While it is easy to imagine a few run-of-the-mill applications which can come in handy, the truly creative and innovative use cases that our users come up with never cease to amaze us.

We take pride in showcasing such ingenious Zoho Creator applications built by some of our enthusiastic users. Today we are here with yet another usergroup that has taken the usability of Zoho Creator to an altogether different level.

The Insti:

IIT Kharagpur is one of the most prestigious educational institutions in India. Offering a plethora of courses in graduate, post graduate, management and doctoral studies, being an IIT-ian is every student’s dream.…

Just In : Subforms in Zoho Creator

September 28, 2011 | By Aparna

Zoho Creator makes building on-the-fly business apps a breeze. And today it gets even better: Introducing subforms!

Zoho Creator users are familiar with the many fields you can include on a form. For example, we’ve had a Look Up field for a while. Lookup fields are useful when you want to associate data in one form with a single piece of data in another form.

But what happens if you want to associate one record in a form with multiple records in another form? For example, what if you have an application of students and you want to keep track of the classes they are taking? Students will be attending more than one course. That’s when subforms become very useful.

In this case, you can create a form that holds the student’s general details (i.e Name, ID number, etc), and another form that holds the course details (Course Name, Instructor, etc).

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Build Order Forms, Increase Sales: Zoho Creator Payment Module

September 14, 2011 | By Aparna

Just recently, the

payment module in Zoho Creator was introduced. With the help of this module, users can set up a payment gateway using their PayPal account. Once this gateway is set up, users can build a variety of applications that involve collecting payments, donations, etc. Our enthusiastic users have come up with a dozen applications that use the payment module in innovative ways. Today, I am showcasing a simple e-commerce application using your familiar Zoho Creator forms.

The heart of the application is an order form. Potential customers can place their orders for the goods offered for sale through this form. Not just that, they can also pay for the orders that they placed. In this sample application that I created, I am offering discounts on bulk orders, sending email confirmations of the order and generating invoices to send to the customers.…

Can Small Businesses Benefit from Custom Software Apps?

September 8, 2011 | By raagavan

Every business can benefit from custom software applications, regardless of the service or product it offers. However, if you are a small business, spending on the right applications is particularly crucial due to a tighter IT budget and being more vulnerable in the dynamic corporate world. This could lead to conflict about whether you should spend on generic desktop software or custom web software.

To resolve this conflict, we look at the key performance indicators of any business: the data about its customer-practices and business process management. What the organization has learned about its customers and how effectively it uses this data to provide better and relevant solutions to its users is what keeps them on the charts.

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Prototyping with Zoho Creator: A Unique use-case!

August 31, 2011 | By raagavan

Zoho was a platinum sponsor at this year’s CRM Evolution Conference, held in New York on August 10. The event brought together many CRM users and vendors, and although CRM was the focus of most discussions, we were looking forward to hearing about Zoho apps too.

And so, we were happy to hear from Charlie Isaacs, a Zoho Creator enthusiast. In addition to working with Alcatel-Lucent, Charlie also works as a social media strategist for Genesys Lab.

When asked about how Zoho Creator simplified his requirement, Charlie had something unique to tell us: he prototypes using Zoho Creator.

Listen to Charlie explain how he does it:

Whenever Charlie gets a new idea for a project, he prefers to use a prototype to propose his plan.…

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