Zoho Blogs » Zoho Sheet

Browsers and Languages supported in Zoho

Arvind — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 13:25:05 +0000

There’s a plethora of services available in Zoho, from online word processor to CRM. And each Zoho service has a separate team working on it. Naturally, each team’s priorities vary and we will see how this relates to the subject of this blog.

Recently, a user asked us the browsers supported by Zoho. The simple answer is Firefox (2.0 onwards) and Internet Explorer (6.0 onwards). But to know what browsers each Zoho service supported, we made a simple form application in Zoho Creator like below and sent it to all the teams, asking them to fill the required info.

And we heard back from all the teams within an hour! The page below lists the browsers supported by each of the Zoho services.

Another of our users asked about the languages Zoho’s UI is available in. For this, we created a Zoho Sheet and shared it with the teams. And the info got filled up as in the below Zoho Sheet.

A special mention is to be made of how Zoho Sheet handles UI translations. They have opened it up for the community to help them customize the UI for different languages. No wonder then that Zoho Sheet supports the most number of languages! (Think other Zoho teams will follow suit in adopting the same strategy)

Previous posts on the ‘How we use Zoho apps in Zoho’ topic :

We have used Zoho Creator extensively for solving many of our internal needs. We will profile such apps in the coming days. And to the readers of this blog, do let us know in the comments (or write to us) how you are using Zoho Creator, Zoho Sheet and other Zoho services for your personal / business needs.

Zoho Notebook for your Stock Research

Raju Vegesna — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 18:32:28 +0000

Some users like managing their portfolio using a simple spreadsheet like this one (it uses our recently launched VB Macros, BTW).

While a spreadsheet is good one for such use, research is a different story. Apps like Zoho Notebook comes in handy in such cases. Good news about Zoho Notebook is, you can even include such spreadsheets inside your notebook.

Mike Hogan from Barron’s talks about using Zoho Notebook (and Google Notebook) for your Stock Research.

BOTH NOTEBOOK SYSTEMS make it easy to sort out the HTML-bound text, pictures and videos you want to keep from those you want to lose. Yes, popular desktop applications accept hyperlinks, graphics and other HTML gingerbread, but not with anything approaching predictability. Web elements can change a receiving file’s formatting; and, if your mouse stumbles over an embedded link, you can find yourself transported to an image or video application or some other Web page.

Google Notebook is better at selectively stripping out Web links and other formatting, or turning a big note into plain text with the click of an icon. Zoho Notebook is more oriented toward page-building than text conversion. It has standing menu options that let you create multimedia notebooks by mixing images, RSS feeds, spreadsheets, presentations and other non-text elements, or even record audio and video directly to a notebook. In addition to text- editing tools, it has a drawing toolbar for page layout and object manipulation — and a truly impressive ability to deal with disparate Web-page elements.

Google Notebook’s strength is in on-the-fly research, where the fewer mouse clicks, the better. But Zoho’s multimedia elements make for greater comprehension, and facilitate sharing. In this age of social media, being able to bounce your research and ideas off other market speculators is an important part of investing.

Both services let you create public folders online — including password-protected ones accessible only to approved collaborators. But Zoho Notebook has more version-control and collaborative features for group projects, as well as chat access via Skype’s (www.skype.com) instant-messaging and phone service. Both can be included as toolbars in Mozilla’s Firefox browser (http://en-us.www.mozilla.com). With a right mouse click, you have the option to capture a Web page’s URL to Google Notebook or the entire Web page to Zoho Notebook.

Full article here.

Research is obviously the core usage of Zoho Notebook. We have been making some good progress towards it for the next version to further simplify the research process with a better plug-in etc. More on that later.

Popular Public Zoho Sheets Causing Slowdown: Update

Ramesh — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 14:50:25 +0000

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.

Macro Recording & Playback in Zoho Sheet

Raju Vegesna — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 13:32:57 +0000

Some of you may know that we recently launched Macros (and Pivot Tables) support in Zoho Sheet. With our recent update, we now have a new addition - Support for Visual Basic Macro Record & Playback in Zoho Sheet.

While writing Macros from scratch requires knowledge of Visual Basic, recording Macros for your spreadsheet just needs couple of mouse clicks. Under the Macros Menu, you’ll now see the ‘Record Macro’ option to record your Macro.

After you start recording, all the changes you make to the spreadsheet will be recorded and the appropriate Visual Basic code will be created at the back-end for you. Once you are done recording, you can view the Visual Basic Macro code and apply that Macro to other Sheets.

This video shows this functionality in action.

We have been rolling out quite a number of features and enhancements to our applications and some of them give us a great level of satisfaction.This new feature in Zoho Sheet certainly falls into this category.

The fact that Zoho Sheet is the only spreadsheet (apart from Excel) to support Visual Basic Macros says a lot about our focus on the depth of our individual applications. With feature-rich apps, we are trying to address the business needs of our user base.

Please give this new Zoho Sheet functionality a try and let us know what you think.

Social Mapping Bret Taylor with 70,000+ FriendFeeders

Arvind — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 01:52:50 +0000

Akshay at Social Media Research Blog has done something very interesting. He wants to find how every user in FriendFeed is connected to Bret Taylor, FriendFeed’s founder (reminded me of a similar example in Malcolm Gladwell’s book, ‘The Tipping Point’ - the one mentioned there is actor Kevin Bacon). Akshay has all his data on Zoho Sheet containing more than 70,000 users listed along with their ‘bret number’ - the degrees of freedom or separation between you & Bret. That’s the largest public sheet that I’ve come across so far.

If you are on FriendFeed, find your ‘bret number‘.

One, two, three - Export data from Zoho Invoice to Zoho Sheet

Sivaramakrishnan Iswaran — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 12:31:22 +0000

Yes, three easy steps are all it takes to export your data from Zoho Invoice to Zoho Sheet. You can export and view all of your invoices, quotes, contacts, customers and items in Zoho Sheet. I am sure most of you would be using this feature already, exploring it for the benefit of others-

Let’s say you want to export and view all your invoices in Zoho Sheet, all you have to do is-

1. Select the “Invoices” tab.
2. Click on the “Export Invoices” link at the top.
3. Click on the “View” link in the Spreadsheet/CSV/TSV format.

That’s it! All your invoices will be exported and will be shown in a new window in Zoho Sheet. Now you can play with it as any other sheet document.

Hope you find this feature useful. We will be happy to hear your comments.

Just like Zoho Sheet, we will also be supporting Google Sheet shortly.

Happy invoicing.
Regards
Siva

Mashup with External Data in Zoho Sheet

Ramesh — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 16:46:55 +0000

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.

‘Open IT Online’ integrates Zoho

Arvind — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 12:33:02 +0000

Open IT Online is a Firefox extension that allows to open and edit documents and images from everywhere. Thanks to this extension, you will be able to open several types of documents directly in Firefox using online services (such as Zoho) without needing any software to be installed. In other words, it adds an option to your Firefox “Open With” dialog to let you open Word documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and more file types in the Zoho suite, Google Docs, ThinkFree Viewer & others. You can configure defaults for every file type - nice and convenient for fans of online editing. Open IT Online is a free download and it works wherever Firefox 2 or 3 does.

Here’s more screenshots & a nice video of how to use Open IT Online to view documents online with Zoho. Install the Open IT Online Firefox add-on to view/edit files directly online without downloading them.

Export/Backup Options in Zoho

Arvind — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 15:08:48 +0000

We get this question quite often -

Does Zoho offer a backup function which will let me download all my data?

We have various options depending on each Zoho service.

Zoho Writer : Offers a variety of different formats that you can export a document to - doc, docx, pdf, odf (odt), latex, sxw, html, rtf & txt. Click on Export to see the options.

Also integrates with Google Gears. Offers upto 50 documents to be downloaded to your desktop. You can access these documents from http://writer.zoho.com/offline. Click on Go Offline to download Google Gears and your Zoho Writer documents

Zoho Sheet : Click on Export. Again offers a wide variety of options from xls to pdf to ods to xml. There is also a batch export option available from the sidebar.

Zoho Show : Open a presentation. Click on Export and you will see the options available (ppt, pdf, pps and odp)

Zoho Projects : Export all your tasks as an xls or csv file. Under Tasks and Milestones, click on Export button

Zoho Creator : Export all your data as xls, pdf. Also as RSS, JSON feeds etc.

Zoho Wiki : You can download all the pages of your Wiki as a zip file. Available under Settings -> Click to download the backup

Zoho CRM : Choose the module (Leads, Contacts etc) and click on Export. You can also export all your CRM data in one go also. We charge a nominal fee of $10.

Zoho DB & Reports : Export your reports as csv, pdf or an image file

Zoho Invoice : Export each invoice, estimate as pdf. Export customer’s info as VCard (vcf).

Zoho Notebook : Has an Export as mht option. The exported page can be viewed in Internet Explorer.

We will be coming up with more export options in upcoming updates.

Syncplicity Integrates Zoho

Raju Vegesna — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 11:56:14 +0000

Syncplicity, a document synchronization tool integrated Zoho into their application recently. This Sync tool lets you synchronize your documents from your desktop (PC-only currently) to their web application.

If you have Syncplicity installed on your computer, you can right-click on a document on your desktop and choose the ‘Edit in Zoho’ option for editing your document. This opens up a window with the Zoho document editor. When the ‘Save’ button is hit in Zoho editor, it saves the file to your local folder and also your Syncplicity account, thus keeping your document in sync. This works with Zoho Writer & Zoho Sheet Apps now with Zoho Show to follow.

Similar editing option is also available in their online application to edit documents online. After you save the changes, the documents are saved on their servers.

And here’s a nice screencast done by the Syncplicity team, demonstrating the integration.

We’d like to thank Syncplicity for integrating Zoho. Our other API Partners are here. If you have integrated Zoho into your application, do let us know so that we can profile you here and list you as a partner in our partners page.