We announced the community driven translation of Zoho Sheet last week on Sep 13th. We immediately got a request from an user to support the Romanian language in translate.sheet.zoho.com. We added it on 14th and within 3 hours of adding, 42% of the messages were translated to Romanian. Dutch and Portuguese (Brazil) which were at around 96% were brought to completion. Within a day, the Romanian language stood at 84% completion. It soon became 99% complete yesterday, and today we are adding it to our main site. Now users can choose the Romanian language by clicking on the Language link after signing in at sheet.zoho.com. A total of 4 users worked on the Romanian Language and brought it to completion just within a couple of days.

8 other languages (Greek, Catalan, Spanish - Argentina, Tamil, Serbian, Kannada, Telugu and Polish) were requested and we have added all of them to translate.sheet.zoho.com. They are in different phases of completion.

Would you like to help translate Zoho Sheet into your language? Then head to http://translate.sheet.zoho.com.

Update: Radu Capan, the user who requested the Romanian language and who has been actively contributing to it, has been blogging about this here and here.

Popularity: 5% [?]

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Yesterday, we rolled out an update to Zoho Sheet that includes Image Upload, Safari Support etc. There is one other important concept that was part of the update….community driven translation on the user interface. This is a new way of translating web applications at the UI level, driven by the community. The experiment starts with Zoho Sheet.

Check out http://translate.sheet.zoho.com/

If you want to help translate Zoho Sheet in your language, select ‘WYSIWYG‘ mode for the language and you’ll be directed to Zoho Sheet user interface where you can start translating right within the application.

The translation process is very simple. Move your mouse on the word you want to translate and an ‘Edit’ icon appears. Click on the icon to specify the translated word and click save. Thats it. You can continue this process to translate all words. Words highlighted in yellow are the non-translated words and the ones highlighted in blue are the translated ones. If you can’t translate all words, just save it and leave the other part for other users to translate. If you are an expert in translation, we also have ‘Power Mode’ to do quick translation.

We also maintain history of all the previous translated versions for each language. Once the translation reaches about 80-90%, we plan to add it to supported languages list in Sheet.

While we currently support 13 languages in Zoho Sheet, we thought it might be better to give you the control to translate the application in the language you want. If you don’t find your language in the list, let us know and we’ll add it.

The below video gives you a quick overview of how this works.

Please do give this new concept a try and let us know what you think.

Popularity: 6% [?]

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Zoho Sheet now supports inserting images into your spreadsheets. You can also import spreadsheets containing images. Inserting image via an URL will follow in a later update.

Zoho Sheet also now works on the Safari browser (version 3.x). We have fixed the major issues in Safari. Some more minor things need to be corrected. We also intend to support Opera in the future releases.

Other notable features include:

• More currencies - Euro, British pound, Japanese Yen and Indian Rupee in addition to US Dollar.
• View the Zoho Sheet interface in Simplified Chinese language (in addition to 12 other languages).
• Zoho Sheet’s Remote API now supports the CSV format too.

The following presentation captures the new features.

Popularity: 6% [?]

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While Zoho Creator was the first Zoho app to have an exclusive blog dedicated to it, Zoho Sheet became the first to have a complete help book made for it. Check out the book at devGuide.net. Many thanks to Jacek Artymiak!

Lynn Aleshire of Anchorage, Alaska has been using Zoho Projects to help her daughter with her school work. And this got referenced in an article titled “Checking the Kids’ Homework Over the Internet” by Christopher Lawton at the Wall Street Journal as well.

Richard MacManus at ReadWriteWeb is having a series of posts on Web Office this week and this post has a poll on word processors. Vote for Zoho Writer if it is your favorite.

At Bootstrappr, Jessica Hupp in a post titled “The Green Entrepreneur’s Toolbox: 100 Networking Resources, Guides, and Links“, lists Zoho as one of the green tools that entrepreneurs can use for a paperless office.

Zoho Office Suite: The Zoho Office Suite has lots of great tools, but the greenest one is Zoho Meeting. You can use this tool to share desktops, hold online meetings and more, reducing the need to travel for collaboration.

We got a tremendous response for Zoho Writer moving offline using Google Gears. Blog search results in Ask (our favorite as it gets the most comprehensive results!), Technorati and Google. Thanks to all bloggers and analysts who wrote about this interesting development!

Popularity: 40% [?]

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The latest Zoho Writer update added a few more goodies. In addition to English, we have had a Japanese version for quite sometime. Zoho Writer is now available in a lot many languages as well. Soon, there will be Chinese and Portuguese versions.

Zoho Sheet too has added support to more languages (to the initial five).

One main and valid complaint from our users is that the UI across Zoho services lacks consistency. And we have just started addressing it. We introduced the easy ‘Switch to’ option in Zoho Writer first and most other Zoho services now have it. Now, the collaborative chat functionality in Writer has been made similar to the one in Sheet. Clicking on the small text bubble at the bottom-right of your screen will open the Chat tab to the right. More UI related updates soon.

The last but not the least, a very important update has happened in Zoho Writer. Full search was disabled for sometime in between (due to performance issues) and you were able to search on document names & features alone. You can now search within documents as well. For now, we support searching in English alone and search for other languages will be available soon.

Do test drive the new features and we will be glad hearing your feedback.

Popularity: 4% [?]

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When we released the Zoho Online Office - Facebook mashup, it got a very good welcome from the innovative bloggers as the first online office suite to be available within Facebook. We knew students would love to share and do their assignments with their friends when logged into Facebook. And it showed when TechCrunch’s interns listed Zoho as one of their Top 10 Facebook apps & Read/WriteWeb made it a part of their ‘Top 10 Facebook Apps: Work‘ list.

Not just the 20-something students, the 40-something Robert Scoble liked it as well. He didn’t list it since he didn’t have anything public to share. As said in your Kyte.tv channel, hope we get to see Podtech’s stats in a public Zoho Sheet soon, Robert
Then came this blog post from Andre Malan, a student from the University of British Columbia, Vancouver (he is also the winner of the ‘International Leader of Tomorrow Award’) where he says,

In my last post “Facebook… you’re dead to me” I lamented at the way in which Facebook apps have killed the usefulness of Facebook as a social networking application. I was wrong (at least to a certain extent) and two events since then have convinced me of that fact.

The first event was discovering that Zoho now has a Facebook App. Imagine, students can find their classmates on Facebook using the courses feature (and if Facebook takes that away I might just disown it again!) and then work collaboratively with them using Zoho.

The above post reiterates our faith in students loving to have productivity apps in their Facebook account. If you are a student reading this, be aware that you can do much more than sharing what you like & poking friends around in Facebook Go ahead, add the Zoho Online Office App to your Facebook account and see the difference it makes.

We came across an interesting blog post by Shanna Germain as well. In a post titled ‘I (heart) Zoho‘, she literally gushes about all things Zoho.

Granted, I’m probably the last person on the planet to discover Zoho, but I am now officially in love. And this is coming from someone who has been a die-hard Microsoft Office advocate for years.

I’ve been using Zoho Writer as my web-based writing app for a while now (I like it better than Google, because it’s easier to switch between projects, and because you can see all your projects without opening a new window; however it could use a few things to make it my ideal processor. Still, they seem to be making regular upgrades, so I have faith).

And their Zoho Creator rocks! (I can’t tell you how long I’ve been waiting for a web-based way to keep track of my writing submissions). It’s easy to edit, easy to use and you can even embed it into a home page. I also love Zoho projects, which is very similar to Basecamp in its design and use.

Plus, their customer service (especially for a company that offers free products) has so far been out of this world.

Thanks to the Techcrunch interns, Scoble, Shanna, Andre and the student community which has made Zoho part of their life routine!

Popularity: 17% [?]

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We recently added the STOCK function in Zoho Sheet. Using this, you can now add stock quotes to your spreadsheets. You just need to specify the symbol and the type of data you want (optional).

Examples:

=STOCK(”MSFT”)
=STOCK(”AAPL”, “VOLUME”)

Change in stock quotes are automatically reflected in your spreadsheets with a max of 30 minutes delay. But you would need to reopen your spreadsheet or your published spreadsheet for the changes to show. Stock function is available under the Stock category and under the Financial category in our functions dialog that appears when you click on the fx icon.

There are some limitations to it. This cannot be currently used in nested functions, nor can it refer other cells. We hope to support these things in the future.

Note: Stock details are provided from free stock sources available in the Web. The data may be delayed up to 30 minutes. Also the data provided is solely for informational purposes.

We have also added support for 7 more languages - Portuguese (Brazilian and European), Danish, Italian, Russian, Swedish, and Dutch. This is in addition to the existing languages of English, French, German, Japanese and Spanish. Do you want Zoho Sheet in your own language? Send us a mail to support at zohosheet dot com.

Other features include HTML and printable views of public spreadsheets, more shortcuts like Ctrl+Home, Ctrl+End and some fixes in charts. Have a look at our What’s New page for more information.

Popularity: 7% [?]

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Zoho Applications (Writer, Sheet and Show) are now available on Facebook and we are excited about this. We got several requests from many users and well wishers like Krish asking us to do this integration. Considering the fact that 30% of our users are students, we couldn’t resist.

So, what can you do with this application?

You can now create documents, spreadsheets and presentations from Facebook. You can also view and edit all your existing documents, spreadsheets and presentations (both personal and shared) from Zoho Writer, Sheet and Show. Here is a quick screenshot.

This makes Zoho the first office app on Facebook. Do give it a try and add it to your profile. This application provides a good view of all your documents in a single page.

Talking about providing all documents in a single page, let me pre-announce something else here. We are working on way to better organize your documents in a single place (compared to our application specific organization). We will reveal more details on this soon.

Meanwhile, do give our new Facebook app a try and let us know what you think.

Popularity: 32% [?]

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…or should I say ‘Office for your iPhone‘. This is fun project going live in record time (thanks to our APIs and of course our team).
iZoho (no, its not an online desktop :)) is an easier way to access your Zoho Apps on your Mobile…atleast, iPhone for now. Sure, you can use Zoho Apps in their current form on your iPhone, but there is lot of stuff you don’t need on your mobile phone. So we simplified the interface and just provided simple features you’d normally use on a mobile phone.

We have three applications available currently in iZoho - Zoho Writer, Sheet and Show which lets you view your documents, spreadsheets and presentations in Zoho. Currently you can view and edit your documents, but you cannot edit your spreadsheets and presentations (you can only view them). You can also create new documents and view your presentations in landscape mode. There will be more features coming as we move along.
Frankly, we don’t know how this will work on iPhone as we haven’t tested it. It certainly works well on Safari so we hope it’ll be a non-issue. In any case, we will be fine tuning this over the next few days.

As I mentioned earlier, a device with a big screen, built in Wi-Fi, good usability and a full fledged browser will only improve the chances of practically using web apps on a mobile device.
Do give it a try and let us know what you think (support at zoho.com). Below are some screenshots.

Popularity: 31% [?]

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Japanese users of Zoho Writer are in for a treat. Thanks to our Japanese colleagues who are putting in a lot of effort in translating the Zoho services’ UI screens, Zoho Writer now joins Zoho Sheet in providing a Japanese UI. In your Zoho Writer account, click on ‘Options’ -> ‘Settings’ and you will find the language option there.

Soon we will be adding other language UIs to Zoho Writer (and other Zoho services) as well.

Popularity: 11% [?]

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