Last week my colleague called me and told me to open a free account with Zoho.
Not wanting to sign up for another social networking site, I initially
refused. However, as she assured me that this had nothing to do with
finding me a date, I gave in.
Zoho, according to their Google description, is a “suite of online
web applications geared towards increasing your productivity and
offering easy collaboration.” In the case of my co-worker, she told me
that she had uploaded a multiple user spreadsheet to Zoho Sheet that previously was flying around via e-mail to users in different offices and even different companies.
So I took two minutes to run through the formalities and—ta-da—just
as she had said, I was able to access the spreadsheet through the Zoho
portal. Now, you may be thinking that this tip is not so interesting;
there are other products that offer the same “file hosting” or “virtual
server” services. While that may be true, what I find super cool about
this site is that Zoho Sheet allows multiple user to access the file at
the same time and make real-time edits. You can see who is accessing
the document and send messages to other users. Messages to other
users? Oh no, it may be just another social networking site! All
joking aside, I find Zoho Sheet to be a great way to collaborate on
spreadsheets and when I need to take a copy on the road with me, I just
export a local Excel file to my machine.
Zoho has many other features besides Zoho Sheet, including Zoho Writer and Zoho Show
which I presume are kin to Microsoft Word and PowerPoint. There are
also Business Apps for more complex things such as invoicing and
project management, though it appears you only get a free trial with
some. You can explore all things that Zoho has to offer at www.zoho.com.