This past week I tried Google Apps and Zoho. I had already tried both. In Google Apps, I had used the word processing and spreadsheet programs and liked them. I tried Zoho when I was looking for an online database application, so this time I tried its presentation application. I really like the design templates that Zoho offers; however, I had a difficult time with Zoho. Using Safari, I received a warning that Zoho wasn’t compatible with my browser; but I decided to try it anyway. The templates didn’t display as shown and getting all of the tool bars to show up was impossible–even after resizing the window, the objects palette was still cut off the right side. Using Zoho in Firefox was a lot better, and I was able to view the objects palette. But the display still did some unexpected things. I liked Zoho’s look but it was frustrating to use. That was surprising to me since I had no such issues when I used Zoho’s database application.
Web-based office applications are definitely very useful for collaborating on documents, and I’ve used them to work on documents and share them with other staff. Having offline access to these documents is something that would be useful for those times that Internet access isn’t available. I’m glad that Google made this improvement.
WONDERLUST 