Zoho Launches Writer 2.0: Looks More Like Word 2007

Frederic Lardinois — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 09:13:22 -0800

Zoho just released version 2.0 of its Zoho Writer word processing application. While the company has added quite a few new and useful features in this release, the most obvious change is a new user interface which looks a lot like the 'Ribbon' in Microsoft Office. Thanks to this new user interface, the application now feels even more like a desktop application and has a far more professional and uncluttered look.

]]> New Interface

Clearly, this new interface, dubbed the MenuTab by Zoho, was inspired by Microsoft's Ribbon interface, which is slowly becoming the standard interface paradigm for Microsoft applications. Zoho smartly keeps the most often used functions like undo/redo, copy, cut, paste, and save outside of these tabs so that they are always available (something MS Office also does thanks to the Quick Access Toolbar). In our tests, the MenuTab worked just as advertised, and if you are comfortable with the MS Office 2007 interface, you will feel right at home in the new Zoho Writer.

Zoho plans to make the MenuTab the default interface for all of its productivity applications in the near future.

New Features

Zoho also added a few new features to Writer. Among these are improved auto-insert fields for dates and page numbers in the header and footer, a word and character count in the status bar, a LaTeX editor, and the ability to change your page layout to landscape mode. Collaborative editing is probably the most important new feature (and a necessary one, given that Google Docs has been doing this for a long time), but as Rafe Needleman points out, it's too easy to overwrite another user's edits.

]]> Discuss

Edit Google Spreadsheets on Your Mobile Phone

Frederic Lardinois — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 09:42:32 -0800

Google just released an updated version of its Google Docs spreadsheet product that finally allows you to edit your spreadsheets on a mobile phone. Now, if you have a G1, iPhone, iPod Touch, or Nokia S60 phone, you can not just browser through your spreadsheets, but actually edit them as well - though with some rather annoying limitations. Documents and presentations remain read-only for now.

]]> At first glance, allowing users to edit a spreadsheet on their phones doesn't sound like it would be a very hard problem to solve, but the size of these devices does make it hard to develop an interface that is usable, yet still displays enough information.

Every row now features and 'edit' button on the left side, and you can sort columns easily by clicking on a box at the top of each row. As we are working on the web, these changes are also immediately reflected and saved in the standard version of Google Docs.

Good for Text - Bad for Math

For large spreadsheets, the small screen on a mobile phone makes extensive work on your documents rather arduous. The mobile version is also severely limited, as you can't actually edit any cells that hold mathematical formulas, and when you update a number in your spreadsheet, the results of the formula are not automatically updated. Instead, you will have to reload the page to see the new results.

Because of this, the mobile version of Google Docs spreadsheets is currently only really useful if you just want to edit relatively simple lists of texts.

Zoho, Google's closest competitor in this space, still doesn't allow its users to edit spreadsheets in its mobile version, but you can create and edit very simple text documents.

Documents and Presentations?