Zoho, Almost There (But Not Quite)

I gave Zoho a go this weekend and quite liked it, thought it still has a ways to go.

In fact, tonight one of my associates, Dino, and I used it to co-write some proposals we’re presenting to some datacenters and integrators that we’re working with, as well as sketch out some ideas for some more Nagios articles on Techtarget.

In overall features offered, it’s quite cool. Just open it up (using your Google login, if you’d like) and you have all, if not most, of the formatting features you’d have in your word processing program.  The main reason I switched was because I needed a table of contents for our proposal, and I did not want to shotgun Word docs to all the people in the party after each edit. As long as you use the right headings (like in Word) the ToC autogenerates, as expected.

When an invited user logs in your document, you see their icon in the left, and when you click that person’s icon, you see a color associated.  That color (yellow in my case) then colors the paragraph that is locked for editing by that other person. The lack of this feature in Google docs can sometime be annoying, and sometimes you need to IM the person and tell them to stay away from your section to ensure that there is no problems.

Things were going quite well, until I decided to make an outline using bullets. This is where Zoho totally blows. For example, I often like to jot down ideas in a bullet format and then drill down into some of the ideas to flesh them out. Instead of simply letting me hit RETURN and then TAB, I had to use hit RETURN and then use the mouse to click the appropriate arrow to TAB in or out. I personally found this insanely annoying while trying to brainstorm.

Another big Zoho annoyance is the way that the ToC blows away any heading you might have at the top of your doc. I wanted to put a title, do a hard return (which I couldn’t find in the menu), and then have the ToC on the 2nd page. After about 5 min of looking, I gave up and resigned to just let Zoho just blow away whatever I had at the top of the page every time I clicked the ToC button to autogenerate based off the headings 1, 2, and 3 I was using.

Until I get all the wrinkles worked out, I suspect that I’m going to have to use a combination of all of the tools to do exactly what I want — Google apps for brainstorming, Zoho for collaboration, and Word for the final formatting touches.

(Supposedly, MS has some cool collaborative tools, but I have yet to use them.  Please comment if you have.)