Thanks Srinidhi from Adventnet, to remind me to write about Zoho sheets, I have tried this web based alternative of our traditional spreadsheet applications.It is a good approach to keep the familiar user interface, which is similar to a desktop spreadsheet, we are so accustomed to the MS way, that it makes it really difficult to adapt on a newer way of doing it.But not all spreadsheet users are going to prefer using it, especially the potential, conventional user types. Zoho sheet is very much competitive when it comes to collaborating, you can share sheets with other users, make public sheets, Import/Export sheets, and you can even insert charts. It supports more than 300 functions.

Google’s online spreadsheet manager Google Docs & Spreadsheets is getting popular; there are some other online spreadsheets managers available like EditGrid, IRows.

The Zoho Sheet UI provides a cool user experience. Navigation is similar to Excel. Using the arrow keys to move from cell to cell takes about 1/4 of a second, possibly because the local display is updating each time. You’ll be better off using Home, End, PageDn, and PageUp to get around a larger spreadsheet, or simply click in the cell you want to edit.

Zoho Sheet displays Web 2.0 trends such as type-in-place, resizable columns and rows feature, chart edges that fade in and out as your mouse passes over them.
What impressed me most were the Charts. Sheet supports Column, Bar, Pie, and Line charts, and they are nicely presented and resizeable.

Text editor enables good text formatting, you can change text color, fill color, alignment/justification, and wrap contents. There are no cell formatting features beyond cell color. No AutoFormating features like Excel.

You can insert and delete rows or columns with icons on the toolbar, but you can’t move or cut and paste rows or columns. Similarly, you can’t drag cells, columns, or rows to move them which are a drawback.

Zoho Sheet is a perfect application when you are going to share a list/table etc. with others on internet. Zoho is better in design compared to google docs, but Editgrid is more versatile online spreadsheet manager as well. It has additional features like real-time-update, stockquote, retrieve information form web, spreadsheet post-to-blog etc, make it a very competitive product.

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