Day 1: Once my account was created (murray@zoho.com) I spent the first few minutes exploring the top navigation/function buttons. Obvious there were several buttons that are universal (bold, italics, line justification, sum, etc) but there were ones that were familiar but normally on the display of buttons. Several of these buttons were for the formatting of the cells, but are so commonly used that it made sense to put on the list (dollar sign, date format, text wrap, and others). I found myself trying out various of the buttons and playing with some test data.
Day 2: I spent the next day playing with the purpose of spreadsheets and decided to manipulate some data and do some calculations. Having some experience with Microsoft Excel I felt pretty confident with formulas and not to my surprise many of the formulas are exactly the same. I added some numbers and used the 'drag-down' technique to populate cells. I added text (Monday, Tuesday) and tried the drag technique and the other days of the week were populated, this really didn't surprise me. I tried a few more basic calculations and then proceeded to try other formulas. I like 'randbetween' so created a list of values which worked and of course was written same formula as in Excel. I ended the second day of playing with some values created so explored another feature of spreadsheet is the charts. I created a simple bar chart with a few values. There are clearly very limited features that can be applied to the charts. The amount of chart choices are wonderful but there isn't that granular details that Excel allows you to manipulate but for a simple chart it was perfect.
Day 3: My intentions were to explore a few of the buttons that focus on sharing and publishing, which I'm assuming throughout all the Zoho applications. The publish button gave many options especially the one I found interesting was the ability to embed in website/blog. This option gives the code to display the sheet directly within the page. The other item I explored was the 'share' button. This gave the options to invite other users to share the file with. Since Julie had already created a group for us, I simply added that group to the permissions. Very easy and straightforward to create an file and share it. Not being able to have any group members on-line at same time prevented a test to see if simultaneous edits were possible, which I'm thinking it may. This will be one item I will continue to test and explore with more.
Overall, I was very impressed with such an on-line "free" application that has so many features. Even though Google Docs are very similar it's nice to know that other options are available. For those that don't have the money to spend on a Microsoft product or even want to use up disk space on their computers, this is a excellent choice. Having the ability to export files as Excel file, comma separated values, and even PDF makes it very compatible with any other software applications that people have. I plan to use Zoho apps for a period of time to see if I'm able to remove my installed Office suite, the only draw-back is I need to be connected to the Internet to use Zoho Sheets. There is no 'off-line' option like there are for other Zoho apps.
