Reflections

Don Sakers 20 June 2008

These are my reflections on using Zoho for the first time. After setting up my account, I wasted more than a few minutes by importing contacts from Yahoo! Unfortunately, Zoho only imported first names, not last names...which made my list of 600+ contacts useless. So then I decided to delete them. Big mistake! Not only did Zoho freeze up, but it froze up the browser entirely -- I couldn't get to any other browser windows, and finally had to quit the browser completely. After this happened several times, I learned to delete contacts only in groups of less than 25 at a time. Even then, it took minutes to finish each deletion -- and the browser stayed frozen while it was doing so. As you can imagine, deleting 600+ contacts took quite a while.

Less than enchanted, I opened Zoho Writer for the next stage of my exploration.

I inserted a picture (above) and resized it using the resize gadgets. Unfortunately, I don't see a way to get numeric control, i.e. to shrink the picture to exactly 33% or to a specific size in inches.

Here is a bullet list of some things I like about Zoho Writer:

• Autosave
• Online availability of documents
• Seems to use HTML or XML as a native format
• Seems to be available via iPhone

Here are some things I don't like:

1. Reverts to Verdana whenever there's a format change
2. Doesn't seem to be a way to rename an existing document, other than saving it under new name and then deleting old version - perhaps useful in version control, but potentially allows you to mistakenly delete the wrong document
3. No keyboard shortcuts and limited menus - have to use the button icons, whose meanings are not always intuitive
4. Can change the font of items in a numbered list, but the numbers stay in Verdana
5. Not intuitively obvious how to terminate list mode
6. Damn thing can't keep up with normal typing speed. Very obnoxious and distracting.
   

Animal	Vegetable	Mineral	Abstract
Meerkat	Trees	Sand	Community
Velociraptor	Ferns	Fossils	Extinction
Cow	Grass	Calcium	Lactose Intolerance
Human	Salad	Plutonium	Termonuclear Annihilation

Okay, clicking on an alignment button while several cells are selected really, really messes up your table. And once a table is messed up, there doesn't seem to be an easy way to fix it. I finally had to delete the whole table and start over. That was a whole lot of no fun. Then I tried to make my heading row bold -- not only did it add a new row and move a heading over, but it undid some of my changes.

I think one of the big advantages of using online tools is the availability of documents anywhere there's an Internet connection. Unfortunately, that could also be a disadvantage...we are all overachievers and workaholics, and I can see us taking work home a lot more.

Patrons could use this service to make their own documents portable. Also, Zoho offers a lot of tools that we don't provide for patrons: spreadsheet, database, presentation, etc. However, with staffing the way it is, we already don't have time to teach patrons how to use Word -- I don't see any chance that we could effectively coach them in using all of Zoho's tools. (Heck, I don't see our staff having time to learn all Zoho's tools themselves.) And the sort of computer-savvy patron who wouldn't need help, is probably at home or at the office on their own pc. So it's difficult for me to see how these tools could be useful to the majority of our patrons.

This is my first experience with online office tools, and I am underwhelmed. In terms of providing basic office tools for those who don't have access to the real things, I guess they could be helpful -- but I don't see myself using them very much. I am particularly bothered by the slowness of the wordprocessor, and the user-unfriendly interface. I've used a lot of wordprocessing programs in my time, on a lot of different platforms -- this one reminds me of the very early versions of MacWrite, or perhaps one of the later wordprocessing programs I used on my old Commodore 64. I certainly wouldn't write a book, or even a short story, with this tool.

And now that I go to publish this thing on my blog (damn it, I wish it would STOP reverting to Verdana!), I'm not sure how to tell it which blog to use...and I realize that I don't see any button or menu item for "help" -- this seems like an odd thing to leave out. Well, I will hold my breath and hope for the best.