WEEK 8: Zoho Office & Productivity Tools (#18 Thing)

Week 8 of the SJlibrary 2.0 program finds me at the new San Mateo Public Library on a beautiful, warm and sunny Spring-like day. It was an ideal day for a walk, and the library was an ideal destination -- a half hour walk.

Our Discovery Learning assignment this week is to use and explore free online applications for wordprocessing and other key applications. First application is Zoho Writer. Here are some observations:

Good features:

The toolbar has features that I haven't seen before on MS WORD. Example of "new" tools:
Strikethrough; Left, right, center, and FULL justify (I don't like Full justify, but is good to have the option); Subscript1 and Superscript2. How COOL! ; Anchor -- not sure what that is.... ; Horizontal rule - check this out (below); Insert a layer... not sure why I'd want that, but I'll check it out. ; Find and replace. Nice to have on the menu in full view rather than hunt in a pull down menu. Other WORD tools are in pull down menus too, yet have icons on the Zoho Writer menu bar -- I often need either ® or ™ and here they are...♥ ; Emotions: hummm... not really for work-related writing, but fine for my blog or e-mail; Can export as a word document, text, html, other options, or pdf.

Not-so-good features:
Font size options are even-sizes only, and I prefer 11pt.
Not sure yet -- haven't used this freeware long enough to discover any disadvantages. I've used MS WORD forever.

Zoho word is only one of many "office" and "productivity" applications. Other applications in office suite are Zoho sheet (spreadsheets), show (like PowerPoint), wiki, notebook, and virtual office (web-based collaboration.) Zoho productivity tools include projects (project management), crm (customer relationship management ), creator, planner, and chat. Most of these are 100% free EXCEPT crm-customer relationship management and Virtual Office, two huge productivity tools for business, so it is interesting to note that Zoho offers all other tools for free as a means of growing its CRM and virtual office revenue-generators.