Zoho Office Suite beta has strong potential, but it's not yet a final product, and its spreadsheets and presentations applications need more work before you can rely on them.

The programs within the Zoho Office Suite beta include the Zoho Writer word processor, Sheet for spreadsheets, Show (which is similar to PowerPoint) and the Virtual Office dashboard to tie everything together. Setup takes a few moments. Just visit zoho.com and establish a sign-in name and a password. Zoho recently allowed users to sign on to the Suite's various services with a single ID.

Despite that, integration isn't at all seamless; the individual programs, such as Zoho Writer, lack links to the other services, such as Zoho Show. And Zoho Virtual Office beta looks promising, with a multi-pane layout similar to that of Microsoft Outlook, only more colourful. Within Virtual Office, the handy Shortcuts drop-down links to common tasks, such as adding a contact. A left-hand column displays icons for documents, contacts and the other applications in the suite. Unfortunately, Virtual Office is only available for private beta testers.

We like the look and feel of Zoho's services, which arrange major functions along the top of the page; just hover over an icon to read what it does. A right-click of the mouse will display common editing functions, but sometimes we couldn't get keyboard shortcuts, such as Ctrl-Z for undo, to work. Zoho makes it easy to share your files with a public URL or feed, or to invite individual users to collaborate on edits. Among Zoho's services, we had the least number of problems testing Zoho Writer word processor with which you can import, export, share documents and even make blog posts.

Zoho Show beta lets you make basic presentations, although we couldn't work out how to create a slide show from scratch without using Zoho's sample as a template. We like the fact that you can embed HTML snippets to insert charts and so on. Even cooler would be the ability to insert a chart from Zoho Sheet, but again, such integration was non-existent during our beta tests. Nor could we initially find the option to change font size, because Show's drop-down menu uses percentages while Writer and Sheet use font points. You're supposed to be able to import images from Flickr or a URL, but neither worked for us either. We added an image from our hard drive, but it disappeared after we changed the slide theme. When we tried to insert another image, both our image and the background disappeared. That was a disaster, as we hadn't yet saved our work. Our work even vanished when we resized the Firefox window, then it mysteriously resurfaced.

And when we hit the Back button on Firefox and IE7, Zoho Show maddeningly returned us to the login screen. Some functions, such as Import Presentation within Show, take you away from the service's main grey interface to a page with a black background that lacks the usual menu of controls. It's easy to lose your place similarly within Zoho's other services.

When it's time to play your show, you can set the timing between each slide, but without any fancy fades or other transitions. You can email people to join your remote presentation. However, neater features, such as playing a slide show while on a Skype call, aren't yet available.

In Zoho Sheet beta, you can easily select rows or columns, sort them and apply fonts and numeric styles. Sheet let us work with multiple worksheets within one document, arranged along the bottom of the screen within tabs similar to Excel's. Still, we'd like a quick-reference key for commonly used formulas, which Google Docs & Spreadsheets offers. But unlike Google's equivalent service, Zoho let us make graphs, such as a pie chart of our expenses, and then a bar chart with the same figures within a matter of moments. This was useful for adding up some numbers quickly, and then creating a chart to see a pattern visually.

Some of the basic functions in Zoho Sheet beta were clumsier than in Google's Docs & Spreadsheets beta (formerly Writely beta and Google Spreadsheets respectively), which offers fewer features. The first time we attempted to paste 300 text rows from Microsoft Excel, Zoho Sheet froze. Importing the same Excel file to Zoho Sheet as CSV didn't work, either. Once that failed, we couldn't even get the Import button to work. And when trying to use Zoho Show beta, we had to tell IE7 to allow ActiveX controls over and over again.

Zoho offers e-mail support and we received nearly instant, helpful e-mail replies from Zoho about our problems. User forums are well trafficked.

Any beta service is bound to have some kinks. Nevertheless, in contrast to Zoho's woes, we ran into fewer troubles with the rival Google Docs & Spreadsheets, as well as with ThinkFree online. Zoho's services look promising, but we hope that its makers will iron out the wrinkles soon so that we can use more than its Writer word processor without headaches.

Zoho Office Suite beta
Company: Zoho
RRP: Free

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