Google Docs is Not a Shipping Company

Well, you know, as frustrating as Zoho was, it's a lot cooler looking than Google Docs, but it already knew who I was when I opened the site because I have a gmail account and I had already logged in there today.

There are some similar features but the interface is not in your face. That is good and bad. The view is less cluttered so may be less daunting to some, but you have to look behind tabs and drop downs to find some features.

You can insert comments in a variety of colors but they seem to be more intrusive; they don't disappear into a small icon when you finish. But neither do they duplicate themselves when you press enter and start a new line which is what happened to me in Zoho for some reason. There's no tagging.

You can track changes made to the document from the Revision tab. I didn't see this in Zoho, but I didn't look for it either. In both programs you can get contextual menus by right clicking. This is useful. You can collaborate on a document with others, and post to your blog from Google Docs as well as publish the document on the web for others to see, as in Zoho.

I had to search further to find the document settings and change the default font.

I think someone who wants very basic functionality and gets confused by too many options might like this better, but might get frustrated trying to find the document settings. The fact that the active document and the home page with saved files are in two seperate tabs may bother some. I like the way Zoho has it all on one screen.

The Great Blog Shift

Okay. I am testing to see if i can post to my blog from Zoho.
Is this Abandon hope all ye who enter here
or God bless all who sail in her?

Technorati Tags productivity,word,Zoho,Blogger,processing

#18 Wasting Time With Online Productivity

These apps hold a lot of interest for me since they have the potential of helping me edit a chapter whatever (Internet enabled) computer I am on.

Zoho sounds simple till you get there and have a whole array of menu items to consider. *takes deep breath and plunges in*

I like that you can tag docs as opposed to putting them in folders. I'm not sure that I am so fancy in my blogging needs that I need the extra features there to post here, but you never know. The sharing capability would be useful for work groups editing a document together. The comments feature is pretty cool (except why did it duplicate the comment when I pressed enter after it). The templates are pretty boring, though.

I found Zoho a little frustrating out of the gate. It changed font on me when I hit enter to start a new paragraph but seemed reluctant to stop using bold and underline, and the highlighting feature wasn't acting quite like I expected. I guess, like anything, you have to get used to its quirks.

Yikes! It decided to freeze in mid-edit as I tried to look at a comment. I had to refresh the page then I thought I had lost my information since I hadn't saved it yet. That would be very irritating if it was an important document. It turns out it must save automatically because I found it in an untitled doc when I started a new untitled doc.

I was able to import a file from my PC successfully.

Okay, I guess I could use this but it might take some getting used to. It seems a little buggy.