Some missing things with Zoho

I’m an avid user of Zoho’s services – Writer and Sheet, but recently I’m being dragged towards Google Docs & Spreadsheets. Why? Its a couple of reasons:

• I use Gmail a lot and Google Spreadsheets is integrated with Gmail. If i receive an email with an excel file, I get the option to open it in Google Spreadsheets. This is an amazing feature, it gives me quick access to documents.
• A “Discuss” feature. While two people are editing/viewing the same document you can chat about it in Google Spreadsheets. This is a rather undervalued but very useful feature!

Let me explain a situation I came across a couple of days ago:
My sister emails me a small excel file on my gmail account. In the gmail message right next to the attachment there is a link saying “Open in Google Spreadsheets”. I immediately click on that link and the emailed spreadsheet is opened in Google Spreadsheets. I go about making my changes to that spreadsheet and I share that document with my sister. She joins me in the editing process. While she is doing live editing, there is a neat little “Discuss” pane on the right hand side. We chat about the changes to the document “Change Cell X1 to this and change this to that”. It’s perfect, there’s no need to switch to an IM client or anything. Work is swift and efficient.

Now if the above link was changed from “Open in Google Spreadsheets” to “Open in Zoho Sheets” it would be perfect because, Zoho Sheets is my preferred spreadsheet application (even though I don’t use it as much as Writer ). However, due to Google’s “convenient” access to their Spreadsheets feature, it sometimes drags me there. Maybe a Greasemonkey script, or a Firefox extension to change this? I can’t even use the Zoho QuickRead plugin within Gmail. 

I’ll await the discuss feature…if it’s there I haven’t seen it yet. But I don’t think that is too much of a priority right now.

Technorati Tags: Zoho, Zoho Writer, Zoho Sheet, Google Docs & Spreadsheets

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