We recently added the STOCK function in Zoho Sheet. Using this, you can now add stock quotes to your spreadsheets. You just need to specify the symbol and the type of data you want (optional).

Examples:

=STOCK(”MSFT”)
=STOCK(”AAPL”, “VOLUME”)

Change in stock quotes are automatically reflected in your spreadsheets with a max of 30 minutes delay. But you would need to reopen your spreadsheet or your published spreadsheet for the changes to show. Stock function is available under the Stock category and under the Financial category in our functions dialog that appears when you click on the fx icon.

There are some limitations to it. This cannot be currently used in nested functions, nor can it refer other cells. We hope to support these things in the future.

Note: Stock details are provided from free stock sources available in the Web. The data may be delayed up to 30 minutes. Also the data provided is solely for informational purposes.

We have also added support for 7 more languages - Portuguese (Brazilian and European), Danish, Italian, Russian, Swedish, and Dutch. This is in addition to the existing languages of English, French, German, Japanese and Spanish. Do you want Zoho Sheet in your own language? Send us a mail to support at zohosheet dot com.

Other features include HTML and printable views of public spreadsheets, more shortcuts like Ctrl+Home, Ctrl+End and some fixes in charts. Have a look at our What’s New page for more information.

Zoho Applications (Writer, Sheet and Show) are now available on Facebook and we are excited about this. We got several requests from many users and well wishers like Krish asking us to do this integration. Considering the fact that 30% of our users are students, we couldn’t resist.

So, what can you do with this application?

You can now create documents, spreadsheets and presentations from Facebook. You can also view and edit all your existing documents, spreadsheets and presentations (both personal and shared) from Zoho Writer, Sheet and Show. Here is a quick screenshot.

This makes Zoho the first office app on Facebook. Do give it a try and add it to your profile. This application provides a good view of all your documents in a single page.

Talking about providing all documents in a single page, let me pre-announce something else here. We are working on way to better organize your documents in a single place (compared to our application specific organization). We will reveal more details on this soon.

Meanwhile, do give our new Facebook app a try and let us know what you think.

…or should I say ‘Office for your iPhone‘. This is fun project going live in record time (thanks to our APIs and of course our team).
iZoho (no, its not an online desktop ) is an easier way to access your Zoho Apps on your Mobile…atleast, iPhone for now. Sure, you can use Zoho Apps in their current form on your iPhone, but there is lot of stuff you don’t need on your mobile phone. So we simplified the interface and just provided simple features you’d normally use on a mobile phone.

We have three applications available currently in iZoho - Zoho Writer, Sheet and Show which lets you view your documents, spreadsheets and presentations in Zoho. Currently you can view and edit your documents, but you cannot edit your spreadsheets and presentations (you can only view them). You can also create new documents and view your presentations in landscape mode. There will be more features coming as we move along.
Frankly, we don’t know how this will work on iPhone as we haven’t tested it. It certainly works well on Safari so we hope it’ll be a non-issue. In any case, we will be fine tuning this over the next few days.

As I mentioned earlier, a device with a big screen, built in Wi-Fi, good usability and a full fledged browser will only improve the chances of practically using web apps on a mobile device.
Do give it a try and let us know what you think (support at zoho.com). Below are some screenshots.

Japanese users of Zoho Writer are in for a treat. Thanks to our Japanese colleagues who are putting in a lot of effort in translating the Zoho services’ UI screens, Zoho Writer now joins Zoho Sheet in providing a Japanese UI. In your Zoho Writer account, click on ‘Options’ -> ‘Settings’ and you will find the language option there.

Soon we will be adding other language UIs to Zoho Writer (and other Zoho services) as well.

Richard Brandt at MIT Technology Review has an article on Zoho titled “Can Zoho beat Google?“. From the article :

Zoho has become a prolific designer of online software tools, releasing at least one new product every month for more than a year. It boasts 15 product offerings so far, including a word processor, a spreadsheet, a presentation tool, a Wiki, a project manager, a customer-relationship management (CRM) tool, a database, and a project-planning tool. Bloggers who have tried the software say it’s more robust than online applications offered by Google, and it offers better collaboration capabilities (for example, it lets multiple people work on a document simultaneously or sync spreadsheets with remote data from websites) than products from Microsoft. Zoho’s fans see it as the model for a new generation of Web-based applications that could displace expensive software sold by Microsoft.

Zoho is the suite to beat. A Gartner report released on March 12 placed Zoho at the top of its list of “Cool Vendors in Web 2.0,” five companies that offer “a glimpse into the future of enterprise innovations.” Says Gartner analyst Nick Gall, “Zoho is ahead in the user community and in the technology.”

Thanks to Richard Brandt & MIT! In other news, The Social Computing Magazine has a write-up on Zoho Notebook titled “Zoho Notebook: One-Stop Business Collaboration Tool“. And in a blog post on Zoho Notebook at weblogg-ed, Melinda Miller has this to say about Zoho Polls in the comments :

I really like zoho polls. One of my 4th grade teachers used it in class one time so now I use it all the time with my staff. We voted on our theme for next year, planning for next year’s holiday party, and staff shirt preferences. Here is a link to my school blog with the zoho poll embeded.

In a post titled “CRM on the Cheap“, Davey Moyers writes,

Looking for an inexpensive, robust CRM program? Why not check out Zoho CRM. The price is right, free for three users. I have been giving this system a test drive, and there’s power under the hood. Full CRM functionality. It lacks mobile capability or offline use, but otherwise this is a solid player for the individual sales rep or small team. It also boast Outlook synchronization that is as good as the competitors in this space. The features I especially find appealing are lead management, opportunity management, and sales quotes…. I spent four years using salesforce.com on a daily basis, and I would pit this program against salesforce.com in all categories save one. Offline and mobile are not yet offered. However, the print templates on Zoho are much better than salesforce.com. So you plan it, print it, execute it. Whatever “it” is.

Amit Agarwal has a nice post explaining how to embed Zoho Sheet’s charts in one’s blog. Zoho Chat’s shoutbox feature (embedding a chat window in your website) has been put to good use by a community named Cerebrals Hens Network. Cool background options, guys! And our recent REST API release got noted by Thomas Willingham & Go To India Web 2.0.

Thanks, one & all

The Zoho API for Zoho Writer, Sheet & Show have been made more developer friendly. In addition to the existing XML-RPC format, we have added the REST APIs as well. This makes it a lot easier for the developers to read data by just making HTTP GET requests to Zoho. The new storage REST APIs for :

Zoho Writer
Zoho Sheet
Zoho Show

One more change is the way time/date is handled in our API response messages. It wasn’t flexible enough since it returned the date in a particular format & the time was in our server’s timezone. We have changed this to the standard long milliseconds format which is just the number of seconds since Jan 1, 1970, 00:00 GMT.

Omnidrive, Box.net, myDataBus, Kearen are some of the web services which have implemented the Zoho API and there’s a lot more to come. Try the new APIs out and we will be glad hearing your feedback.

Ryan McIntyre has a neatly done brief history of Excite presentation as an embedded Zoho Show slide show. ‘Connected Internet‘ recommends Zoho as one of the top 5 web apps that an enterprise can use. Here’s what the blog says about Zoho :

After trying them all, i am pretty much convinced that Zoho is currently the most advanced Office 2.0 suite in the market. What i like the most about Zoho, is that although it runs on the web, its set of features is rich, and would satisfy even the most enthusiastic MS Office user. In my opinion, Zoho Writer (the word processor) and Zoho sheets (the Excel like spreadsheet) are excellent choices for organizations that would like to cut their MS Office expenses (they are 100% free). I also like Zoho Creator, a nifty application that allows you to create database applications in minutes. If you don’t like to work on your office productivity suite on the web, you’ll enjoy Zoho Desktopize, a widget that allows you to work in selected Zoho applications in a desktop environment.

bemaNetwork, a group of experts for fighting SPAM write this about Zoho in their blog:

I have used several of the app’s myself and they are great, AJAX is being used here in force and it works marvelously. I am very impressed with the UI, the performance and what it delivers for the cost. Zoho.com we really appreciate these tools that you have made available, and want to share that with our members and friends. We hope that everyone that finds zoho will love these programs and use them everyday to replace your office or other productivity software, and maybe win a piece back for the developers!Great Job guys, we all love it!

We earlier wrote about Rick Roche and the surveys he does for his library. He is out with the results for his core biography survey. Wanna do such a survey? Try it with Zoho Creator. It is simple and easy.

Thanks, all

Gili at ‘Blogging for business’ has a nice post titled “A realistic valuation model for blogging ventures” which is about calculating the net worth of a blog. The blog evaluation calculator there is on Zoho Sheet. If you have a regular blog, do give the blog evaluation calculator a try.

John Wilson confesses to being a big Zoho fan (thanks, John!) and has a nice post of his first experience with Zoho Meeting. From his blog post,

Today, whilst chatting to someone on Skype, I decided it would be helpful to walk them through a website application. I was able to quickly launch Zoho Meeting, ping them an email invite containing a link and within 2 minutes from initiating the entire process, my counterpart was able to view my onscreen activities without having to worry about installs on their machine.

Another long-time Zoho fan, Craig Cmehil has a full review on Zoho Meeting as well.
Talking of Zoho fans, here’s a Chinese blogger named Wangtam who has got lots of posts involving Zoho! Benoit Descary (being French) took note of Zoho Sheet going multilingual.

And this is from a Tumbler blog, “can’t believe I missed these brilliant applications” [referring to Zoho Projects and Zoho Creator]. The same blog makes a reference to one Mr James Clay who had referred to a list of Top 25 Web 2.0 tools for schools. Probably it is this article from March 2007 in OEDb (Online Education Database) which recommends many of the Zoho apps. Elmer Thomas Jr. writing about Office 2.0 tools recommends Zoho Projects & Zoho CRM as well.

Most of the Zoho apps provide Unicode support which enable our users to enter/store their data in any language. But they had to make do with an English interface which was a slight drawback as far as non-English speakers & online collaboration for teams spread across the globe were concerned. Not anymore.

Today, Zoho Sheet took a major step forward in bridging this gap. Zoho Sheet becomes the first of the Zoho apps (Zoho Mail which is private Beta supports 6 languages) to provide non-English UI as an option. You can now choose to have your UI in one of the 5 languages - English, French, Spanish, German or Japanese. We plan to support many other languages soon. Zoho Writer and Zoho Show will be joining Zoho Sheet in offering multilingual support as well.

Other useful features in today’s update include :

• Customizing invitation email
• Email notifications on shared spreadsheet updates
• Easy recalculation of formulas by hitting F9
• Use your mouse to select cell ranges while typing formulas
• Data label option in charts

And more…

David Einstein in his San Francisco Chronicle Computing Q&A column gives this tip :

Microsoft Office, which includes Word and Excel, continues to be the standard for creating and editing documents and spreadsheets — but it’s not the only game in town. OpenOffice, from openoffice.org, is a free suite that’s compatible with Microsoft Office and compares favorably to it.

Another option is a free online suite called Zoho Office, from zoho.com. Although still in beta phase, it’s pretty impressive. The word processor, for example, lets you create, edit and share documents online. It has lots of formatting features, and is compatible with Microsoft Word. You can even upload Word files from your computer so you can edit and store them online, and you can export (download) documents created in Zoho office to your computer as Word files. How cool is that?

Thanks, David & SF Chronicle!