Zoho's spreadsheet tool adds new features; where were they in 1995!

Editor's note: Zoho is a sponsor of CenterNetworks.

After I wrote about Zoho adding Chat to their Writer product, today Raju sent over details of a major upgrade for Zoho Sheet (their spreadsheet product). A video from Raju is below (RSS subscribers, click thru to see it). They have added chat, collaborative editing, new charting options, and updated the API.

Raju Vegesna, Zoho evangelist told me in a Skype chat, "The best feature for online applications is collaboration and we are focusing on enhancing it. In our apps, we started with sharing documents, then added collaborative editing, we recently added chat functionality, and now added web conferencing. All of these come together and enhance the collaborative experience."

Let me take a look at the first two from an accountant mindset (or as Mike calls it, a bean counter). While I am not 100% sure what accountants use today, back in my day, we used Lotus 1-2-3 and Excel for a good percentage of our work. In my office, we had about 30 accountants and at the other office, about 100 more. We had a crude network, so sharing files sucked. Many times, we would up bringing floppies back and forth.

Here, Zoho allows users to chat, discuss and edit documents real-time. Don't like the way your gross income looks, edit it! Want to have a partner review your work but she is in another office in Amsterdam? Load it up and chat and edit on the fly. I can only imagine the time, effort and reduced spending a tool like this would have saved back then and I have to believe it will help today as well.

The charting is cool. Make a chart in your sheet, and then you can embed that chart into any web page. This reminds me a bit of Skinnyr's charting for weight loss. The only thing I can think of to make this better would be voice chat with a log. Then I could have the team on the phone, while we discuss and make changes.