Juzer Burhani

Zoho Projects underwent an update just now and the below features are now available.
Multiple Admins : Till now, Zoho Projects followed the single admin concept. But from now on, there can be multiple admins. The one who created the Zoho Projects account is assigned the super-admin / portal owner role. And he/she can designate other members as Administrators. These administrators have all the previleges as the portal owner except upgrading/downgrading the Zoho Projects account & changing the credit card details.
Task-Documents and Task-Forums Mapping : Along with adding Notes to a task (which is useful for knowing a task’s status etc), documents uploaded to Zoho Projects and discussion forums created for a project can now be associated with tasks. Multiple documents/forums can be associated with a task and a forum/document can be associated with any number of tasks.
Managers can add Clients : Project members in Manager role can now add (external) client members to the projects they manage. This gives a Manager fuller control over the project(s) he/she manages.
Separate iCal link for Google Calendar : Google Calendar follows the VEVENT component as againt the VTODO component that needs to be followed for tasks/tasklists/milestones. To support GCal, Zoho Projects now has a separate GCal link. Clicking on the links, you can download an .ics file which you can import into your iCalendar / Google Calendar.

InfoWorld did a good analysis of MS Office alternatives (Slideshow here). They picked couple of vendors from the cloud (Zoho and Google) and couple from the Open Source world (IBM and OpenOffice) and did some analysis to see if they stand any chance against MS Office. Full article is available here. Here is the summary.

Bottom Line:
If you’re ready to embrace the SaaS future, then Zoho could be the productivity suite you’ve been waiting for. Zoho can provide both personal productivity and business back-end applications, and with Google Gears, you can keep working on documents even if you can’t find the Internet. Zoho is the only suite here that you could easily use to run a complete business. It’s also the only one that can run virtually all the Excel macros you might have developed

Zoho DB & Reports offers a wide range of data types (column types) to store your tabular data. So far, the options offered for formatting the data stored in these column types have been limited. We have addressed this in our latest update.
Zoho DB & Reports now offers a wide variety of formatting options for each data type. With these options you can choose how you would like to have your data displayed in the various reports created.
How to format a column?

1. Select the table or tabular view in which the columns are to be formatted
2. Right click on the column that is to be formatted
3. Set the necessary formatting option in the dialog that pops up
4. Click OK to apply the formatting changes

1. Select the Chart whose colors are to be customized
2. Click Edit Design and go to edit mode
3. Click on any of the category colors listed in the legend (seen on the right side of the chart) to change the same.
4. A color chooser will pop up
5. Choose the color required
6. Click Apply to apply the color Or Click on Use Default if you would like to revert to system generated colors.

• Data can be exported in CSV (Comma Separated Values), TSV (Tab Separated Values), XLS (Spreadsheet) and JSON formats.  Additionally we also support exporting of customer and contact information in vCards (.vcf files) format.
• You can import your data in CSV (Comma Separated Values) or TSV (Tab Separated Values) formats.  Additionally we also support vCard format for importing your contacts or customer information

Looks like Zoho has started posting some useful tutorials and basic steps for their online apps arsenal.
this time they talk about Tasks in Zoho Project.
they say:
"Let’s see the possibilities that Zoho’s project management application offers when working with tasks.

1. You define a task which forms part of a larger tasks list. And this task list can be Internal or External, can be associated with a Milestone or not
2. You can choose to Send Mail Notification whenever a new task is created, gets assigned
3. In the real world, most tasks are accomplished through team work. Zoho Projects allows you to associate a task to multiple team members
4. Typical project management involves Start and End dates not just for Milestones reached but for individual tasks also. And you can do this with Zoho Projects
5. You can set the priority of each task as High, Medium, Low or None
6. A task’s progress can be monitored as you can edit a task and change the % Completed field status. And each task’s status is reflected in the Gantt chart view under Reports"

As you may know, there were recent updates to Zoho Sheet and Zoho Writer. Continuing on the series of updates, the below new functionalities in Zoho Show are now available.

1. Export to PPT, PPS, PDF, ODP : Zoho Show has long had the ‘Export as HTML’ option. Now we have added the much needed ppt, pps, pdf & odp file export options as well. After opening a presentation, click on the Export button. You will find the new options

2. Languages support : 9 new languages. In addition to English, the Zoho Show UI can now be set to one of these languages too : Chinese, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese (Brazil), Portuguese (Europe), Spanish & Swedish

3. Personal Groups and Contacts support : Click on Share. You will see the Add Contacts, Add Groups option.

Group the email addresses of your contacts (work, family etc). Useful when repeatedly sharing presentations (need not type all the email addresses again). Also, all your Zoho contacts - the ones who you have shared documents with, from your Zoho Mail account etc - get listed while you share a presentation (auto-suggest feature which will help you in easily picking up who to share a presentation with.

4. Undo/Redo : You can now undo/redo upto 50 actions. You can see the new undo & redo buttons in the toolbar

5. Picasa Integration : Click on the Insert Image icon. You can see Picasa listed along with Flickr (which was already there). You can insert public pictures from your Picasa account

After our Macros and Pivot Tables update in April, we did couple of updates in Zoho Sheet and here are the highlights.

New Theme - Mint Blue

The first thing you are likely to notice is that Zoho Sheet now sports a light blue theme as in the screenshot below (click on image to enlarge). This blue theme has been made as the default theme. You can select the various themes from the Themes menu at the top.

Public Spreadsheet URLs

We have made the URL of your public spreadsheets much shorter and much more readable. For example: http://sheet.zoho.com/public/sripathyramesh/crm-calculator. Your existing public URLs and embedded spreadsheets will continue to work as well.

We have also provided a page for an user’s public spreadsheets. For example http://sheet.zoho.com/public/dreamisle/ lists the public spreadsheets of dreamisle and you can find some nice spreadsheet puzzles there. There is also an RSS feed provided for an user’s public spreadsheets.

You can now export a public spreadsheet by appending .filetype at the end of the URL. For example: http://sheet.zoho.com/public/username/documentname.xls will export the spreadsheet to XLS format. Supported extensions include xls, sxc, csv, html and pdf.

We also show the number of views of a public spreadsheet. They are available at the top of a public spreadsheet. We have been tracking views since the last 3 months.

Charting Enhancements:

We have done some enhancements to our charting engine.

- You can draw charts on a different sheet in the same workbook.
- Charts on discontiguous data ranges are supported as well.
- The Y-Axis scale of charts will automatically be adjusted depending on the values.
- We have also changed the default chart colors as seen in the above screenshot.

More enhancements in Charting on the way.

Other Enhancements:

• Zoho Sheet is now available in Norwegian language thanks to our users who translated them. Zoho Sheet is now available in 20 languages.
• Auto Sum functionality has been enhanced. It will now automatically select the range at the top or left, when you press the Auto Sum (Sigma) button or use the shortcut Alt+=.
• Some performance improvements have been done in Formula Recalculation and Range selections.
• Some fixes have gone in too.

Read our What’s New page for more detailed information.

Say dad bought you a digital camera from Japan but the problem is that the PDF manual that came with the camera is also written in Japanese.

How do you quickly translate that PDF file into an English document ?

Solution: If the PDF document is not password protected, you can easily convert it into another language via Google Translate.

The idea is that you extract the text from the PDF file and pass it to Google Translate. Here’s how:

Step 1: Open Zoho Viewer (review) and upload the file(s). Other than PDF, you may also upload common Office file formats like doc, xls and ppt.

Step 2: Zoho Viewer provides a unique URL for each of your web document. Go to Google Translate, type that web address, select a language pair and hit the Translate button. Voilà!

Important: If the source document is multi-lingual, you should considering uploading to Slideshare since they handle foreign languages slightly better than Zoho Viewer. See a sample document from Zoho and Slideshare.

Slideshare will create a text transcript of your PDF document that can you pass on to Google Translate for converting into another language.

You may even extract text from PDF documents using Adobe Reader itself but again, this program doesn’t work too well with all languages.

How do you share a bunch of websites with grandma? Normally, you would put all the links in an email message and send it across.

This is fine but imagine if your list of websites is long – that would require her to make way too many clicks and she will also end up opening several browser windows on the desktop.

So here’s a more elegant solution that uses Zoho Notebook – a very powerful note taking app on the lines of Microsoft OneNote. And you can easily login through your existing Yahoo! or Google Account credentials.

First, check this public page to get an idea about what the final solution would look like. And here are various steps involved:

Create a new book in Zoho Notebook and click "Add Web Page” from the toolbox in the left sidebar. Type the URL of a website (e.g. cnn.com).

Continue this process until you have added all your favorite web pages to that particular book.

These web pages will appear as vertical tabs in the right sidebar. You can double click the tabs to give them a more meaningful name (e.g. CNN). You can also change the order of website tabs by simply dragging them up or down.

When you are done, go to Publish –> Book. Copy the URL of the Zoho Notebook and email it to your gradma – she will love this. Here’s a finished presentation.

Zoho Notebook also offers annotation tools for web pages so can you highlight sections, add freehand drawings to web pages, etc before compiling them into a single web page. There’s more – the final book can be embedded in blogs as well via an iframe.

We are happy to announce the support for attaching documents while sending your invoices. Now you can attach your purchase order (PO), expense receipts and other supporting documents with your invoices.

How to attach documents?

You can attach documents while sending the invoice to your client. It is like attaching documents to your e-mail.

1. Click on the “Send” button in the invoice details page.
2. In the “Send Invoice” screen that comes up, click on the “Add” link in the attachment window to add your attachments.

Look at the image below for details:

What Next?

We will be enhancing this feature further. Instead of searching and attaching the documents while sending invoice to your client. We will give you options, to attach documents to the invoice as and when they are ready. Say for example, you will be able to attach an expense receipt to an invoice upon incurring that expense. While sending the invoice, the documents will be automatically attached to the invoice; of course you will have the option to remove the attachments.

Hope you find this feature useful. We would like to hear from you, feel free to share your comments.

Check into this feature by signing into Zoho Invoice now.