Labs

Zoho Office suite is still some way from being a fully featured online alternative to Microsoft Office, but it's a lot closer to that goal than Google Docs & Spreadsheets, and can handle most of your everyday tasks. Along with a word processor, spreadsheet and presentation module, the suite offers a range of extra productivity tools, from planners to chat software. There's an awful lot of functionality here. When you sign up, you have to provide a valid email address and respond to an email within seven days, but you can get straight on and use the software in the meantime.

With full-blown toolbars and a workspace divided into panels, Zoho's rather large number of applications look much more modern and comprehensive than Google's, although a little more cluttered too. The word processor, called Writer, can work with Microsoft Word documents, and unlike some web applications it lets you type freely at decent speeds, with no lag as you enter text.

As well as sharing files with other users,

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you can store and compare document revisions, which gives you a limited equivalent to Microsoft's Track Changes feature. In common with some other web apps, one of its notable limitations is that you can only use the built-in fonts (the standard Microsoft web set, with Arial, Times, Verdana and so on), not the others installed on your PC. Other core features are present and correct, though, including word count.

Sharing sheets

Zoho Sheet is a polished spreadsheet app that can import and export Excel files, including charts. It has a couple of big advantages over other spreadsheet programs, both offline and online. Not only can you share worksheets, but several people can work on the same one simultaneously, and you can also synchronise data from websites.

The presentation tool, Show, is no match for PowerPoint - you don't get advanced features like the ability to rehearse your timings or record narrations, and there aren't even any transition effects between slides. Imported PowerPoint presentations will lose these effects and other advanced formatting, but they'll still normally work.

Zoho Notebook is perhaps the most intriguing application, and one that tries to do something different from traditional office software. Here you can gather together different kinds of media on a page, from Writer and Sheet files to songs, images and videos, whether to create something to show others or just to juggle with ideas. As with the other Zoho elements, two or more people can edit a document at once, so it could be a handy brainstorming tool.