Overall, I'm only mildly impressed by Zoho. Parts seemed easy to use, but other parts seemed a little too complicated for our average patron. And some parts seemed to be in Beta. :-( I don't think it's likely I'll use them much myself, but I could see offering it to patrons as an alternative to buying a disk or losing their work..... That's if they actually ask for help earlier than 2 minutes before their time on the computer expires.
Zoho Writer
I liked Writer pretty well, definitely the best of the three things I tried. It seemed very easy to figure out as long as you had a basic knowledge of Word. I've already mentioned it to a couple patrons (although they were definitely the type who could figure it out on their own). There does seem to be the risk of having to help the less-computer-literate of our patronage in using it, so I'll probably be picky about to whom I recommend it.
Zoho Sheet
It seemed to work well enough for what it was. I'm not much of a spreadsheet user in general, so I can't really compare the online version with the desktop. I would predict that the people who want to use Excel on our computers probably already know how to use it, so this could be a good option for them -- especially as it's got the import/export features that I assume are designed to work primarily with Excel.
Zoho Show
I liked this one least. It was slow and clunky and much harder to figure out. Every now and then it'd do something really weird. (At one point, it duplicated my text and quadrupled the font size, then overlaid it atop my original text. Weird.) It also had weird formatting problems, as you can probably guess from that two-column slide in my experiment. And I also tried importing a show from Powerpoint, and the formatting got really screwy. I'd probably only recommend this one as a complete last resort.
Off With His Head!
"The executioner's argument was, that you couldn't cut off a head unless there was a body to cut it off from..."
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