Proud Geek

You’ve repeatedly heard me extoll Zoho’s virtues. (I love Zoho!) I use Zoho for wordprocessing and spreadsheet’ing, and I know I can use it to create databases, presentations, manage employees, and much more.

And now Zoho has released a feature I’ve been wanting for a while: a Start page. With a Start page, Zoho can now unify its various apps, giving a more centralized location for all of my documents. In the past, I’ve had to log in to Zoho’s wordprocessing app, then log in separately to Zoho’s spreadsheet app. I’d write a wordprocessing document on an issue, and do a spreadsheet file too — and until now I wasn’t able to see both files at the same time.

With Zoho’s Start page, I can now see all of my wordprocessing documents, spreadsheets, and presentation files at once. I can now even create folders and move (via right-click) files into these folders. Clicking on that folder shows all the files associated with it. Clicking on Box View switches me from seeing all of my files as a list to several boxes showing all presentation files in one box, spreadsheet files in another, and so on. The boxes can be dragged around to change their order (and so can the folders in the left column). Very handy. New files can be created directly from the Start page as well. While this Start page only unifies wordprocessing, spreadsheet, and presentation files, Zoho folks are saying that its other apps will be added to the Start page soon.

I’ve only tried the new Start page for a few moments, and I find it very useful. I will be using this page as my “go to” destination from now on whenever I need to read or create a file through Zoho.

At this point, I only have one quibble: I think the folders view in the left column need some work. The “My Docs” folder actually lists all of your private documents, the “Shared Docs” lists all of your shared docs, and the individually created folders lists some of the same documents. This becomes confusing. Instead, I think that there ought to be a master folder labelled something like “All Docs.” All subsequent folders — “public docs,” “private docs,” and individually created folders — would be sub-folders of the master folder.

Yes, in true geek-speak: “One Folder to Rule Them All. One Folder to Find Them. One Folder to Bring Them All and In The Brightness Bind Them.”