Zoho’s online office suite is getting closer and closer to becoming a real rival to Microsoft Office. One important update Zoho recently released was support for Visual Basic compatible macros in its spreadsheet application, which was great for importing already existing spreadsheets with macros, but writing macros was limited to coding them in a text editor. Today, Zoho has rolled out an easy to use macro record and playback function, similar to what most offline office suites offer.
Focus on Business
While Zoho also has a number of consumer oriented products in its line-up, the company notes that it has lately been focusing mostly on providing features for businesses rather than consumers, which can be seen in the line-up of recent Zoho’s products like Projects, CRM, and Invoice. Macros, too, are a feature that is mostly aimed at business users.
Google Docs, Zoho’s largest competitor, offers a similar set of features (though no macro recording), but its overall product suite is limited to documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. Also, Adobe just launched its own online office product in June. Chances are that Microsoft is also working on a similar product, though for now, it is following its ‘Software+Services‘ strategy and is using the Internet mostly for storing documents and some limited file viewing capabilites.
Almost There
While the current crop of online office suites can’t quite match the feature set of traditional suites like Microsoft Office or OpenOffice yet, the steady addition of features and products is making the online suites a lot more competitive and while they are still somewhat limited when compared to MS Office, they are approaching a point where their feature set can satisfy the majority of customers.
