Having just pushed out QuickRead, which I covered a couple of days ago, online office suite player Zoho have released more features in their suite of products.

Why I am covering this again? Well, Arvind who works at Zoho dropped me an email about the new changes. I decided to take another look because some of these new updates further address the issue of online office integration, the lack of which is one of the major disadvantages to using an online office solution at the moment.

Now while this feature doesn’t directly deal with integrating Zoho’s systems into the desktop, it is still important.

In desktop office suites like Microsoft Office, you can embed data from other applications into other elements of the suite (for example you can embed an Excel spreadsheet in a PowerPoint presentation). Now Zoho Sheet offers this functionality, but you can embed your Sheet spreadsheet on any webpage.

This obviously offers a benefit as if you want to display a spreadsheet on a public webpage; your visitors don’t need to have a copy of any particular spreadsheet software on their desktop. It also means the user doesn’t have to download and view the spreadsheet in a separate window. Without a universal document exchange format like PDF existing for spreadsheets (ODS isn’t widely accepted yet), this is especially important for the spreadsheet medium.

Of course, there are situations where this isn’t appropriate - for example when the spreadsheet contains complex macro stuff, or isn’t a public document but does want to be distributed over an intranet, for example.

You can see an example of an embedded spreadsheet at the Zoho Blogs post on the subject.

I think this is also an important step for Zoho and this feature also appears to work within other Zoho applications. This gives an advantage over a desktop solution, but Zoho have still got an uphill struggle to convince people to use an online office suite. The landscape for applications is inevitably changing, and it could be in the very near future that we will all be using an online solution in place for many of the desktop applications we use now.

There also were a couple of other new features which you can read about on the Zoho Blogs here and here.