Zoho Sheet for Webware

The playful logo and pastel interface may remind you more of baby's blocks than an Excel worksheet, but Zoho Sheet's many advanced features make quick work of organizing and storing your data. The free Web-based program behaves much like your familiar spreadsheet, with the added features of being able to save your work online, tag it for later searching ease, and share with others. Options allowing recipients read-only or editing powers makes version-control possible. The only missing feature here is a built-in address book. We like being able to keep our test expense reports private with an option for embedding the data into a Web site or blog, but we sorely miss some of the more intuitive features from other spreadsheet programs, such as a paintbrush tool, an undo command, and autofill capabilities for adding a value from a separate box. While we appreciate being able to export the Web file to an Excel document, the rickety transfer yielded some formatting errors. Zoho Sheet won't accept data pasted from an Excel spreadsheet, but it works very well for creating fresh documents. The exporting hitch and Web-hosting rather than local control may make some enterprises wary of acquiring the program in its beta mode, but individuals will find its sharing functions useful, especially for reconciling data such as expenses.