Access and save Zoho Office documents in Microsoft Office - Lifehacker

Well, as I posted yesterday about Zoho making moves, today Lifehacker puts out into about a new plugin which enables Word and Excel to open/save devices from/to Zoho online.  Pretty nifty.  I’ve always wanted an online space to which I could save through a network link (not on campus, but my own space) without the whole FTP setup.  This is moving in the right direction.

The question is, how many of these online office or storage repositories will follow suit (or may have and I haven’t seen them).

UPDATE: Had a faculty member stop by at the end of lunch, so I took a moment, after they left, to download and test this puppy.  I’m thinking it could be very useful for faculty/students writing as a group.  I’m wondering what the options are for versioning and check-out for individual documents.

Pretty simple.  Downloaded the plugin.  Created a Zoho account (it is free).  Had to quit Outlook so that it could install.  The plugin adds a new toolbar to Word (haven’t tested Excel yet).  I selected Settings and entered my new login info.   Selected Remember me and clicked Save.

The one non-intuitive aspect was logging into Zoho in Word.  You click the Zoho Writer dropdown and select  login.  Zoho shows a little bar and takes about 15 seconds to login (different network speeds may effect this).

I entered some text and selected Save in Zoho Writer.  A window came up requiring me to save the file locally.  I saved it to the desktop and tried again.  Got a request: This document si not available in Zoho Writer.  Do you want to add it?  I clicked Yes and up it loaded.

Now for the real test.  What does it look like?  So, I opened up Zoho and ws already logged in.  I clicked on Zoho Writer and it took about 40 seconds for the app to load.  Once it did, there was my new document in the left My Docs panel.  I clicked on the title and Zoho opened it in a new tabbed document (next to the original blank document) with all of the toolbars for working on the device.

Pretty nifty.  Don’t have time to test this with groups, but it may be worth looking into as time permits.