Zoho – free online office suite

Zoho office is a free online office suite which has a dozen apps like Zoho Writer (like MS Word), Zoho Sheet (like MS Excel), Zoho Show (like MS PowerPoint) and many others. You have to sign up for a free account and you can create, upload and store all your documents online. Here is how :

  1. Visit http://www.zoho.com/.
  2. Click on any online application you want to try like Zoho Writer

  3. If you do not have Zoho account, you can easily sign up for a free Zoho account by clicking on the Sign up for free button. You can also sign in using your Google, Google Apps, Yahoo! or Facebook credentials. When you are logged in you will see a familiar document editor interface in your browser as shown :

  4. You can start a new document by clicking on New on the top-left. You can import (upload) your exisiting documents to Zoho by clicking on the Import button on the to-left. You can select a document in the list on the left and click on Delete to delete it.

  5. With Zoho Writer, you can do anything that you can do with a typical commercial office word processor like Microsoft Word. You can insert various items in your document, you can change the format of fonts and style of your document and much more. When you are done, you can save your document by clicking on the save button. By default, Zoho Writer saves documents on its own server online. If you want to download the documents on your hard disk for local use, you can export your documents in a variety of formats including DOC, DOCX, PDF, RTF, LATEX etc.

    To export your document, click on the export button and choose a format. You will get a download prompt. Save the document on a location in your hard disk.

Zoho suite is still in beta, so we can expect many new features and applications being added in the future. Zoho is free and online so you can use it from anywhere in the world wherever you have access to the internet and create or edit your documents. Zoho can also work in conjunction with Google Apps so that you can combine the benefits of both applications.