There has been lots of talk online about Writely, iRows and Google Spreadsheet lately that I though I’d take a moment and talk about the Zoho offerings. ZoHo is a company that makes an online word processor , spreadsheet application, polls, to-do lists, chat and more. Most applications are free and are all very good; and not invite only.

ZoHoWriter is basically the same as Writely. It’s a free online word processor that import & export Microsoft Word documents along with many other types of text files, export PDFs and it’s all web based. They deal with documents a little better though with a left hand menu that includes all your documents. All accessible from one screen and they can even open in tabs. Pretty sweet.

Hey Hey Hey!  It’s Google Spreadsheet~

Here is my five minute review.  I got my invite so I just had to take a few minutes to play with it.

Works on a Mac in Firefox and seems quite nice.  No Safari support.  Scrolls better than iRows and has a very simple and clean design.

I don’t see any ‘link’ abilities though or sheet tabs.  You can freeze rows/columns and change the color of text and do basic formatting.

All the PC shortcuts are here, no Mac keyboard shortcuts though.

No Spell checking.

Google has announced Google Spreadsheets! It’s currently limited beta but I have high hopes for it. Google has Writely, an online word processing application and now a spreadsheet application. This is one step closer to Google Office.

I have yet to get my Google Spreadsheet invite, but I’ve got on the list. For more information check out this Sneak Peak at Google Spreadsheets.

If you can’t wait for Google Spreadsheets, check out iRows and ZoHo Sheet. They are both online spreadsheet applications that work very well and are available for sign-up today! I have accounts at each and it’s tough to say which is better, but both are excellent alternatives to Microsoft Excel.