Can Web-based applications outwit, outplay, outlast the desktop?

I dug around and found a number of Websheet contenders, including Google Spreadsheets, iRows, JotSpot Tracker, Num Sum, and Zoho Sheet. JotSpot just isn’t my thing. It’s a spreadsheet integrated with a wiki. So first you’ve got to create a new wiki site for yourself, then there’s loads of support for calendars, file cabinets, and other stuff I didn’t associate with spreadsheets, and then the tool selection for working with a spreadsheet simply wasn’t as rich as in the other offerings. I’m not dissing it. JotSpot just seems intended for an interactive, collaborative “experience” more than ordinary spreadsheet work.

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That left Google, iRows, Num Sum, and Zoho. All of these could take a paste from a desktop spreadsheet (but only using the Ctrl-V command), all can import spreadsheets from Excel (and others), but formulas are a bit different. The iRows toolbar and menu system had no support for creating formulas. And when I tried to import a spreadsheet containing them, I got a lot of “[something]VALUE#]” errors. iRows bought the farm.

That left Google, Num Sum, and Zoho. All had a similar, Office 97-style look and feel; all offered spreadsheeting capabilities that were more than capable of handling anything I wanted to do. Importing from my own library of spreadsheets was no problem, including formula support. When I timidly asked my partner for an even more advanced spreadsheet, he threw another stapler at me and then sent over an electronic form done entirely within Excel. Unfortunately, none of the three could handle that. Google and Num Sum just blinked a lot and claimed they’d loaded everything, but displayed a blank page. Zoho displayed a few dozen cells of one-letter gobbledygook and also claimed success.

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Still no clear winner. Working in Num Sum, however, was a bit slow; same with Google Spreadsheets. Using Zoho, resizing a cell or moving a column was definitely closer to desktop snappy. And then I took a phone call for 20 minutes, came back to my Google console, and found that I’d been disconnected from the server. Logging back in allowed me to find the spreadsheet I’d been working on, but none of the changes I’d made before the call was there. That’s an Advil moment. Zoho wins.

Thursday: Presentation graphics

I’m not a great salesman, but I am a desperate entrepreneur, and that’s the mother of all sales motivators. Presentations are near and dear to my livelihood. Fortunately for me, the choices were simple. For one, I found only two real contenders: S5 and Zoho. And S5 died the second I opened up the tutorial and saw that “based on XHTML standards” meant actually coding the presentation that way. Sorry, but I’m the face guy for a reason.

Zoho Show, on the other hand, was one of the more impressive online app representations I saw during WINO. It’s got a slightly similar look to PowerPoint, and it behaves similarly, too. Importing a presentation is easy, and it even took a basic one I whipped together in OpenOffice. Animations tend to get lost, however, but that’s an erratic error at best.

Things got a little less impressive when I began creating slides, however. A quick flowchart slide, for example, allowed easy positioning and sizing of the flowchart boxes, but it’s a hit-or-miss deal to attach lines between them. None of that smart auto-grabbing stuff that PowerPoint’s drawing tools have. Adding text is a two-step process, as well, instead of the simple click-and-type procedure in PowerPoint.

But a surprising number of other features are there: master backgrounds, previews, basic photo sizing, fancy font tools. You don’t get all the advanced drawing, transition effects, and multimedia tools you get with PowerPoint (especially PowerPoint 2007), but similar to most of the other tools here, it’s comparable with PowerPoint 98 or PowerPoint 2000. There’s even a new feature called Presentation in Presentation, where you can create Presentation A then hyperlink to it in a single slide of Presentation B and B will simply run A until you move to the next slide.