18. Zoho

I am fairly impressed with the polish and the capabilities of this tool. I was expecting something a little more limited, but was pleasently surprised when I uploaded a reasonably complex word document (involving tables, various styles and tabbings). I like the inclusion of New Zealand English in the spell checker.

Just as a test, I uploaded a 23 page document with images, multiple fonts, a contents page and a bunch of other things and it all seemed to come through without any problems (albeit rather slowly which is to be expected when uploading documents), and once uploaded was actually very fast to browse through, which was a happy surprise. An issue I have with it is that it doesn't show page breaks (or possibly I haven't found the option), which makes me think that the reason for it being so smooth is that it doesn't try to work out the paging and such until it is actually getting ready to print (which is a good plan; yay the paperless office).

One other issue is that it seems to need to have a file open all the time; so if the last document you were editing was huge, just getting into the site to quickly open another document could be a problem (well, if you don't have a fast internet connection).

Internet connection is also another issue; the reliability of the connection and such things as proxy or page errors could be troublesome, not to mention if you are on dialup or have a relativly slow computer.

I'd rate this as having potential; but requires better infrastructure than NZ has before it will become the preferred option.