Quick Clicks: Zoho vs. Google vs. Microsoft

Productivity Suites are headed to the cloud. Although debate continues about the pros and cons of online productivity suites, the trend is here and looks like it will not diminish anytime soon. Here's a comparison of AdventNet's Zoho Office, Google Docs and Microsoft's Live Workspace.

Often overshadowed by the hosted service giant that is Google, Zoho provides a free, personal productivity suite, along with more advanced business-class offerings. Here is the portal to Zoho Accounts. Note the wide range of available applications and services.

Keeping consistent with the utilitarian look of its browser, Google's log-in screen belies the feature-rich and powerful functionality of Google Docs.

Colorful and customizable, the Windows Live Log-In screen is where users can access Hotmail, MSN Messenger, as well as Office Live Workspaces, all with a Windows Live ID that logs into these services across the board.

Anyone who has used just about any word-processing program will have no problem navigating the toolbars and menus of Zoho. Writer is a good, basic word processor, yet a little lacking in recovery options in the event of a system crash.

Minimalist, yet capable of doing many of the same tasks as Microsoft's Word. Some of the features not available are auto spellcheck and grammar, table formatting beyond changing cell colors and no support of Word 2007 documents.

More of an extension of Microsoft Office rather than an online productivity suite, Live Workspace has Workspace templates that will load templates in the workspace. Or, workspaces can be created from scratch.

With charts and pivot tables, Sheet has a lot of the same "feel" as Excel. However, it was not able to import a complex Excel spreadsheet with all formatting intact.

Google Spreadsheet, in contrast to Zoho's Sheet, was able to handle an import of a complex, Excel-created sheet with no formatting issues. Creating a new spreadsheet initiated Auto Save.

Presentation is decent enough, but a bit boring when compared to the bells and whistles of Microsoft's Power Point. Still, for a free, basic presentation editor it suffices.

Present also doesn't have the razzle-dazzle of Power Point. Yet, it imported a heavily image-embedded Power Point presentation without a hitch. Neither Zoho's Presentation nor Google's Present currently support .pptx files.