Zoho Notebook

Zoho Notebook is the coolest thing I’ve seen in a while. There’s a learning curve - I gave up on it several times, actually. The only instructions I found were a sort of video, and you know how I feel about video instructions. But after a couple of weeks, here’s what I’ve learned.

You can create several notebooks, or just pages within one big one. You access notebooks from the left sidebar, and pages from the right sidebar within each notebook. If you’re going to be flipping between certain pages, I’d recommend keeping them in the same notebook for convenience to save on clicks.

Within Zoho, you can create Excel compatible spreadsheets. There are several things I log daily on Excel sheets. I went into Zoho’s separate spreadsheet module and uploaded my files from my desktop (you can create new spreadsheets and copy and paste into them from within Notebook, but to upload, you need to spreadsheet module). Then in Notebook, I clicked “Add Sheet Page”. The popup gives has two tabs: New and Existing. I clicked Existing and chose the spreadsheets I’d uploaded. One note: when you work on your spreadsheet, you need to save it first by using the little floppy disk save icon within the spreadsheet’s menu. Then use the standard “Save” option for your Notebook page. It sounds confusing, but basically you need to save the sheet separately from saving the page the sheet is on.

By the way, the only thing I’ve found that doesn’t work in Zoho’s spreadsheet program is the ability to freeze panes. I’m not missing it.

But there’s something else: if you click “Add Web Page” near the top of the left sidebar, you can import an entire, functioning website into the frame and have it there on command. Remember my WordPress GTD? I just added it as a webpage into the notebook, and I can use it from within Zoho. Ditto on Bloglines and Google Reader. Gmail won’t go into it (I’m guessing because it’s on a secured server). But I suspect any site that’s not on a secure server will. This means a lot of my daily browser tab sites and two Excel spreadsheets can be consolidated into one tab.

Oh, and if you want to use Zoho’s quite useful To Do/Planner program, you can cut and paste this link in as a webpage for your notebook - http://planner.zoho.com/login.do - and keep it in the notebook with anything else. Or you can do the same with any other To Do list you maintain.

Plus, you can log into this from everywhere, so I’m no longer having to email files back and forth.

I haven’t played much with the other modules, but here are some things I’m still learning. You can Add Blank Page and put all sorts of stuff on it - video, audio, URL’s. Frankly, I’m still not sure what I want to do with this - it could probably be useful for just copying and pasting stuff I want to come back to or collect. I did discover if you add an RSS, and it’ll appear as a little box with the post links inside. That’s not how I prefer to read my feeds (still a Bloglines fan), but it will work for some people. The only problem is, it won’t handle a redirected feed - i.e. a WordPress feed redirected through the Feedburner plugin.

You can upload files - I tested Word and PDF files. This is strictly file storage - you can’t edit them, but you can download them to work on, then upload them again later. But… you can use the Zoho writer module to upload Word files, then put them in your notebook just like the spreadsheets. In the Writer module, you select “Import” at the top, then upload the document. It won’t look exactly like your Word document - I’m seeing some altered fonts and removed horizontal divider lines. But still very useful. And you can create brand new Writer docs from within the Notebook.

Bugs to watch out for: after a while, it just stops saving changes. The way you find out is the little “Saved” popup in the lower right corner (which I didn’t even notice for a while) stops showing up.When that happens, you just need to refresh your page - it’s probably an Ajax-related issue, but then this is still in beta. UPDATE: another issue is that if you save a frame-busting Web Page to Zoho, it’ll divert you out of your notebook when you try to load that page (and you can’t even delete the page, then). About.com was the culprit in my case. They plan to find a way to fix this, or maybe just block such sites from being added, but for now you can use ‘test frame buster‘ before adding.

Feel free to ask me questions and share your own discoveries if you play with this.