One of the main complaints leveled at web-based alternatives to Microsoft Office is that they generally lack some of the more powerful features found in Office. While online office apps have the general use cases covered, they often lack the specialized tools. But Zoho is quickly changing that. The company recently announced an overhaul to Zoho Sheets with support for power user features like pivot tables and Visual Basic Scripting.
The new macro supports means that the macros you’ve written for Excel can now be used in Zoho Sheet. Aside from Microsoft Excel, Zoho is one of the only other Office suites that offers support for VBA macros, which are often used for complex calculations that can’t be done with spreadsheet formulas alone.
The other main new feature in Zoho Sheets is support for Pivot tables, which are complex tables that can automatically sort, count, and manipulate the data stored in one table and display it in another table, making it easier to analyze.
While neither of these features are sort of sexy new release that draws in casual users, they’re both key for pulling in the business power user — the people who actually use Excel’s more advanced offerings.
At the moment Zoho only supports about half of the VBA spreadsheet functions, but that puts Sheet well ahead of Google Spreadsheet, which, thus far, doesn’t support VBA macros at all. Zoho has posted a complete list of the spreadsheet function available and says that more are in the works. There’s also a new wiki where users can share useful macros.
The Zoho Sheet update also adds a number of other smaller new features, including support for large spreadsheets (up to 100,000 rows of data when when imported from CSV files). As always, there’s a video demo to accompany the release:
[screenshot courtesy of Zoho]
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