We’re bringing contextual integrations, artificial intelligence, and refreshed experiences to our office suite apps Writer, Sheet, Show, and Notebook. Here’s everything new.
We envision the future of work as a connected system that brings together different apps into a comprehensive platform that helps you get work done faster.
Today, we’re delighted to be making huge strides towards that vision, made possible by the incredible breadth of the Zoho suite and our decade-long focus on developing a powerful office suite on the cloud.
Apps that run together to create incredible synergy
An end-to-end digital signature platform
Zoho Writer now lets you create template documents, populate them with Zoho CRM data, and send them for signature collection using Zoho Sign.
Create contract templates, connect them with your contacts to generate personalized copies in bulk, and finally sending them across for signature collection—all from one tool, without making manual edits or uploading documents elsewhere.
Insert wet signatures and create your own sign collection workflow in Writer
2. Spreadsheets that talk to your business apps
Though most modern-day business apps aim to replace spreadsheets for complex bookkeeping and data analysis, spreadsheets remain a simple, everyday productivity tool. While we continue to keep it simple and familiar, we’re also making it easier for you to connect your spreadsheets intelligently with the other systems you use at work.
Zoho Sheet now features a brand-new Custom Function engine that’s built on Deluge, our custom scripting language. Imagine creating sales or expense reports that require you to pull in data from your sales or accounting apps. Custom Functions in Sheet help you pull data from multiple apps by using ready-to-use scripts or writing your own.
Pulling dynamic data from Zoho CRM using Custom Functions in Sheet
We’re also connecting Zoho Sheet with Zoho Flow and Zapier. The new row-based controls let you trigger an automated workflow as soon as a particular row in a spreadsheet is updated.
3. Chat and video calling, across all your systems
Instead of having one central messaging app that acts as a collaboration hub for your work, we’re bringing Zoho Cliq—our team communication app—to all the apps your teams use. From Zoho CRM to Desk to Writer, all your work tools now have instant chat and video calling options built in, making communication easy.
Communicate with your team while you work on your documents using our Zoho Cliq integration.
Zia, our intelligent assistant comes to the office suite
1. A smart assistant to improve your writing
We’ve trained Zia to help you write better. She’s now part of Zoho Writer, continuously working in the background to come up with real-time grammar, writing, style, and readability suggestions based on the context of your piece.
Realtime grammar and style suggestions in Writer
Zia also analyzes your piece to come up with advanced, granular suggestions that can elevate the quality of your writing. She uses the Flesch-Kincaid readability test to calculate the readability score of your piece, and suggests ways to make your writing easier to read.
The Writing Quality section of Zia’s mini report card lists all the common style errors—like clichés or overly wordy phrases—you might’ve made in your piece, and how to improve them.
2. She’s your personal data analyst, too!
Want to make sense of your rows and rows of data before your next meeting? Zia can help. Tap “Insights by Zia” in Zoho Sheet, and she’ll bring you a wide variety of ways you can organize, represent, and understand your data better.
She builds instant pivot tables you can drop into your workbooks. These summarize your data in a couple of clicks, making work much easier for you.
Zia creating instant pivot tables and charts for you.
Got a quick question in the back of your mind about the data? Ask Zia what you’re looking for, and she’ll use all the tricks she’s got up her sleeve to answer it for you the best possible way.
Ask Zia questions about the data in your spreadsheet
3. Ask Zia to take notes for you
Note-taking was the next area we wanted to train Zia for, and she was quick to pick that up as well.
Now you can give Zia voice commands to search for a note or create a new one. You can even ask her to go find the top trending video on Youtube, or the latest recipe on The New York Times cooking section, and save it as a Smart Card. Zia will also help you keep organized by suggesting which notebook a note belongs in, or which tag would be best for your note.
Refreshed design for a more refined experience
Last year, we gave Zoho Writer a major facelift with a clean, minimalistic design that removes clutter and relies on contextual tools to help you focus on your work. Today, we’re doing the same with Sheet and Show as well.
We analyzed how people use each of these tools, kept what matters to the users, and tidied up everything else that stood in the way of a simplified user experience.
Adding even more depth for the power user
Along with all these new capabilities each of our office suite apps have picked up, we’re also adding more depth to these tools, thanks to all our users who wrote to us asking for these features.
Zoho Sheet now features an all-new Data Cleaning tool to help you find and remove duplicates, fix inconsistencies across your data (like Color vs Colour), and fill in missing values for you.
Data Cleaning option detecting duplicates across your spreadsheet in Zoho Sheet
Zoho Writer now works completely offline across all your devices. Create and edit documents offline, and even close the tabs when you’re done—Writer saves everything automatically. Once you’re reconnected, all that work you did offline syncs to your account in a snap!
And finally, Zoho Show is taking major strides in making your presentations more exciting and interactive, with beautiful new design elements and smooth animations.
An example of path animations in slide done using Zoho Show
We’re always working toward building the contextually integrated digital workplace of the future. With more support and feedback from you, we can only make things better from here. Let us know how you like the new updates in the comments section below.
Thanks for reading!
We’ll be following up this blog with a series of product-specific ones, to help you learn more about the updates in detail. Follow the #FutureOffice series to stay connected.
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