The online office suite Zoho launched a new presentation tool this week called Zoho Show, for use in creating and displaying remote presentations on the web. This newest offering is the 12th Zoho web based application, including a word processor, spreadsheet, chat, CRM, an app creator and more.
Zoho Show’s most important feature is that you can import Power Point (and open office) files. That’s it’s primary advantage over Thumbstacks. Unfortunately, there’s a 1 MB upload limit on those files, so substantial Power Point files won’t work. Zoho files can also be exported to power point files or put up on the web with single click, whereas Thumbstacks exports to HTML.
Both Zoho Show and Thumbstacks” target=”_blank”>Thumbstacks offer remote controlled online display of slideshows, and both make it easy to toggle between public and private. When private is selected, both systems display an error message if you try to load the public URL. Zoho Show does not appear to support the creation and manipulation of arrows, which seems like a huge problem for presentations. Thumbstacks does. According to the Thumbstacks developer’s blog this was a real technical feat, browser support for arrows. Instead, Zoho offers some images of arrows that you can move around and resize.
Both services support easy import of your photos from Flickr, but only Zoho’s prompts you to login to access the photos you’ve marked private. Thumbstacks seems to have struggled on Macs since inception and has a limit of 5 viewers at once for slide shows. While Zoho Show is a more polished offering from a commercial vendor, until they add support for arrows, it would be better to use Thumbstacks to create most slide shows. It would be best to use Zoho Show if you are working on something collaboratively with people who use Power Point.
To be fair, the now 12 services Zoho suite is impressive. We reviewed Zoho Writer here and the company is obviously serious about improving their offerings over time. Here’s hoping that Zoho Show increases its Power Point upload limit and adds support for arrows.
