- There is one video that I've been asked often to create, and this is what are our... Alternatives, I can't say that word. What are our alternatives to Google Drive. Oh, good heavens, that's coming up today on Dotto Tech. Steve Dotto, here, how the heck you doing this fine day? Today we're gonna take a look at an alternative to Google Drive. I get so many requests for alternatives to Google Drive because of the privacy issues surrounding the entire Google ecosystem. Now we love the free nature of Google's office suite of tools of Google Docs, and Sheets, the spreadsheet, word processor, the presentation package, and all that is encompassed in Google Drive. It's great stuff, we use it a lot, but many of us have concerns about how Google uses our information, and the effect it has on our privacy. So we're looking for alternatives to the Google ecosystem. There is one big alternative out there that is worth considering, and that is Zoho. Have you heard of Zoho? You probably have, but you've probably not paid super close attention to it. Zoho is actually a huge ecosystem of its own. They have a CRM, they have word processing, spreadsheet, presentation tools. If you take a look, and you visit the Zoho.com site, you'll see all of the different pieces that Zoho has in place for personal productivity, personal work, personal CRM, mail, all the way through to entire enterprise-based tools that will allow you to run your entire business, and a large team using their tools. There's a lot to Zoho. There's a lot to like, and I'm gonna take a little look today with you right now at Zoho's office suite, their free office suite that's designed for individuals, because they also have a work, a team-based tool, which is an extension of what we're gonna be showing. But let's get you started with baby steps first. You want to get out of the Google Drive space, and you want to consider what your options are. Zoho will provide us with some options that are free, or exceptionally, reasonably priced for email and word processing. We'll start with that and see where it takes us, okay? As always, we will put in links in the description, or in the blog post for everything that we're gonna be showing you today. But by visiting the Zoho site, if you scroll down, you'll first of all get an idea of the depth of different offerings that they have, but here we see in Email & Collaboration that we can gain access to email here, Docs, Writer, Sheets. Now Docs is what they call all of their different office products. Writer and Sheets are their word processor and spreadsheet, which is primarily what we're gonna have access to today as well as Show, which we aren't gonna take time to look at right now. But you can sign up for any of these services just by clicking on the link and choosing to sign up. Now one of the things I want you to be careful to pay attention to as you sign up, if you are gonna be trying it out and diving into it, is make sure that you choose the right path. If you choose the WorkDrive path, they're gonna be taking you down a revenue path where you're ultimately gonna be charged for the tools that you use, because it's designed for the workplace, for team-based work. You wanna make sure you go into the Docs for individuals, and that's where you can sign up for the forever free service, which you can then later upgrade if you need more services. So this is for our basic documents. So let's jump in, and I've actually already signed up for my... For an account, and when you sign up for the account, this is where you're gonna be initially... Initian-ally? I'm really good with the words today. This is where you're gonna be initially brought, is into this screen here, which gives you an idea of an overview. I kinda like this, look, they got these little animated arrows that fly to the spot when you use it. But this talks you through the basic structure of Zoho Docs, which contains, if we take a look under the Create menu, it contains three applications: Document, processing, word processing, effectively, Spreadsheets, and a Presentation tool. And you can just jump in and start by creating a document right from here, but it's worth taking a second and looking through what options you have. There's a mobile version, and there's also a sync version that comes onto your desktop, so that you can work on the documents when you're offline, which is useful if you're gonna be flying, and working on your notebook, or that sort of stuff. You also, if you go into the Upload section here, have the ability to import documents that you've created in other systems. Word documents, straight from a folder, straight from your computer, or even import documents from Google Drive if you're migrating over. So that's an option that you have, especially if you decide that you like the tool and you wanna migrate all of your documents in, that's what you'll be doing a little bit later on when you get into that. So let's now take you into the word processor and the spreadsheet tool. Now I've imported one of the documents that I'm working on, a blog post here, to give us something to work with within the word processor. Now I, in some ways... Actually, in a lot of ways, I like this word processor even better than I like Google Docs. It's got some nice structure. It's a little bit of, kind of, it feels like a little bit of a throwback to kind of the more Microsoft Word-type word processors, where you're dealing within an application, but they've got some really nice features that apply a lot of different structure and allow you to compose your document with a lot of control. And it's really all about the control, isn't it? Now here's one of the first things that I noticed, is within the page itself, the compose window of the page, is there's these two kind of... In every paragraph, there are these two shadowed tools that allow us to automatically insert images, or create paragraphs with images, bookmarks, links, tables, and insert a table, let's just insert a table directly in there, let's do a three by three column table, and there it is inserted. And then the other thing that these little shadow things, and I don't know what they call 'em, but it allows us to go in and do your basic paragraph formatting right within here. So that gives you an interactive window in your document compose screen. Now much of those same tools are available to you here, and you just go under the hamburger menu here, and that brings up all of your different typical formatting tools that you've got. And we see the same options of inserting different types of document types, or different media types, setting your page setup for printing and publishing, allowing your viewing window, different tools. What's the tools for, spell-check, you're adding a dictionary and a personal thesaurus, or a thesaurus and that sort of stuff. So we've got all of those tools available here, as opposed to having a big menu bar at the top, which is the way Google Docs does it. So they're all available here in this pop-out sidebar, which is pretty slick. Now they also have general... Editing environments, which is a compose window, a review window, and a distribute window here, which allows you to publish it to the web, send it directly to an email, and we'll speak about their email service in a moment, post it to your blog, and other things. So you've got all these distribution options available right here. Now what about as a collaborative word processor, Steve? One of the big strengths of Google Docs is how good a collaborative tool it is for creating collaborative documents. Within the share menu here, you can choose who you wanna share, and what your sharing preferences are. So you can make it wide open for everybody to be able to edit and view, verus being able to close it down and limit permissions, depending on what roles everybody is playing. You've got all of those abilities there. But when we go here into the review window, right here, we see along the top now a couple of menu items that give us an idea that it is indeed a pretty powerful collaborative writing tool. We can turn on and off tracking changes, which will then identify who makes changes, what they made, and then we can determine whether or not we want to accept those changes or reject them here within this window. A lot of structure, as I said, there's a lot of structure to this word processor. I like it, I think you will like it as well. I think they're on version five of the iterations of this, and it is available free, and it is well worth checking out if you want an alternative to Google Docs. Now while we're here, let's take a quick look at their spreadsheet as well. Now the spreadsheet package, again, it looks very Excel-like, it looks really like Microsoft Excel used to look, with the traditional menu structure along the very top, and then access to your different tools within here. And if you are comfortable with Excel, you will be very comfortable with this. As a matter of fact, down to the fact that if you put in, you know, start typing in a series, January, February, and see even the... Extensions, extending out a range, all works exactly as you'd expect as you go through it, the format painter, you've got the same sum tables, where you're gonna have all of your numbers. Let's do a 56, a 76, 87, and we wanna add up all of those numbers there, we just highlight them, click on the sum, and it automatically creates the calculation. So you've got the same basic spreadsheet tools as you expect, I think, as far as I can tell here... I actually like this better than the Google Sheets. I don't know why, it just feels more like Excel to me, and I guess I come from an Excel world. So Zoho sheets is a worthy competitor as well. I promised you I would take a look at mail, which is a slightly different story than the Docs story, because it's not free. Well, it's close to free, but it's not free. If you take a look at Zoho mail, which gives you an option to get out of the... The tool that we use the most in the whole Google suite, which is Gmail, if you want your own Zoho mail service, you can access it through here, and if you check out the pricing, you'll see that they don't have a free service. They've got it starting at $1 a month, billed annually. So $12 a year to access mail. And here is a list of the services that it provides. And then if you step up to $4 a month, for an individual account, or $3 a month for each individual in the workplace environment, you see the other services that are available to it. So it's a very small amount of money as far as Zoho is asking, but you get some significant functionality, but you're stepping completely outside of the Google ecosystem at that point there. And it has the rest of the tools you want as well. You can tie into the Zoho calendar, and it gives you options in all of those spaces. We don't have time to explore them all today because it's a... There's just too much to cover, but if you do wanna move outside of Google, it is a viable option. Now what do you lose? What do we lose if we move to Zoho from Google? The biggest thing that we lose, in my opinion, is how powerful Google's search is, how effective Google is at searching and finding what it is you're looking for. Now while the search within the Docs on Zoho and within the Zoho mail is very good, it's not Google-level search. That's what Google is really best at, is search. So the ability to be able to search through your Gmail very quickly, very effectively, you're gonna lose a little bit of that functionality, and you're gonna lose any additional integration that Google provides, say, with the browser, with the Chrome browser, especially if you use a Google phone, smart phone, you're gonna lose some pieces of that integration. You're gonna lose a little bit of convenience, but you're gonna gain a certain degree of privacy. Now you're not gonna gain quite as much privacy as you believe you will gain, because you should, if you are following this path, take time and read through the Zoho privacy policy. Now one thing I really like about Zoho's privacy policy is they make it very easy to understand as they explain things, but they do share some of your information with contractors and with other companies when they feel it is necessary for them to provide the services that they are promising to you. And they explain it within here, but you just have to recognize that no online service that we work with is going to be completely private as far as we're concerned. The fact that we're publishing our information online in a synced environment means that there's a certain loss of privacy, and there's also a certain amount of risk with our information being inadvertently exposed in other ways, through hacks, or through mistakes. So you have to recognize that you're taking on a certain degree of risk there as well. Overall, I think Zoho is a great option. I'm really happy to be diving into it again, and kind of pulling my way through, and seeing all of the very cool features that it has. We haven't even started to talk about some of its super advanced features, such as the CRM integration, and how it fits as a business suite managing large businesses. For individuals, on a personal level, it's well worth taking a look at. Zoho, an option outside of the Google ecosystem that provides most of the functionality. I hope you found today's video to be useful. If you did, please do us a favor, gives us a thumbs-up on this video, and if you've not yet subscribed to the Dotto Tech channel, make sure you subscribe and ring that notification bell so that you learn of new videos when we upload them. Tell me in the comments of other stories you want, if you're using Zoho, if you have decided that Google is not for you, but you're going in a different direction, let me know, and tell me if we were helpful to you. Till next time, I'm Steve Dotto. Have fun stormin' the castle.
