Access files from any computer with Zoho

Project management
Asking people to do something is easy, but keeping track of whether they have done it or not can be difficult. Zoho includes a very capable project management tool, a fancy to-do list that lets you share and assign jobs to different people. Click here to open the Zoho project management tool.

The free Zoho account lets you use one project at a time. That’s enough for now but it will have to be deleted before starting another project.

Click on the Add Project link on the Projects Home page. Give the project a name and description. Click on the Click here link after ‘To add users for this project’.

Enter an email address for the first person and click on Add User. Change the User role to Employee, so they can make changes. Zoho will send each person an email to confirm that they are a member of the project. If they do not have a Zoho account the email will include a password for them to use to access the service.

Click on the Add Project button and the Dashboard page will appear. Click on the Tasks and Milestones tab and you will see a blank text box, where you can type the name of your task list. Ours is called party jobs.

Click on Add Task List and enter a job title, such as buying some cutlery before selecting a family member (or employee, as Zoho calls them). Click on Advanced options to add a deadline to the task. Click on Add Task and they will be sent an email to tell them about the task. The task will then appear in the list. Click in the box to the left of the task name when it’s completed.

Making a slide show
No family party would be complete without a slideshow of embarrassing pictures. Click on the Switch To link and then on Zoho Show. Existing Presentations will be shown on this page if there are any. If you have already started a Power point or Open Office Impress document, click on Import a local or online Presentation link to import it into Zoho.

Otherwise click on Create a New Presentation. Give the presentation a name and then a description. Tags are added automatically. They are not essential but will help you find the document later on. They are added automatically from the title so most of the time this field can be left as it is.

Finally, choose a theme for the slideshow. Click on a category to see a preview and a thin yellow border will appear around the selected theme. Click on Start.

The presentation editor will then appear. Click on the Presentation Title text and replace it with your own. Click outside the box to confirm the change. Repeat this for the Sub Title. Click on the Save icon to save the presentation.

Click on the Slide icon at the left of the toolbar to insert a new slide. Just like Powerpoint there are several slide templates. Select Blank Slide, as we only want to include photos, and then click on Create Slide.
Items can be added from the task pane on the right-hand side of the screen; clip art can be found at the bottom of the list. Click on an image once to insert it onto the slideshow.

Click and drag the image to move it around the slide. Click and drag on the orange circle sticking out of the top to rotate the image. The squares on the border (also known as handles) are used to resize the image. Use the blue square to keep the image in proportion, otherwise it will look squashed.

To add some photos, click on the third icon in from the right in the bottom toolbar to insert a picture. It looks just like the Insert Picture icon in Word or Powerpoint.

There are three places to select photos from: a library of images uploaded to Zoho or the Flickr and Picasa online photo-sharing services. Click on the Browse button and select an image on your computer. Images are limited to 2MB so you may need to resize the image before adding it to the presentation in an image editor such as Paint.Net. For example, a high-quality photo from an eight-megapixel camera would be too big to upload without resizing it first.

The photo will then appear in the library. Click in the box next to the name to select it and then click on Insert. If an image fills the slide, the resize handles (the squares that appear on the border) will not appear. Right-click on the image and left-click on Properties. Click in the Width box and enter a smaller number. Press tab to move to the height box.

If you are arranging more than one photo on a slide, you may want to click on the Flip & Rotation option and enter an angle to rotate the image. Click on the icon to the right to preview the change.

This slideshow is going to have contributions from other people so they need to be given access to it. Click on the Share button in the Toolbar. Enter the email addresses of all the people you want to share in the slideshow in the bottom left-hand window, separating each address with a comma. This will send them an email with a link to the slideshow.

You can preview the slideshow by clicking on the Slideshow button. The final presentation of the slideshow is where Zoho shows some of the limitations of working purely within a web browser as the present options are much more limited than Powerpoint or Impress. For the best results we recommend downloading the presentation by clicking on the share button in the toolbar.

Sharing your photos on Zoho Wiki ­
It’s safe to assume that people will take lots of photos at the party and they will want somewhere too share them afterwards. You could create a group for this on the photo-sharing site www.flickr.com but Zoho also provides a way of doing this.

Click on the link labelled ‘Switch to’ and then on Zoho Wiki. A welcome page will appear with the address of the Wiki and the option to change the name. Keep it private and select a template in the bottom-half of the window. Click on Save and Continue and then on the Wiki title.

At the bottom of the window you will see an option labelled ‘Set dashboard as my home page’ with a tick next to it. Untick this box and then click on ‘Click here to reload your Home Page’. Click on the Edit button and use the editor to delete the content that is placed there by default. Now you can click on the insert picture icon in the toolbar to insert a photo on the page.

As we have seen, there are lots of applications and options to explore within Zoho that can be helpful when organising an event.

Zoho’s other programs are worth exploring and include an online note-taking application to help with research. If there are elements of Zoho or other online applications that you would like to see explored in our Workshops section, contact us at letters@computeractive.co.uk.

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