Are you still stuck with spreadsheets to manage your work? Let’s look at a real-time scenario
Imagine your company suddenly receives a significant request, which is a deal breaker for your product. It’s due in 4 days. And your boss just puts you in charge of pulling it all together. You’ve just got a tiny window of time to discuss with Product Expert Tricia whether it’s possible to meet the deadline, to work with UI Designer Eddie for a last-minute interface and get the developers to start coding on this request.
Above all you’re trying to do all this through your company’s default medium – spreadsheets. Yikes!
The real struggles with spreadsheets
- Unfit for agile business: Managing work with spreadsheets makes sense for personal projects but they break when you try to collaborate with a group to get work done faster.
- Lack of visibility: It’s hard to track what part of work is been done and what’s still pending in a project.
- Poor coordination: Teams which are geographically separated can’t work in unison to accomplish a common goal using spreadsheets
We already know the answer. No spreadsheets anymore.
At Zoho, we’ve developed a nice little feature to Import your Tasks from various formats like xls, json and csv files and quickly start collaborating from anywhere, anytime.
How Zoho Projects helps you
- Assign tasks to team members and easily track who’s done what.
- Communicate effectively with your team using feeds, forums, wiki and chat rooms
- Tag files to easily find them later. This means you can quickly locate that Design from three months ago the next time a similar one hits your desk.
But that’s not all a couple of more exciting features are rolled as part of this update
1. From now on start shooting tasks into Zoho Projects with start and end dates, severity via email. Furthermore, if you wish to make an announcement use [announcement] tag and post a forum topic. Learn more about them in detail at Email Collaboration
2. If you are a power user of Chrome browser then this is for you. We’ve built a cool extension for chrome that allows you to see latest updates, create tasks, file bugs, post comments and do more right from within your browser.
Give it a try and let us know what you think as comments here.
I attempted the import tasks feature while testing the product using the free version. I mapped my fields on my spreadsheet from a zoho export file that I had created earlier. It started the process but it hung during processing. After closing out and Upon entering the product again the feature has disappeared as listed above in the tutorial (see reference below). What has happened? Is this a bug? Referencehttps://www.zoho.com/projects/blog/introducing-import-tasks-in-zoho-projects.html
What's the goal of zoho projects in itself? Do people use it primarily for time-tracking alone? Or People use it to track the workflow of projects (KANBAN/SCRUM/...)? We basically try to use it primarily for time tracking than project management in itself and I personally feel zoho is not working well for this. Please give your opinions.
Great article and very informative content.
What is the recommended browser platform for all of Zoho's suite of products. In the past, I've been told Firefox, especially with using Zoho Docs, however I notice that most of your browser add-ons are developed for Chrome. This sends mixed messages. Please clarify.
Is there anyway to include subtasks for the excel import?
@Bernard Zoho's suite of products work across browsers... :-) be it Chrome, Firefox, Safari and IE provided they are latest versions. Chrome provides extension APIs which we used and built this extension for Zoho Projects. Hope that clarifies.