The year we've had: Zoho Office Suite in 2019

Zia, automation, integrations, and more—here's a quick recap of everything we added to the Zoho Office Suite this year.

Staying true to our vision for the future of work, we continued to push boundaries with our office apps Writer, Sheet, Show, and Notebook this year. As always, our goal was helping businesses be more productive, save time, and connect our apps easily with the rest of the Zoho operating system.

We saw more users engaging with Zoho's office suite than ever, with over 100,000 office documents and 250,000 notes accessed everyday. We're thrilled to continue helping more businesses do amazing things in the coming years. ?

To round things up, here's a quick bird's-eye view of what we did with the Zoho Office Suite in 2019:

1. WorkDrive is here

We announced our new, unified document storage and collaboration platform, Zoho WorkDrive. This is designed to break down any information silos your previous file storage system created within your teams. WorkDrive brings all your files across our business and productivity apps to one place.

Zoho Office Suite editors Writer, Sheet, and Show are natively integrated with Zoho WorkDrive, making it an incredible solution to create, share, and collaborate on documents wherever you are.

2. Automation options for your mundane work

Writer introduced new features to help you create smarter documents that can be merged with the data source of your choice. Create templates using smart fields (including QR codes or Barcodes), and pass them on to your teammates to streamline workflows. All they have to do is to connect this document with an app where your business data is stored (Zoho CRM, for example).

Similarly, you can link spreadsheets with other data sources—like inventory data in Zoho Inventory, for example—to auto-populate numbers in sheets. Zoho Sheet is now integrated with workflow automation tools like Zoho Flow and Zapier to help you do this.

3. Embracing Deluge

We understand that every team has unique workflows and processes they follow. This is where Deluge, Zoho's own custom scripting language, comes into picture. Using Deluge scripts, you can easily connect your Writer documents to a Zoho CRM or Orchestly workflow, or create custom buttons within them for specific document tasks.

In Zoho Sheet, Deluge helps you perform personalized calculations and bring in data from external sources. Use the intuitive Custom Functions editor to tie over 350 different functions together and create the exact workflow you're looking for.

4. Bringing the office suite to communication apps

We made it easier for you to pull documents and notes into your email threads. Zoho Mail's eWidget panel now comes with Zoho Notebook and Zoho WorkDrive integrations, so you can easily drag and drop notes, office documents, and files to your emails.

Similarly, Zoho Cliq has made it easier than ever to share documents with people in a chat group. Dropping a document link into a chat now creates a smart card for participants to preview instantly, add other group participants as document collaborators, or send it as an email attachment.

5. Zia learned more tricks too!

How did Zia help you in 2019 across the Zoho operating system? Let us know! The beginning of the year saw Zia coming to the office suite as a writing assistant in Writer, number-crunching expert in Sheet, and your note-taking assistant in Zoho Notebook.

Our users loved being able to give Zia voice commands to search for a note or create a new one in Zoho Notebook. Zia made it easy to quickly look up the latest recipe in The New York Times cooking section, or organize your notes into Notebooks in a single tap.

Thanks to everyone who wrote to us, we're bringing Zia to the Zoho Mail editor as well. Soon, Zia's expertise in grammar, spelling, writing style, and cliche can even help you write better emails. Here's a quick sneak peek:

Apart from these updates, 2019 was also an incredible year for Zoho as a whole—we hit 50 million users across our apps and opened a new Data Center in Australia.

Is there a feature you’d like us to add to the Zoho Office Suite? Let us know in the comments below.

Wishing you a very happy end of this decade and bright new year! ?

—the Zoho Office Suite team

Read next:

Zoho Writer in 2019 | Zoho Sheet in 2019 | Zoho Show in 2019

Make Zoho do more for you: You can now use Writer, Sheet, Show, and WorkDrive as part of our cloud office suite and other collaboration tools by signing up for Zoho Workplace or Zoho One.