The people at AdventNet have been busy as of late. Following the development of the amazingly effective Zoho Writer, they have been working on the long-anticipated Zoho Websheet, which is the best Office 2.0 alternative I know to Microsoft Excel. The service still is in beta test, but you should expect a release very soon now.

I have been using the preview release for a couple of weeks and have been impressed by what it can do. I built a fairly sophisticated flight navigation log using Microsoft Excel and imported it into Zoho Websheet. The online spreadhseet was fully functional, including pretty complex mathematical formulas. The presentation was true to the original, beside the lack of support for merged cells and cell borders. But I got totally blown away when I exported the spreadsheet back to Excel: to my amazement, the exported document looked exactly like the original.

Once Zoho Websheet goes live and the couple of bugs I found have been fixed, I believe that I will be able to uninstall Microsoft Excel from my laptop. And once the Zoho team releases their yet-to-be announced Office 2.0 alternative to Microsoft PowerPoint, I should be able to uninstall Microsoft Office entirely. These are truly exciting times!