Zoho Creator: Amazing Web Database

Zoho Creator is an amazing (and free) web database application that is part of the web Zoho Office suite. I heard about it and its mobile device support late last year but did not try it out until this evening. You can find my comments about its mobile device support on my MobileViews blog at Zoho Creator Mobile: Simply Amazing where I describe the process of taking an existing Excel spreadsheet and turning it into a simple mobile device accessible database application.

Zoho Creator lets you quickly and easily create a web-based database application. A little database and development experience is a definite plus. But, I think most people with some familiarity of basic database concepts and web interfaces can be productive very quickly with Zoho Creator.

I've been using Google Spreadsheet inappropriately as a convenient tool for a bunch of, what amounts to, flat file databases. However, a couple of these pseudo-databases are running into speed and other issues as they push into hundreds of rows of textual, date, and numeric data. It may be time to migrate those problematic spreadsheet databases into Zoho Creator. Zoho also lets me export data from its database out to a variety of file formats (including Microsoft Excel). So, if I ever change my mind or find an even better solution, Zoho doesn't prevent me from making that move out of Zoho Creator.