Dear Zoho Creator and Reporter Teams,

Many thanks for your help – your apps have huge potential.

I have a number of problems with using your programmes.

I am attempting to use Zoho Creator/Reports to run a live audit tool, which will real-time produce reports regarding the data stored - this is potentially to be implemented into large business scale.

In Zoho creator I have encountered the following problems:

1. CHECKBOX DATA CANNOT BE PRESENTED IN A GRAPH. This needs to be fixed. It should be possible to present data such as I have 5 apples, 3 pears and 4 oranges as a bar graph. If you allow free text entry then the data may become invalid e.g. pears vs Pears or pEars.
2. FORMULA DATA CANNOT BE PRESENTED IN A GRAPH. This is a big fault. If I have 30 pounds in one savings account and 20 in another and create a field of total savings I cannot create a graph of the total savings.
3. CANNOT SPECIFY THE RANGE DIVISIONS for numerical data that is presented in a graph. This is a big fault.
4. Having converted a large data set into checkboxes and having discovered this flaw I CANNOT CONVERT THE FIELD CATEGORY BACK INTO TEXT INSTEAD OF CHECKBOX.
5. CUSTOM FIELDS e.g. if I wanted a field to have a Time field the format of which must be ####.
6. When importing a database and converting fields to checkboxes (which I have stopped doing because of the earlier bugs) – there are frequent errors due to alleged duplication faults. I have been through the data meticulously and cannot find the source.
7. Data cannot be divided by category then presented for example a bar graph first divided into apples, pears and oranges then displaying weights of each category e.g. pears 4 at 50-75g, 3 at 25-50g, 2 at 75-100g, apples 3 at 0-25g, 4 at 25-50g, 3 at 50-75g.

I feel that the possible solution to this is using Zoho Reports. Zoho Reports seems to have greater data manipulation functionality and has been a more established and supported application.

1. If Zoho reporter were to have a “create form” option so that the database could be populated via an embedded external data entry form then this could work well. The iframe format from creator seems to work well for this purpose.
2. Alternatively, Zoho reporter should be able to populate a database real-time from zoho creator. The advantage of this solution would be that if it imported the field data alone and not the formulae/checkbox coding then the data would be “cleaned” and could then be either text or number and thus should be processed by the reporting tools. The current solution requires making the Creator tables and data public and this is not possible with sensitive information.

If these faults were fixed my implementation would rapidly expand into 10,000 + records.

Many thanks,

James