Zoho Creator team,

The front page of your creator.zoho.com site clearly advertises that 


When you attempt to offer a useful service (useful enough to charge for it) you must meet one of the following conditions:

1. Your service is perfect.  Everything works as it should.  All problems are user problems.
2. Your service is not perfect but you would like for it to get better and more useful.

If you accept that number two is the dominant reality for software, you must develop and fund systems which allow your customers to let you know when your service does not work, allow you to communicate clearly that you have gotten their message, and allow your users to know how and when you will address the issue.  Lacking an effective communications system, your users are forced to choose either to wait and hope or stop paying for a poor quality service.

Are these the only choices you wish to offer?

I have spent a few thousand dollars of my clients money and a few hundred hours of my time attempting to use Zoho Creator to create a simple "new client intake system".  Now that we have captured a few hundred new client records, I have been using the new "reports" feature and have found it to have a FATAL PROBLEM!!!

When I choose to highlight words by using bold face, all caps and lots of exclamation points, I make this choice with the full knowledge that these violations of internet etiquette will label my point as not really very import so please re-read those words again.  "I have found it to have a fatal problem".

I have a working view of my data which properly shows new records as they are entered.  When I create either a report or a chart based on this view,  it does not always find or display all the underlying data. 

Some time before January 12th, I posted this inconvenient truth on the Zoho Creator forum, gave edit access and emailed a copy to support.  The next day I got a reply on the forum that you were looking into it.  After a few days with no response I did more testing and figured out that the system appeared to be only seeing the data that was there on the date the underlying view was created.  I posted this information on the forum.  After a few days with no response, I went back in to my charts and reports and was astonished to see them working properly.  I assumed the Creator team had identified and resolved the issue but was just too busy to let me know or post anything on the forum. 

I made an appointment with my client to show him our progress.  One hour before, I took a quick look at my pivot table reports and found that once again, new data was not being found.  This is not a criteria problem as there are none used. 

Here's where we are this morning, January 28th 2010.  The reports and charts feature of Zoho Creator has a fatal problem in that the information it displays can't be relied on.  I brought this to your attention 16 days ago and have received no communication other than useless form responses.  I am emailing support and posting this once again on the forums. The ball is now in your court. 

You have my name, my email, my phone number and my posts on your forums.  You may respond promptly in any forum you choose.  After a few days with no response..........


Rick Clay