Zoho sheet corrupts data in sheet and a list of other errors encountered yesterday
Yesterday I encountered extensive data loss and corruption with Zoho sheets, finally resulting in me having to have all the users email me the data and putting it into Excel myself manually. Although I did some initial testing in the last few months, this is the first time we tried to process this data with all the users.
First let me describe how I use the sheet and then I’ll list all the issues I have:
I have a group of people that place orders once a month. All the data is stored in a single workbook with each users order in a separate tab. Each user has only their tab shared with them in Zoho, so they see none of the other tabs.
Each month I load data into the workbook in Excel using a series of macros to extract the data from the web and load it into Excel. I use Excel to do this, since Zoho does not have the support or speed to do it online. Once the data is loaded into the workbook, I upload the file to Zoho using the Excel plugin.
Once the data is on Zoho, I email all the shared users. I would like to do this with notify shared users, but it has a bug I have already reported. Inconvenient, but I can work around this bug for now
Then each user signs in and edits their sheet simultaneously. You may have 10-15 users editing the same workbook, but different tabs at the same time. Users then print a copy for reference.
This is where all the data corruption occurred. Users entered the data on the tab, saved it, and printed. They then send me a notification that they are complete. When I looked at the data, many of the sheets they had entered information on are now blank. Some were distorted, with data entered in one row now appearing in another row. A complete disaster! So what I had to do was have all the users email me the data and I entered it manually in Excel. In fact to make sure it wasn’t a user error, I entered the data for one user in Zoho, and by the time I had finished and download the file with the Excel plugin, it was corrupt, so much for blaming it on an inexperienced user.
Some users reported other errors during data entry:
• Error 500
• An error dialog with just error on it, only a close button
• Hang when saving, icons stayed dimmed
• No notification during save, user did not know if saved occurred or not
• Please wait to edit, never going away with icons dimmed
• Please wait to edit, with icons not dimmed, sometimes they could enter, sometimes they could not
So now I downloaded the workbook using the Excel plugin. As I looked at the data, it was calculating the totals at the top, but I did not see any values in the rows. It took me awhile to figure out what Zoho had done to the remaining data; it hid just about every row the user had entered data into. (I can send you a copy of the file I downloaded, but it is too big for your forum attachment.)
After downloading the data, I use a series of macros to filter it and print it. Can’t do this in Zoho since it doesn’t support filters and the printing is weak.
After about a week, I upload a new file with all the order data deleted, so a user can’t place an order on old data. Then the process starts all over again the next month.
Most of the users are on Windows (both XP and Vista) using Firefox, some using IE, but that doesn’t seem to have any pattern or association to the errors encountered. Some are also using a Mac with Firefox.
So here is a summary of the bugs I have found:
1. Zoho corrupts the data a user enters online.
2. Zoho changes format of rows that had data entered when downloaded by the Excel plugin
3. Notify shared users, looks like it’s going to send email, then errors out with can’t send email. It sends to one or two in the group of 29
4. Error 500
5. An error dialog with just error on it, only a close button
6. Hang when saving, icons stayed dimmed
7. No notification during save, user did not know if saved occurred or not
8. Please wait to edit, never going away with icons dimmed
9. Please wait to edit, with icons not dimmed, sometimes they could enter, sometimes they could not
10. Number of users in chat dialog incorrect
11. Export send email, when you have an attachment, reports error attachment non existent
12. Zoho corrupts the shared users when you add a user to the group and then share a file with them.
Think this is a great solution, but unworkable and unreliable for us at this point.
Some of these bugs I have reported before, but they remain unresolved. The data corruption makes the Zoho application unusable for us; please let me know when you can address the bugs.
I can also send you the corrupt file I downloaded, if you tell me who to email it to. The one on Zoho now is a corrected version, so it won’t do you any good to look at it.
One other issue that really makes it hard to use Zoho, is not having a way to protect cells or even rows or columns of data. I reorganized most of the sheets to work around this, but it still makes it hard to protect users from themselves without this functionallity.