The task seemed relatively simple. Send a client a list of links to their and their competitors’ coverage. They are a bit old school so liked the idea of an Excel spreadsheet or similar.
When my file was received the links would not work. This was the case irrespective of how these were formatted. Having Googled around for a solution, it became clear that this was a well-known fault with Excel.
Like a lot of Microsoft Office users, I love and hate Excel at the same time. Many use spreadsheets to collate and analyse public relations coverage. They can feature columns of variables like sentiment, branding and messaging. If you don’t need to share the spreadsheet Excel's pivot tables and graphing options are suitable for most analysis needs.
Lots of tools
Many options were tried including Caspio. This fitted the need, being an online version of Excel. But it lacked some functionality in its free version.
This was a shame as Caspio is a good tool and well worth a play. It’s straightforward to import Excel sheets. It retains functionality of URL links (in the premium version). It creates a useful query form screen. This could be configured to search the columns or fields.
This included the ability to filter for references to themselves and their competitors, date periods and any other variable tracked. Users decide aspects like which fields use tick boxes, drop-down list and radio buttons. It then generated a bit of code snippet which can be pasted into an HTML page. This created a query form showing listings with working URL links.
Google Docs was then tried. This was also eliminated along with Dropbox. Neither could get through my clients rather picky firewall.
Before trying Zoho Creator I also tried Microsoft One Drive. This is built into most recent versions of Excel. It allows users to share Excel spreadsheet via email addresses from a cloud location. Although coming with great promise it also fell foul of my clients’ firewall.
Zoho Creator
The Zoho Creator Forever Free plan has a wider selection of features compared to the free version of Caspio. You can run three sets of tables, sharing with three users, including up to 750 records and 300 MB of storage. This met my monthly and quarterly reporting requirements.
When getting acquainted with a new tool increasing numbers of people are referring to online video tutorials. YouTube proved to have a rich selection of how-to videos on Zoho Creator. Recent YouTube research found there has been a 70% increase in the number of searches for tutorials in the past year.
It proved simple to upload an Excel or similar spreadsheet into Zoho Creator. This can then be formatted into the database’s structure. The table is viewable online. Importantly it can be shared with other users, via an email link. Alternatively the query and results tables can be added into another html page via a code snippet.
There are a large number of options available with this tool. These include creating a fully relational database. It can also be used to make a contact form or some type of online data collection device. It does not need to sit on their server. A code snippet can take any of these properties to your own page.
Zoho Creator solves the problem and does more
Zoho Creator can be used to collect information from users of a micro site about their interests. This can be configured to include features like data validation rules. For example only accepting numbers or text in certain fields and dates in a certain way. The forms are flexible. They could include options such as drop-down menus to focus user inputs.
Zoho Creator can work like a more sophisticated version of an online market research tool such as Survey Monkey. There are some nice to have features including the ability to customise email responses depending on form answers.
Key to the adoption of many of these online tools is the intuitive nature of the user interface. In my experience Caspio is easier to pick up than Zoho creator. Caspio makes the configurations of components like data entry and query reporting quite distinct. Zoho Creator is not so compartmentalised. The free version seems to have greater adaptability and functionality than Caspio. Zoho Creator features drag and drop assembling tools. But I do like the database creation wizards used by Caspio.
Part of the fascination with the size of the third part tool market is the possibilities. By becoming competent with a tool it improves workflow. It is difficult not to think of how they could be connected up.
While it might not be an option now, it is interesting to think of ways of connecting tools like Zoho Creator or Caspio with others. Personally, my target is to use tools like Zapier and IFTTT to feed online databases. By collecting media coverage they could be configured to do customised low-level automated media analysis on the fly.
