BANGALORE, INDIA: As we all know,  Zoho offers many online productivity and collaboration applications including Zoho Mail, Zoho Writer, Zoho CRM, Zoho Reports, etc. The web-based online office suite  lets individuals and businesses manage their work easily.

In this article, we look at Zoho Creator, a database software that lets you build custom database applications. Targeted at individuals,  small and large corporations, this intuitive and feature-rich Platform as a Service (PaaS) also allows you to host custom database applications. You can create forms, tables, import data from standard formats like .xls, .csv, .tsv and .mdb. There are three different ways in which you can create your own  database apps.

Zoho Creator lets you create databases from scratch and also allows you to create forms, define actions/triggers easily using its drag and drop interface. It gives you complete control over the database structure, relationship between them, and fields/datatypes, etc that are used for capturing data.  

Be it MS Access Database or Spreadsheet, Zoho Creator helps in refining the database over the web and helps in collaborating with your team. It allows to move the MS Access database onto the web without porting through MS SharePoint, MySQL or PostgreSQL. For using this feature, you simply need to download a plugin,  upload it and once migrated, start collaborating with the team easily.

Features at a glance
Business Logic: This feature contains different entities that comprise of schedulers, custom validations, triggers, etc. Again, there are different types of schedulers such as form schedulers, report, custom schedulers, etc. The Form schedulers simply lets you schedule an event based on time/date field in the form.

After signing in with your user name and password, you get this screen. Choose whether you want to start from scratch or import data from spreadsheet or MS Access Database.

After choosing the form template, you can start by filling up the details including uploading photos. You can edit field type, give permission, etc.

To perform different actions on user inputs, you just need to drag and drop fields and it allows you to define business rules.

To define different schedules like form, report or custom schedule, simply click on 'Schedule' menu on the top and then click on 'Create' button.

Drag and Drop interface: Two entities, HTML form builder and Script builder enable users to add business rules and create custom workflows & with HTML form builder, create forms/tables easily just by dragging and dropping the required fields.

Data Analytics: This feature also contains different entities such as set criteria, search data, filter, group-by, etc. As the name suggests, the search data helps in searching the records and supports list and grid view. The sort data field helps in sorting the data in ascending or descending order.

You can share the database application privately or publicly. For sharing it, simply click on Share menu, select Private or Public and enter email ids you want to share to.

You can also create reports by selecting the 'Report' menu. After this, specify the report type which could be a Pivot table or Pivot chart.

After filling basic details of the report, you can drag and drop different fields in the column, row and data fields & then click on 'Create here to generate pivot'.

You can also change the application settings by simply clicking on the Settings tab. Here, it shows you different options such as allow HTML tags, making this application private or public.