1. Start a Google Document with the text of an email I send
2. Start a Google Document by attaching a Powerpoint, Excel, or Word Doc.
3. Have anyone upload to my Google Documents in a predesignated folder

Well, now all of these things are easily within my grasp and I am basking in the glow of this productivity hack. While you may not be as excited about it as I am, here is how you might want to use it:

• To turn in files (from anyone in a meeting or in your classroom) to you in a well organized folder with a time stamp
• To share files with a group of people in a Google Docs collection simply by emailing them to a single email address (and not having to remember all of the emails of the people that should have it)
• To start a collaborative document on your phone by sending an email (that you can continue to edit when you get back to your computer)
• To upload files that you need to have access to in the cloud.
• To CC google docs on conversations that you would like to continue in a more collaborative way than just emailing back and forth.

I’m sure that you can think of a few other ways of using it, but let’s get to the steps for making this happen.

Step 1: Log in to http://sendtodropbox.com by giving the application access to your Dropbox account.

What this will do is give you a single email address that you (and anyone else who you want to have access) will use to upload document (first to Dropbox and then to Google Docs).

Some tips: To keep the next steps as simple as possible, keep the file structure as just Attachments / Filename.

Step 2: Check “Include HTML copy of email message” in Send to Dropbox

This will take whatever is in the body of your email message and create a file in your Dropbox account in the Attachments folder. Make sure you click “Save Settings” after you check the box.

It looks like this:

Step 3: Send a test email to the email address that Send to Dropbox gave you

You can choose to attach a file or not. It will create the Attachments folder in your Dropbox account and it will allow you to use it in the next step.

Step 4: Log into http://wappwolf.com/dropboxautomator by giving the application access to your dropbox account.

This is what will take the files from your dropbox folder and upload them to a Google Docs collection. The question most of you are asking is why not just leave them in Dropbox and be done with it. The answer is that you can’t share the Attachments folder that the Send To Dropbox application makes for you. This limits your ability to leverage the files in that folder (for collaboration and editing purposes).

Step 5: Click “Create a new automation” in Dropbox Automator

The Automator is going to watch a folder for new files. The folder you want to select is the “Attachments” folder that was created by Send to Dropbox.

It looks like this:

Step 6: Choose “Upload to Google Docs” as the action in the Automation you are creating

If this is your first time setting it up, it will ask you to connect your Google Docs to Dropbox Automator as well. After you do that, it will ask you which folder/collection to put the files in. Choose a folder that you would like to be the “inbox” for these types of files and documents.

Make sure you click “Add Action” when you are done with selecting the collection in Google Docs.

Tips: You can also have the Automator do lots of different things to those files in addition to uploading them to Google Docs, including sending them to a Kindle, emailing them to someone else, saving them to another dropbox folder and a bunch of others. Play around with these because your workflow may be more interesting than the one I have envisioned for my tiny purpose.

It looks like this:

Step 7: After you are done adding actions, click “Finished” at the top of the page

It looks like this:

That’s it!

Now if you (or anyone else) emails that Send to Dropbox Address, the attached files and the email itself will be sent first to Dropbox and then in about 10 minutes get picked up and uploaded to the collection of your choosing in Google Docs. Any files that are “Google Docs Types” will be converted for instant editing and they will be made available to anyone you have shared that folder with. Enjoy.

Extra Credit:

If you want to know who sent the files, you can choose to have Send to Dropbox put in a “From Address” in the path in Dropbox. While this makes it easier to know who “turned something in”, you will have to make an automation for each one of the folders in Dropbox Automator in order to have those files moved over into Google Docs. If you are getting things from the same set of people (a classroom or a team, for example, it may be worth the effort).

Also, let me know if you figure out anything cool to do with this hack. I am super excited about how easy it is to automate this process, but I think there is a lot more that we can do with it.

So, while there are many other ways to get Google Calendar to sync with iCal, it always makes your secondary Google Calendars into delagates. The only way to make those secondary calendars into primary ones in iCal is to use this older program (created by Google). It is awesome, however, and I highly recommend it, especially if you want to add items to an iCal calendar from another program on your machine, which would then sync with Google.

I know it sounds like no one would ever want to do this. But I am finding it incredibly important and I thought I would share.

Hall.com: “Our Story

Frustrated by communication tools that were siloed and did not solve real problems. The team quit corporate america to solve the problem.

The company is headquartered in Mountain View, CA.”

Big Marker: “BigMarker is a free web conferencing community. Through our platform, you can reconnect with your family in Rio; manage your employees in Madagascar; organize your non-profit’s resources to Ottawa; teach a virtual class from Tulsa to students all over Thailand; foster a support group for cancer survivors from France to the Falkland Islands. With unlimited access to live events, there are endless opportunities for you, your community, organization, business, classroom, and social network to grow.”

VYou:

“VYou allows people to broadcast video structured as conversations, offering the most personal form of social interaction on the web. It works like this: you record video responses to messages entered by friends and fans. VYou organizes their messages and your videos into conversations, making the experience feel continuously live even though the content is stored.

VYou lets you get advice from experts, interact with your favorite celebrity or organization, or communicate with friends and family using a social presence that persists even when you’re away. As a simple application it can be embedded and posted anywhere on the web giving you tremendous power and creative control.”

Kinda like Tedx or Ignite, but more oriented around action and getting things done to change the world. Nice.

About – Do Lectures:

” The idea is a simple one— that people who Do things can inspire the rest of us to go and Do things, too. So each year we invite a set of people down here to come and tell us what they Do. They can be small Do’s or big Do’s or just extraordinary Do’s. But when you listen to their stories, they light a fire in your belly to go and Do your thing, your passion, the thing that sits in the back of your head each day, just waiting, and waiting for you to follow your heart.

To go find your cause to fight, your company to start, your invention to invent, your book to write, your mountain to climb. The one thing the Doers of the world Do, apart from Do amazing things, is to inspire the rest of us to go and Do amazing things too. They are fire-starters.”

WordPress › Enquiry Blog Builder « WordPress Plugins:

“MoodView – This displays a line graph plotting the mood of the student as their enquiry progresses. The widget displays the past few moods and allows a new one to be selected at any time. Changing moods (a hard coded drop-down list from ‘going great’ to ‘it’s a disaster’) creates a new blog entry with an optional reason for the mood change. The graph is created using the included Flot JavaScript library.”

 

WordPress › Bloggers Circle « WordPress Plugins:

“Similar to a traditional writers circle, but with a work-flow optimized for bloggers. This helps you get and give constructive criticism of your drafts, without annoying your friends.

Creative writing is surprisingly hard, and it takes time and patience to become a better writer. By both receiving and giving criticism, we can use this tool to become better writers faster.”

Tools at Schools:

“Design studio aruliden, together with Bernhardt Design, conceived Tools at Schools as an initiative to teach eighth graders the value of design as a problem-solving tool at The School at Columbia University. Forty-four eighth grade students were immersed in the entire design process, from research to ideation to 3D modeling and ultimately launch. What started as a simple effort to get involved in the community grew into a much larger realization that design has a role in the classroom. Their success was not only in their concepts, but in the awareness each student gained in the process. The result was a collaborative vision of today’s classroom – designed for kids by kids.”

(Via .)

About Creattica – Creattica:

“About Creattica

Creattica is a gallery of great design and inspirational imagery. Anyone can submit their work for consideration and voting on items is open to one and all. The best work is accepted and featured in the gallery which receives thousands of visitors every day.

To start submitting your work simply create an account and then go to the Submit Form.Submissions take up to a few days to review depending on the volume of work coming in. To vote on other people’s work you’ll also need an account.

We hope you enjoy the site and find the inspiration to make some brilliant work of your own. And when you do, don’t forget to submit it to creattica!”