Docs Blog

Removing the beta label

2009-07-07T08:14:00.000-07:00

If you look closely in the upper left hand corner of Google Docs later in the day, you'll notice that we've removed the small grey word "beta" from our logo. We're dropped our "beta" label today along with the other Google Apps (Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Talk). You can read more about this change on the Official Google Blog.

Over the past year, we've launched hundreds of features and product improvements to Google Docs, many of which we've documented on this blog and our What's New page. We still have a long "to do" list of features and enhancements that we're actively working on. Look for these changes over the coming months and years.

Posted by: Jonathan Rochelle, Group Product Manager, Google Docs

Solve feature lets you solve optimization problems

2009-06-26T15:02:00.000-07:00

Today we've added optimization capabilities to spreadsheets. Try out the Solve feature at Tools > Solve... It's useful for problems where you'd like to maximize (or minimize) a certain value.

Let's say you want to buy a new house. You know that you can afford $2,000/month, and you want to determine how much house you can afford. Just create a spreadsheet with your formulas (in this case, using the equation =B1*SUM(B2:B3)/12 in Sheet1!B4).

You'll quickly see that you can buy a house worth $320,000.

Check out this more complex profit maximization example that's documented in this help center article. This example shows how the Solve feature could help a farmer who is trying to determine how much of three different crops to plant given his land, fertilizer, and budget constraints.

For those of you who are familiar with optimization functions in spreadsheets, note that we only support linear equations in the constraints and in the cell you want to optimize.

Still, the Solve feature is a great way to solve a multitude of everyday problems without hurting your head too much. We hope you find it useful.

Posted by: Ben McCann, Software Engineer

Take Docs to Work

2009-06-25T09:08:00.000-07:00

Collecting information from coworkers is something that many of us do every day. Whether you're chasing after sales figures, budget projections, product feedback or TPS reports, the basic business of requesting, collecting, and processing information is, well, a basic part of business.

Here at Google, we use spreadsheet forms for employee surveys, volunteer lists, product feedback and managing events like team offsites. Forms chase information so that we don't have to. Send a form with simple, straightforward questions via email -- and behind the scenes, your form busily updates your online spreadsheet with responses in real-time.

If you're already a convert to forms and were struggling to explain how they work to your co-workers, check out this short video we've created and then pass it along:

Posted by: Jason Cook, Product Marketing Manager

Creating and giving presentations has gotten easier

2009-06-20T17:24:00.000-07:00

If you haven't created a presentation in Google Docs in a while, you should consider trying out these recent enhancements:

Multi-shape formatting allows you select multiple shapes and/or text boxes, and format them all at once. To select multiple objects, hold down the Shift key while you click each object, or drag over all of the objects that you'd like to select. You can then change the fill color, line color, border weight, font size, etc.

Manipulation of text boxes got easier in some more ways, too. Text boxes now grow in size as you type and you can now vertically align the text within multiple boxes using a new Text Vertical Alignment button in the toolbar:

When you are giving live presentations, you now can better navigate to specific slides within your presentation. Click the Start Presentation button to launch into presentation mode. Then look for a toolbar at the bottom of the window. At any time, you can immediately jump to a different slide.

We love feedback, so visit our Help Forum to share your feedback on these and other features.

Posted by: Jen Mazzon, Product Manager

New Google Web Elements for Spreadsheets and Presentations

2009-06-08T14:27:00.000-07:00

We conclude our Spotlight on Developers series with a look at Google Web Elements for spreadsheets and presentations.

At Google I/O, the concept of "copy/paste development" was introduced in the form of Google Web Elements. For Google spreadsheets and presentations, these web elements offer a quick way to get a snippet of code that allows you to embed your document anywhere on the web.

First you'll need to publish your spreadsheet, then you can go to the Spreadsheets Elements page to enter in the published URL, the size of the element you'd like and the range of data you are interested in displaying, and "voila!", the snippet is there for you to copy and paste into any webpage. Here's an example spreadsheet:

You can do this with published presentations as well. After you publish your presentation, you can go to the Presentations Elements page to enter the published URL and the size of the element you'd like. Get the snippet of code and paste in into any webpage.

While you're on the Google Web Elements page, be sure to check out the other Google products that you can embed into your website.

Posted by: Ronald Ho, Product Manager, Google Docs

For Developers: Two New Spreadsheet Data APIs

2009-06-01T17:32:00.000-07:00

We continue our Spotlight on Developers series with this Data API announcement.

At Google I/O last week, we unveiled two new Data APIs for spreadsheets to a very excited audience. The two new Data APIs, the Tables and Records feeds, provide a structured record-based table for storing and updating tabular data in a spreadsheet. Tables can be placed anywhere on the sheet, with multiple tables per sheet and column-based meta-data for each column in the table. The Records feed is a feed of rows within a table, which we are calling records, with stable IDs (moving the rows around will maintain the same row ID).

The APIs allow for creating, reading, updating and deleting records and tables in a spreadsheet. We've also improved the permissioning so that we use the same simple permissions as those given through the Share menu in a spreadsheet. Here's a simple Java demo showing the Tables and Records feed in action.

One exciting and simple example of the Tables and Records feed is through an online store that's powered by Google Checkout and has inventory managed and stored in a spreadsheet.

A feed of the products for sale is parsed and rendered by the Google Checkout store gadget to display a store. The Tables and Records feeds are used to communicate between the store and the sheet and the full text search is also implemented through the records feed.

Learn more about building these mashups in this tutorial.

Posted by: Radhika Lakshmanan, Software Engineer

The file formats keep on coming! Announcing .xlsx and .docx support

2009-06-01T09:41:00.000-07:00

I still remember the first time I was introduced to Google Docs by a friend. I had one of those "aha" moments. Here was a product where I could easily share documents with people all over the world, and never have to worry about overlapping revisions or heavy email attachments. And with everything stored online, it meant that I didn't have to always carry around my computer or back up my files.

Aha.

Well, it didn't take long for me to start telling everyone I knew (and even some people I didn't!) about my experience with Docs. But there was one recurring question from my friends - how do I get my Word and Excel 2007 documents into the cloud?

Today, I'm happy to be able to answer their question: we've added .docx and .xlsx to the list of file formats that we accept for uploading documents (which already included .doc, .odt, xls, .ods, .ppt, .csv, .html, .txt, .rtf, and others).

To import a .docx or .xlsx file, simply click the "Upload" button in your Docs List menu, select your file, and voila! We'll upload and convert your document for use in Google Docs. This is a another great benefit of Google Docs - you don't have to worry about what format the file is in. Just upload it and we'll figure it out for you.

And if you have lots of files and would prefer to upload them all at once, then be sure to check out the Google Documents List API.

Posted by: Anil Sabharwal, Product Manager, Google Apps

Spotlight on Developers: Gadgets to Visualize Data in New Ways

2009-05-26T13:34:00.000-07:00

Continuing our Spotlight on Developers series, we present a few gadgets that give you new and exciting ways to visualize your data.

Our spreadsheet gadgets API is all about giving developers the power to extend the functionality of Google Docs spreadsheets. The following four spreadsheet gadgets display information in unique ways.

1. Tree Map Gadget (By Yaar Schnitman, former Technology Program Manager intern) - A color-coded area diagram that helps you understand complicated hierarchical data at a glance. Required columns: one or more text columns describing a hierarchy of items, and a single numeric column describing the weight of each item. Optional: supply one additional numeric column to create a heat map. Check out this visualization of the 2008 U.S. budget.

2. Advanced Word Cloud Gadget (by Seth Glickman, former Web Development Intern) - Word clouds are a great way to visualize the popularity of words from large amounts of text, say for example a feedback form, where the more often used words appear in a larger font. With this advanced world cloud gadget, you can customize your word cloud by choosing the color, excluding words of your choosing (like "or" and "the"), and best of all, turn each tag into a link with an easy-to-use search string. Check out a word cloud for Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.

3. Spider Chart Gadget (by Greg Marra, former Software Engineering Intern) - With spider charts you can visually compare the values of multiple attributes. In this example, the handling, acceleration, top speed, firepower and armor of a race car is compared to a tank.

4. QR Code Gadget (by Greg Schechter, former Software Engineering Intern) - Use this gadget to quickly encode data into the QR code format from a Google Docs spreadsheet so that it can be scanned and read by mobile devices that have a QR code reader. An easy way to send web addresses, phone numbers and notes. Try out the QR code gadget.

There are two ways to get started using these gadgets. First, you can use the templates above since they already have the gadget inserted within the spreadsheet. Or you can add these gadgets to your own spreadsheet by creating a new spreadsheet and using Insert > Gadgets. There you can check out all of the gadgets that are available.

Posted by: Ronald Ho, Product Manager, Google Docs

Spotlight on Developers: Spreadsheet Mapper

2009-05-25T18:23:00.000-07:00

This next post in our Spotlight on Developers series highlights a gadget that combines spreadsheets and the My Map feature in Google Maps. In addition to using it while househunting like our guest author did, you might even find it useful to plot out points of interest for a vacation or a road trip this summer. :)

Last year, I was looking to move into a new apartment. Using a spreadsheet in Google Docs was a convenient way to list the apartments I was interested in, and creating a My Map in Google Maps was a great way to plot their locations. But, I wished there was a way to see both the map and spreadsheet at the same time. Some tools already existed to convert spreadsheets into KML, but these don't work well when you're updating a spreadsheet on a daily basis.

Thus the Spreadsheet Mapper gadget was born. The idea is simple: within a spreadsheet, generate a map based on address information in any column. This allowed me to quickly list the apartments I was interested in, while seeing how far they were from work.

Developing the gadget was easy. I was already familiar with programming a Google Gadget, and it was wasn't difficult to use the extensions that pull spreadsheet data into the gadget.

Try it out using this template or insert it in your own spreadsheet using Insert > Gadget.

Or add the gadget to your own spreadsheet with these instructions: http://spreadsheets2kml.appspot.com/help

Posted by: Alec Go, AdWords Sales Engineer (and spreadsheet fan)

Update: Replaced the link to the published spreadsheet with a link to a template.

Spotlight on Developers: Educational Spreadsheet Gadgets

2009-05-21T09:01:00.000-07:00

As we gear up for Google I/O, our annual developer conference, we'll be presenting a series of posts highlighting some of the gadgets and applications that have been built by developers using our APIs. Today, we'll start with a few gadgets that might be useful for educators, students, and maybe word-lovers, too.

Spreadsheet gadgets allow you to display spreadsheet data in new and interesting ways. Using our spreadsheet gadgets API and the spreadsheet Data APIs, outside developers and other Google teams have been able to add new features into spreadsheets and publish these gadgets to iGoogle, blogs and other platforms. Some older, but popular examples include a Gantt Chart by Viewpath and the Analytics for Google Docs spreadsheets by Panorama.

For this first post in the Spotlight on Developer series, I wanted to show off a few new gadgets that teachers and students might find useful -- for studying for a Spanish exam or learning new vocabulary by playing fun word games.

1. Flash Cards (by Seth Glickman, previous Web Development Intern) - Easily create flashcard sets. HTML is allowed. Ideal for foreign language vocabulary sets, AP Chemistry common ions... anything you'd use flashcards for. Remove cards from view once you know them well enough, shuffle the remaining cards, change languages and more. Try this out.

2. Word Study (by Pamela Fox, Engineer) - Create interactive word games. You can guess using word jumbles, type-ins, or multiple choice, and you can choose to have the hints come from Google Image Search, Google Translate, Wikipedia, or your own spreadsheet. Try this out.

3. Word Search (by Pamela Fox, Engineer) - Create an interactive word search from a column of words in a spreadsheet, with a user-specified number of rows or columns. Try this out.

There are two ways to get started using these gadgets. First, you can use the templates above since they already have the gadget inserted within the spreadsheet. Or you can add these gadgets to your own spreadsheet by creating a new spreadsheet and using Insert > Gadgets. There you can check out all of the gadgets available.

Posted by: Ronald Ho, Product Manager, Google Docs

Teachers: How do you use Google Sites?

2009-05-13T14:32:00.000-07:00

Last year, teachers shared examples of how they're using Google Docs in the classroom, and we listed these ideas on a Docs for Teachers page. While reviewing all of these teachers' ideas, I noticed that many teachers used Google Sites as a central website for their classes and class projects. Students and teachers also often created pages within their websites that include embedded documents created in Google Docs.

This got me thinking... why don't we create a page to display educational uses of Sites like we did for Docs? If you're a K-12 teacher using Google Sites and are willing to share your examples, check out this request for projects on the Google Apps blog.

Posted by: Ashley Chandler, Docs User Operations

Create groups of contacts to make sharing faster

2009-05-05T14:49:00.000-07:00

People who regularly work in teams should check out the recently released standalone contact manager: http://www.google.com/contacts. It lets you manage your contacts and put them into groups.

When you share a document in Google Docs, just click Choose from Contacts to pick one of these groups. There's no need to enter your collaborators' email addresses individually. The groups you create or modify while using Google Docs are stored in the contact manager and can be used across other services like Google Calendar, Picasa Web Albums, and Gmail.

To learn more about the contact manager (and to find out how to use it within your organization) read this Google Apps blog post.

Posted by: Andrew Chang, Marketing Manager

Spruce up your surveys: 70 colorful themes

2009-04-30T13:50:00.000-07:00

We've just launched 70 themes for forms so you can add a little (or a lot of) color to your surveys and questionnaires. Some themes are basic colors schemes (like Blue, Espresso, or Rose) and others are fancier designs (like Picnic, Zen Spring, and Dusk).

How do you choose a theme? When you're editing a form, click the Theme button to find the right theme and apply it to your form. One caveat: These themes will be visible to your respondents when they fill out the form online, not within email (like Gmail).

Try them out and let us know what you think.

Posted by: Andrew Chang, Marketing Manager

Update: Replaced an extra open paren with a comma and corrected the image. Oops.

Sheet protection gives you finer control of your spreadsheets

2009-04-28T09:50:00.000-07:00

When working on a spreadsheet together with others, sometimes it's handy to allow some people to modify specific sheets but restrict them from modifying other sheets.

Today we've added sheet protection - an additional layer of control over who can edit individual sheets, using the list of people invited as collaborators. Just go to the sheet, bring up the menu, and choose Protect sheet.

Say I'm throwing a party (a wild one, of course) and I've invited my friends Frank, Ian, Kev and Veronica to a spreadsheet to help with planning. I know for sure Ian and Kev have good taste in music so I'll let them select some choice tunes... but Frank should probably just stick to bringing chips and salsa. Here's how I set up protection for the sheet titled Music playlist:

Easy as that. Ian and Kev will be able to modify the sheet all they like, while Frank and Veronica will see the sheet but won't be able to make changes. (Later, if Veronica promises to leave her enormous ABBA collection at home, maybe I'll let her edit it too.)

Sheet protection is a great way to add a little fine control over the contents of your spreadsheets. We hope you find it as useful as we have.

Posted by: Joseph Wain, User Experience Designer

View PowerPoint attachments in Gmail and upload them to Google Docs

2009-04-23T21:50:00.000-07:00

If you're an active Gmail user, you probably know that you can open Microsoft Word and Excel attachments from within Gmail and import them to Google Docs. Gmail also provided a basic View as slideshow option for PowerPoint attachments.

Today we're improving this feature by making it easier for you to upload presentations from Gmail and edit them in Google Docs. When you receive a PowerPoint attachment, simply click the View option to open and preview the presentation in a new online viewer, powered by Google Docs. If you'd like to save the presentation to Google Docs, just click Edit Online and it'll be imported into Google Docs.

To read more about this new viewer, check out the Gmail blog.

Posted by: Stephen Drennan, Google Docs Consumer Operations

For Beginners: 3 Getting Started Guides

2009-04-23T06:11:00.000-07:00

My friend Chrystina is an Operations Coordinator at a small software company in Sunnyvale, CA. A few days ago, she told me that she just started using Google Docs. As a beginner, she was trying to figure out how to collaborate with her coworkers and access her docs from both home and work. She's very busy, so she asked me if we had some guides that would give her the basics of how to get started using Google Docs.

The timing of our conversation couldn't have been more perfect. We recently finished Getting Started Guides for spreadsheets, documents, and presentations -- because using a product for the first time can sometimes be challenging.

These three guides cover the basics about Google Docs and have tidbits of information on features you may not know too much about. If you already use Google Docs spreadsheets, but aren't so familiar with presentations, you can read this guide to learn, for example, how to embed an online presentation in your blog.

Don't forget to send these links along to your family, friends, and coworkers who may want to get started with Google Docs.

After you're finished reviewing the guides, check our Help Center for more information. And if you have questions or want to share your suggestions and comments, visit our Help Forum.

Posted by: Estela Arbuco, Docs Online Editor

Just to clarify...

2009-03-27T19:34:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, a researcher publicly reported some concerns with Google Docs. At Google, we treat the privacy and integrity of our users' data with the highest priority. We quickly investigated, and we believe that these concerns do not pose a significant security risk to our users. If you want the details, read on...

The first concern that the researcher raised is that an image embedded in a document is not deleted when a document is deleted. Images are maintained because removing them would break image references in users' other Google documents and external blogs. In addition, image URLs are known only to users who have at some point had access to the document the image is embedded in, and could therefore have saved the image anyway (which is fully expected). You can always contact support to purge images from your account.

The second concern that the researcher raised is that viewers may be able to see revisions of drawings that are included in a document, using the new "Insert Drawing" feature. The ability for document collaborators to view revision history is a feature built into Docs. The ability to view past versions of the drawings is limited to authorized persons who have been given explicit access to the document with the embedded drawing. We may consider explicitly preventing viewers from accessing drawing revisions. For now, if document owners decide they don't want viewers to have access to their revisions, they can simply make a new copy of the document (from the File menu) and share that new version. The revision history of both the document and all embedded drawings is removed in copies of documents.

The final concern that the researcher raised is that users removed from documents can, in a specific case, regain access to them. The specific case is related to the use of a feature which allows document invitations to be forwarded to more than one person. That feature was provided in response to user requests for "invitation forwarding" and sharing documents with email lists. Invitations sent using this feature contain a special key on the document link. This feature can be disabled at any time to expire previously distributed invitations which contain that special key. To do this, simply disable this feature by unchecking it (in documents and presentations, it's called "invitations may be used by anyone" and in spreadsheets it's "editors can share this item").

We have begun adding more documentation in the Help Center here and here to describe in more detail the functions related to each concern. We are also exploring alternative design options that might further address the concerns.
We'd like to thank the researcher for sharing his concerns with us. We always welcome your feedback on our products, and thank you for your continued support.

[Update 3/28/09: I failed to mention the researcher's name in the original post. His name is Ade Barkah]

Posted by: Jonathan Rochelle, Product Manager, Google Docs

Drawing on your creativity in Docs

2009-03-25T18:14:00.000-07:00

I'm excited to tell you about Insert Drawing, a new feature we've added to Google Docs. Now you can create and insert rich, colorful drawings into documents, presentations and spreadsheets, to illustrate your ideas or just for fun.

It's easy to create drawings using lines, free hand scribbles, text labels and a large choice of shapes that you can move, resize, rotate and adjust. Group, order, align and distribute and other features are available when you select objects you've drawn. You can also customize a range of shape properties, from line widths to fill color, and from arrowheads to font size, and much more. If you change your mind, there is undo and redo. You can collaborate with a friend or colleague on a drawing, or work alone, just as you can in Google Docs today.

The team and technology behind Insert Drawing originally came from the startup Tonic Systems, which Google acquired in 2007. The drawing feature that we've built relies heavily on a relatively new capability in browsers: the ability to render vector graphics. We use the SVG (scalable vector graphics) standard to accomplish this in most browsers and VML (vector markup language) where SVG is not available. Only recently has the performance and ubiquity of such technology enabled us to deliver what we hope is a delightful feature. As browsers continue to improve, we can deliver more and more useful cloud-based functionality.

As with any new feature, we'll be adding new capabilities over time. But even though we have our own to-do list, we'd love to hear about how you think we could improve drawings. You'll find Drawing within the Insert menu, so try it out and tell us what you think in our Help Forum.

Posted by: Tony Glenning, Drawings Team Lead

Find (and replace) my favo(u)rite colo(u)r and much, much more

2009-03-25T10:25:00.000-07:00

I'm Canadian. And although I've lived and worked here in the U.S. quite some time now, the Canadian spellings of certain words still often slip into my documents. Favourite, colour, neighbour, centre, etc. -- you get the idea. This week, we've added a new find and replace toolbar (for documents) which will make it easier for me to catch those Canadian spellings when I'm writing for an American audience.

If you want to locate a word or phrase in your document, it's as easy as choosing "Find & Replace" in the "Edit" menu, or hitting Ctrl+F.

Then type the text you want to find, and click Find Next (or press Ctrl+G). If it appears more than once in your document, you can click Find Next again to select the next occurrence.

If you want to change some or all of the occurrences in your document, just type the replacement text in the second box. Click the Replace button to change a selected occurrence to the replacement text, or click Replace All to change all the occurrences in your document in one shot.

Find and Replace also supports additional options for controlling the search, which you can see by clicking the arrow next to the search box. Options such as case-sensitive matching and regular expressions. Find out more about this feature in this help center article.

Pretty useful tool, eh?

Posted by: Vivian Leung, Product Marketing Manager (and proud Canuck)

Custom views give you more control of your spreadsheets

2009-03-18T15:52:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago we enhanced mobile access to spreadsheets by adding the ability to add, edit, sort, and filter rows. Today, I'm happy to announce that this same list view is now available when you're working on spreadsheets from desktop and notebook computers. You can find list view under the View menu.
List view provides a simplified interface to your spreadsheet. Here's an example of a spreadsheet that could be used by employees that are staffing a trade show booth:

Notice that you can quickly sort and filter data in list view without changing the underlying spreadsheet. Each sort and filter view has a unique web address (URL), making it easy to return to a particular view to inspect and analyze your data. You can share list view URLs with your colleagues, provided they have permission to access the spreadsheet. Below, I've filtered the spreadsheet to see who requested "Large" t-shirts on "Tuesday":

List view can also be embedded in a web page, either in read-only or editable mode. Here I've embedded a view of the example spreadsheet right into this blog post:

Here are a few more ways to use list view:

Imagine that you collected 100 names and t-shirt sizes using a Google Docs form. You might share a list view of the form responses, allowing people to fix errors (such as someone entering the wrong size) without worrying about a novice user accidentally messing up other parts of the spreadsheet.
Rather than embedding a published snapshot of a spreadsheet in your Google Sites page, you can now embed a read-only list view of the spreadsheet, which allows users to easily sort, filter and page through the data.

List view also loads very quickly in your browser, making it especially useful when you just want to quickly give others basic editing access rather than the full functionality normally available. And if you're using list view and need full spreadsheet functionality, just follow the "Go to spreadsheet view" link.

Posted by: Eric Bogs, User Interface Software Engineer

New Template: 2009 College Basketball Tournament Bracket

2009-03-18T09:48:00.000-07:00

The first round of the 2009 NCAA Division I men's college basketball tournament starts tomorrow. For many of us in the U.S., it's a time when we root for our favorite college teams and engage in some friendly competition with co-workers and college buddies to see who's going to win the National Championship in Detroit.

In preparation for this year's tournament, I used my 20% project time to create the tournament bracket template above, all within a Google Docs spreadsheet. To make this spreadsheet work, I created a GoogleTournament function that lets you look up a plethora of information about the NCAA tournament including team names, records, seeds, scores, game times and even the location of a game. Every time you check out the spreadsheet (and if you're like most college basketball fans - multiple times each day) you'll see the latest results.

Since you can add collaborators to your spreadsheet, it's easy to engage in some friendly rivalry (i.e. trash talk) right within the spreadsheet. The template includes 10 blank brackets that each of your friends can fill out. No need to print out and fill-in blank paper brackets. There's one sheet that shows whose picks are the best.

If you are brave enough to share your picks with the world, you can publish your sheet or the entire spreadsheet. When you're in a fan forum discussing the tournament, you can just refer to the published spreadsheet to show off your picks.

Not satisfied with my basic spreadsheet? Create your own using the GoogleTournament function.

Posted by: John Danaher, Software Engineer

On yesterday's email

2009-03-07T11:34:00.000-08:00

Yesterday we contacted some of our users to let them know about an issue that affected their Google Docs accounts. We believe the issue affected less than 0.05% of all documents, but, in the interest of transparency, we wanted to share the details more broadly.

As we noted in the Google Docs Help Forum yesterday, we've identified and fixed a bug where a very small percentage of users shared some of their documents inadvertently. The inadvertent sharing was limited to people with whom the document owner, or a collaborator with sharing rights, had previously shared a document. The issue affected so few users because it only could have occurred for a very small percentage of documents, and for those documents only when a specific sequence of user actions took place.

For this small percentage of documents, the bug (now fixed) occurred when the document owner, or a collaborator with sharing rights, selected multiple documents and presentations from the documents list and then changed the sharing permissions. The bug did not affect spreadsheets.

As part of the fix, we used an automated process to remove collaborators and viewers from the documents that we identified as having been affected. We then emailed the document owners to point them to their affected documents in case they need to re-share them.

We're sorry for the trouble this has caused. We understand our users' concerns (in fact, we were affected by this bug ourselves) and we're treating this very seriously. We hope this explanation provides greater clarity.

Posted by: Jennifer Mazzon, Google Docs Product Manager

Which is faster, warp or hyperdrive?

2009-03-06T15:05:00.000-08:00

More and more people have started using forms to collect information from their co-workers and customers. To contrast these more "practical" uses, I thought that I'd share three fun surveys that you can send to your friends: one for Star Wars and Star Trek fans, another that lets you find out what your friends think about you, and one with 18 totally random questions (just because).

After your friends submit their answers, you'll be able to see nifty summary charts like the one above. According to my friends, hyperdrive is faster than warp. Would your friends agree?

For those of you who haven't used forms before, here's how to get started:

Preview the three surveys below and choose one.
Customize the survey with a personal message and even add your own questions and answers.
Email the survey to your friends.
Sit back and watch as the results come in.

By default, your friends will be able to see each others' responses as well, but you can change this setting before sending out the survey if you'd like.

For those of you that would like to create a form from scratch, you can go to your Docs List and click New > Form.

Have fun with these forms.

Posted by: Andrew Chang, Marketing Manager

Update: Several people have mentioned that they're enjoying the lively discussion (and sometimes debate) after filling out the survey. A common question has been, "How do I share the results with my friends?" An easy way to do this is to change the sharing options for the spreadsheet that holds the survey results. You can add your friends (using their email addresses) as viewers of the underlying spreadsheet and email them a link to the spreadsheet.

New Templates: Embedding spreadsheets in your website

2009-03-03T12:50:00.000-08:00

Did you know that you can publish a spreadsheet and embed it in your website or blog? An embedded spreadsheet is a perfect way to display an event calendar, team checklist, or your favorite list of things. Publishing a spreadsheet is really flexible. You can choose which parts of the spreadsheet to share with the world: all sheets, certain sheets, even a range of cells. Any changes you (and other collaborators) make to the spreadsheet will be visible to your website visitors.

To make this easier, we've recently added five spreadsheet templates to the templates gallery that have been formatted nicely for websites. Special thanks goes to Jon Wittwer of Vertex42.com for creating these templates:

1. Embedded Schedule

2. Embedded Calendar

3. Reading List

4. Countdown Timer

5. Quote of the Day

Each template has a link to instructions for how to publish and embed the spreadsheet. For more ideas on how to embed spreadsheets, see Jon's list of over 20 ideas for embedded spreadsheets.

Posted by: Andrew Chang, Marketing Manager

A faster way to get to Docs and other Google Apps with Pack

2009-02-18T16:51:00.000-08:00

We've invited Julie Farago and Mike Smith, Product Managers for Google Pack, to tell you about recent updates to Pack that might interest those of you who regularly use Docs and our other apps.

We think that you should be able to access your favorite web apps with the same ease and simplicity as desktop applications. Today, we took one small step in that direction.

As an option in Google Pack, you can now quickly install desktop access points to Docs, Calendar, and Gmail. These access points include placement in the start menu, shortcuts on the desktop, and a presence in add/remove programs. If you use Gmail, you can also make it your default mail handler. When you launch the apps from these access points, they run in a streamlined browser window via Google Chrome. You may have tried to customize this on your own but now it's even easier.

Try it out and tell us what you think by installing it from Pack.

Posted by: Julie Farago and Mike Smith, Product Managers for Google Pack

Update: Thanks to so many people who have tried and installed Google Apps from Google Pack and given us feedback. We wanted to let you know that we've heard you loud and clear that you'd like Pack to support these installable Google Apps not just for the standard Gmail, Docs and Calendar, but also for the flavor of Google Apps that businesses, schools and organizations use. We can't comment on future development here, but please do stay tuned--we're working on it.