Docs Blog

Coming soon: Changes to the spreadsheets interface

2008-09-26T08:39:00.000-07:00

Next week, we'll be introducing a new interface for our spreadsheet application, polishing up the navigation and making it look and feel like our word processing and presentation tools. At the top of the page, a new set of menus is the place to look for all of your favorite spreadsheet features. In the toolbar, we've concentrated the most commonly-used features as shortcuts to make formatting data easier and faster. And the Share menu (look for the big blue button) contains everything you need to invite people to work together, publish to the web and share with the world.

Some of our favorite details are the subtle ones. For example, whenever a form is active, the menu shows a count of your total responses. And now it's even easier to insert a formula, switch between number and date formats, or access help content.

Behind the scenes, the new streamlined interface loads the spreadsheets application even faster.

Everything you know and love about spreadsheets will still be available—just better organized. And the best part of these changes is that we'll have room to add more great new features. Stay tuned.

(click image to enlarge)

Posted by: Joseph Wain & Michelle Lee, User Experience Designers and Eric Bogs, UI Software Engineer

The dreaded bibliography

2008-09-22T14:51:00.000-07:00

Throughout my school days, one huge headache when writing a paper was that dreaded and extremely tedious bibliography. As a way for students, teachers, and professors to ease into the school year, we decided to create four bibliography templates representing various citation styles. We've created these templates so that students in various disciplines could reap the benefit of using one of these templates and copying these styles in their papers.

You'll find these templates in the Students & Teachers section of the templates gallery. As a sneak preview, take a look below at the American Psychological Association style bibliography template. All of you social science majors will get good use out of this one.

Updates: Corrected the title of this post and the link to the gallery.

Posted by: Joelle Fornengo, Google Docs Operations

It's about communication, not the tool

2008-09-16T06:20:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago, Tom Barrett wrote about how he introduces Year 5 students to Google Docs. This week he shares some common challenges teachers face when students begin working together on collaborative projects.

Communication is important, not the tool

The success of our own class projects was not influenced by how well the children could use Google Docs. After all, it is not really about the tool -- it's about the group's ability to work together as a team. My class found this difficult throughout the year. I did not expect that just because we were using technology that the outcome would be any different. In fact even though each child was engaged with a role within the group and a task to complete, the technology exacerbated the lack of communication. The groups were plodding on with their own tasks and when it buffeted with someone else's they would get upset. They may be working in the same online space, but that does not automatically indicate they are collaborating well.

With this in mind we raised the profile of the sense of communication within the groups and discussed with the children their teething problems and how we can best resolve them. With every resolution I drew it back to the idea of better communication. The class had a fuller understanding from these discussions of what they were doing when working together in Google Docs and some of the ways that their own communication was causing problems. To reinforce this in future sessions I would regularly stop the class to talk about an excellent example I had overheard from an individual or a group. One such example was when the children in one group lowered their laptop screens so that they could discuss the progress of their work so far. I raised it with the wider group ,we briefly discussed why it was such a good move, and through this we then saw the majority of the groups adopting this strategy.

How student personalities and familiarity with technology affect group work

You know what it is like: you try and balance a team and consider the characters that you put together in a group, but within moments they are falling out! I suppose using Google Docs does not make the task any easier. Out of the 5 groups in my class, 2 worked very well together, 1 was OK and the other 2 had lots of problems and struggled. On reflection, the groups that worked least well together were made up of perhaps 2 or 3 strong personalities that would naturally like to take a lead and this caused conflicts and problems as it has in other activities. When the children have their own laptops and a clear contribution to make within a document, that is appropriately structured, in my experience it can help a group work together.

I had children in my class that were very capable at using technology and were motivated and enthused at its use in our lessons but who often struggled with their literacy or maths, they were more confident when collaborating with Google Docs because of their own personal comfort with technology in the classroom. They pushed themselves forward to take a lead and be more involved when in a more traditional paper-based activity they may not have done. Similarly, the flip side of this is children who are very confident and capable in literacy who perhaps have less confidence when using technology. Even though composing groups within your class to collaborate is similar for any activity, it is important to consider the type of characters who grows in confidence when embedding technology in their learning.

Posted by: Andrew Chang, Marketing Manager

Calling all teachers: Share your ideas and projects

2008-09-15T08:44:00.000-07:00

Last week we rolled out some back to school features, many of them inspired by your requests and stories of using Google Docs in K-12 classrooms.

Now we're turning our sights to a new initiative. We want to collect your example projects and ideas for how to best use Google Docs (documents, presentations, spreadsheets, and forms) in the classroom. We'll collect your ideas and share them with all educators on our Docs page on the Google for Educators site. To do this, we first need your inspiration and ideas.

Are you using Google Docs in a K-12 classroom?
Have you created any group projects that use the collaborative features of docs, presentations, or spreadsheets?
Are you using spreadsheet forms to collect information from students or parents?

If you answered "yes" to any of these, we'd love to hear from you.

Learn more about what we're looking for and check out two example project ideas. Then, submit your own project idea by Sept 30, 2008. As a big "thank you" from us, we'll give out moleskin journals to the first 50 teachers who submit projects.

Posted by: Ashley Chandler, Google Docs Operations

We launched Table of Contents, too

2008-09-11T16:19:00.000-07:00

I'm writing this from the Phoenix Sky Harbor airport, just 5 minutes before I hop on a plane back to Google in California. I spent the day at Arizona State University (ASU), the second stop on our Apps to School bus tour of U.S. college campuses. Boy, it was hot outside today: 94 F (34 C). I really enjoyed talking to students about Google tools like Docs and introducing them to new Docs features like our template gallery and forms.

Before I board, I wanted to point out another useful feature that we forgot to mention on yesterday's blog post: Table of Contents. In the Format menu, you can use the following for section headings: Heading, Sub-heading and Minor heading. Then, insert a Table of Contents on the first page of your document.

To learn more about Table of Contents, check out this help center article.

Posted by: Andrew Chang, Marketing Manager

Back to school with a bunch of new features

2008-09-10T09:11:00.000-07:00

Fight on, Trojans! Yesterday, we spent the day at the University of Southern California, the first stop on the App to School bus tour of U.S. college campuses. We hung out with a lot of students (and some professors, too) who dropped by our demo stations, and showed them our favorite tips and tricks in Google Docs. Some of them also told us about how they used Docs in their classes, clubs, and even side businesses. In our down time, Jen and I managed to don some Trojan colors and snap a photo. :)

And just in time for back to school, we've got some new features that will definitely help you get ahead in class:

Dictionary & Thesaurus
You now can highlight a word and look up its definition and synonyms using Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary. Look for this feature in the Tools menu, just below the Spell-check and Word Count. Now you're just two clicks away from being able to look up and hear pronunciations of hundreds of thousands of words. These tools are available in English only.

Encyclopedia
You can also look up a term in Encyclopedia Britannica from within Docs. Students and teachers should find this feature useful when writing reports and doing research online. Here's what an encyclopedia entry looks like for "Trojan War":

Search for words and images on Google
Fans of Google Image Search will be happy to see that you can also find and insert images into your documents. Again, you just highlight a word or phrase. Then, use Tools>Search... using Image Search. Once you find the right image, you can drag-and-drop that image directly into your document.

Posted by: Jen Mazzon, Product Manager and Vivian Leung, Product Marketing Manager

Presentations turns 1

2008-09-10T08:55:00.000-07:00

We've been quiet for a while but are letting the news out. Presentations is nearing our first birthday, and we're unveiling a slew of new features that will make your presentations pop.

To start off the announcement... reveals! You can set the order that objects appear. Or, setup a textbox to reveal paragraphs or bullets one at a time as you're giving a presentation. Reveals are perfect for pacing your talk, keeping the audience focused on you rather than reading the slide content, and constructing neat visual sequences. Set the order that an object appears by right-clicking on it and selecting "Incremental Reveal".

If you'd like to see reveals in action, check out this presentation.

You'll also notice a complete face lift of our user interface. Now that we're growning up, we wanted to give you more space to edit your slides and still allow you to get to the right features to create your slides. With this new design you'll see a significant increase in slide space, improving the experience on smaller laptop screens.

Another oft-wished-for feature is Zoom. Just go to the Slide>Zoom menu to zoom in or out, letting you work on slide details to your heart's content.

Finally, for all you Ctrl+Z fanatics out there, full undo/redo is now available in presentations. Never say "doh" again, undo is there to save the day.

With that, we invite you to give these new presentation features a try. We're excited to be turning 1 and look forward to another jam-packed year!

Posted by: Andrew Perelson, Docs Engineer

Teachers... last chance to register for Letters to the Next President: Writing Our Future

2008-09-03T16:15:00.000-07:00

In August, I announced our sponsorship of Letters to the Next President: Writing Our Future, an online writing and publishing opportunity for U.S. high school students. I invited teachers to ask their students to write to the next U.S. president about the issues that matter to them the most.

The deadline to register for this project is Friday, Sept. 12th.

Teachers and mentors: all that you need to do is get an account on the National Writing Project website and provide your name, school name, contact information, and a brief description of the class or group of students you want to have participate. Visit nwp.org/r/letters2president to learn more and register.

Update: Due to popular demand, registration has been extended to September 12, 2008.

Posted by: Andrew Chang, Marketing Manager

Tips for introducing online collaboration to students

2008-08-28T21:40:00.000-07:00

Tom Barrett is an assistant headteacher at a primary school in north Nottinghamshire, England. We first noticed Tom's blog in May when he gave a week by week account of introducing Google Docs and Google Apps to his Year 5 students. Tom's starting a new term this September and we've invited him to share some best practices for introducing new people (in his case, his 10-year-olds) to Google Docs.

Modeling expected behavior and good practices first

As our first Google Docs project began to gather pace last school year, I realised that the children were finding it difficult to work together. With hindsight it is easier to recognise that the children were not only being introduced to a new piece of technology (the Docs tool) but also their traditional way of working was to be challenged by the new concept of working collaboratively in an online document.

It was clear that the children were unsure about the way they should be working together. They were each working on their own laptop and it was not the technical side of things that they struggled with, it was the fact they were expected to interact with others in their group as well as use a screen. I found it very useful to model the process. Just as I would if I were showing the children a style of writing in Literacy or a type of stretch in PE. I worked with a colleague on an example document and gave the class a running commentary as to what we were doing. As we worked we talked to each other and I underlined some of the key features of what made that short demo collaboration successful for us.

I think that every class of children will respond differently to the challenge of working together in an online doc, but it proved incredibly valuable to our classes to model what is expected of them. In September, I'll have a new class and I will be keeping in mind this idea from the outset. Another idea would be to encourage the students to demonstrate the concept to the class - this is much harder to show but valuable nonetheless. I will be planning in time to model the technical and communications side of working together and also reflective time with the groups throughout the project to discuss and review the process of collaborating.

Introducing group collaboration: entire class, working in pairs, and groups of four

With the 9 and 10 year-olds in my classes, I found it valuable to take small steps towards an open collaborative project with 4 or 5 group members. As I introduced Google Docs to the class, we began to work together on documents that everyone could contribute to, revealing the ways that it worked and how it updates. In many respects this could be labelled as modelling the process that the children will in turn use later on. It proved valuable to be able to prove the concept to the children in a simple "step in, step out" controlled type contribution, nothing protracted. We added ideas to a large grid within a spreadsheet, with the children being told to choose any cell to write in - you could also invite them to fill in some information about themselves next to their name in a class list document. This single contribution to a whole class document was our first step.

It was followed by children working together in pairs on one document - a laptop each, sitting next to each other and sharing the document between them both. Finally the children worked in a larger group of 4 in a more lengthy collaboration as part of a Geography project. I believe it is important to progressively build up to bigger group collaboration and for this coming academic year I will be taking the same approach in developing the children's collaboration experience over the first 6 weeks of term.

Posted by: Tom Barrett, Assistant Headteacher

Another summer, another thank you note to our interns

2008-08-20T15:33:00.000-07:00

I know it's not over yet - but summer has flown by too quickly again. We know it's coming to an end when we start saying 'goodbye' to the incredibly talented interns who joined our team for the summer. With the goodbyes are always a load of thank yous for what they've added to Google Docs. Here are some anecdotes:

Shrikant Shanbhag says, "The fact that I got to work on what I asked for and to see all the changes I made actually make it to production is immensely gratifying. Some of the keyboard shortcuts I implemented are incidentally the only features that I can conceivably demonstrate to my friends and family. I say, 'Look I did this' when asked what I did during the summer and there are always 'ooohs' and 'aaahs' in response." Shrikant's work on our offline capabilities in spreadsheets also seems to have removed a bunch of "ouch"es from our user community. For that we are grateful.

Justin Kosslyn worked on spreadsheet gadgets, and as he describes it, "embedded himself in the team, retrieved information from a range of sources, internally processed the data, generated interactive analysis, and shared it with relevant parties. I can't help but notice that this is awfully similar to what spreadsheet gadgets do." Ya think maybe we had him too focused?

Jessie Berlin took on several projects within the Forms feature of Docs, including required questions, lots of bug fixes, and... oops, I almost gave away the other killer features which haven't launched yet. Jessie didn't have a quote to add here, but she's currently running a survey using Forms to get ideas for what she should say. ;-)

Jorrit Herder implemented several critical parts of the infrastructure behind some exciting upcoming features. We can't describe them yet, so you'll just have to trust on this one for a while. Many of you will one day thank Jorrit for his part in improving our products significantly.

Erdal Tuleu worked on some much needed improvements and fixes to our spreadsheet APIs including some not yet launched methods for controlling data feeds.

Matt Ziegelbaum categorizes his work this summer as "incredibly non-glamorous", which, in our minds, means necessary and high priority work. He's helped to speed up the application and made it easier to maintain and add features without degrading performance. He had the advantage of being with us last summer, too - so he knew where to look for improvements.

Roshni Malani, aka our Rubik's Cube Queen, slam-dunked a series of killer features in presentations, getting way more done than the team dreamed of. Watch for her improvements to come in presentations soon!

Grant Dasher's code has already launched and has been used by anyone who's visited the templates gallery. Star ratings for templates and "Templates I've Used" were all Grant. And thanks to him, you can embed a template in your web page. We can't spill the beans about the rest of his work quite yet.

Angelo Dinardi has developed some soon-to-be-released functionality for the document editor that students can use for their term papers this fall. We'll be sure to credit him on the feature announcement blog post.

Isaiah Greene has improved the folder view in Docs, making it easier for all users to add descriptions and colored labels to folders, as well as name/edit/delete them. If you haven't yet used folders in Google Docs, try creating one now and you'll see Isaiah's handiwork in action.

David Bloom has been knocking bugs upside their heads all summer long, and has decided to complete his last remaining units online so that he can stay with us indefinitely. We are ecstatic that David has chosen to stick with us, so no 'good-bye' for Bloom!

Rob Turer worked on a top secret project out of our Boulder, Colorado office. Here's what the censors are letting us say: Rob created a proof-of-concept framework for Docs that will enable users to [bleeeep] when someone [bleeeep] [bleeeep] . Some people might call it [bleeeep], but we think there's a lot of users who might want to [bleeeep]. Oh, and Rob also helped convert his cubicle "pod" at Google Boulder into a model of the International Space Station.

Nikolay Valtchanov has been digging through the innermost workings of the document editor to make it generally speedier and more efficient. You won't see his work since it's all under the hood but if you notice that the document editors feels faster... well it probably is, thanks to Nikolay.

Update: Corrected Rob Turer's section, adding the missing "bleeeeps" that were supposed to be there in the initial post.

Update: Corrected Erdal's last name. Sorry, Erdal!

Posted by: Jonathan Rochelle, Product Manager

Forms move out of their parents' basement (and other improvements)

2008-08-14T17:09:00.000-07:00

We made a few improvements to the spreadsheets editor this week, which you can read about in our user group. Among the changes were some improvements to Forms.

The most visible change makes the whole Forms feature more accessible to you, since "spreadsheets" isn't the first place you'd look to create a form. We noticed that many of you search for "Forms" from your Docs List and from within the other editors (documents, presentations). So, we've made Forms accessible directly from your Docs List in the "New" menu.

Next, we changed the Forms interface a bit to make it easier for you to add and edit the questions in a form while giving you more clues about the types of questions available. You can also delete a form completely now in addition to just turning it off (not accepting additional responses).

We also now identify each spreadsheet with a Form using a special icon on your Docs List.

Moving out from under the shadow of its spreadsheet parent seems like a good step - but give us feedback if you've got other ideas. Just wait until Forms is old enough to drive... Oh, the places we'll go!

Posted by: Andrew Bonventre, Engineer

Students will tell us... what issues matter the most

2008-08-07T11:06:00.000-07:00

The U.S. presidential campaign is drawing unprecedented interest among young people. What issues matter most to America's youth? Are they concerned about the economy and gas prices? Or is climate change, Iraq, or global terrorism foremost on their minds? We'd like to find out by giving them the ability to express themselves through their words during the period of the presidential election.

We've teamed up with the National Writing Project to create Letters to the Next President: Writing Our Future, an online writing and publishing project that invites young people to write about the issues and concerns they want America's next president to address.

During the presidential campaign, high school teachers will guide students through the process of writing a persuasive letter addressed to the candidates. Topics will be chosen by the students themselves to reflect their specific personal, regional, and age-related interests. Google Docs will allow teachers to incorporate peer review, revisions, and publishing into support of these letters. Participating students will publish their letters online to a Letters to the Next President website (which launches in September) for their peers, parents, and the public to read.

Students and teachers, visit our Letters to the Next President project page learn more. The registration deadline is Sept 12, 2008.

To see how teachers and students are using Google Docs to enable effective peer review and publishing, watch the following video:

Update: Due to popular demand, registration has been extended to September 12, 2008.

Posted by: Andrew Chang, Marketing Manager

2008 Editors’ Best award

2008-08-04T11:42:00.000-07:00

A big "thank you" goes out to the editors of Windows IT Pro Magazine for naming Google Docs a winner in the "Breakthrough Product" category. We're honored.

Update: Corrected the name of the magazine.

Posted by: Andrew Chang, Marketing Manager

Educators in Portugal, México, and Germany speak out

2008-07-23T18:22:00.000-07:00

Several months ago, Joelle asked teachers to tell us how they've been using Docs in the classroom. We received stories from professors and instructors all over the world. In today's post, I'd like to highlight three specific educators from México, Germany and Portugal:

Jose I. Icaza is a professor at Tecnológico de Monterrey in Monterrey N.L., México. He teaches courses in Leadership for Sustainable Development.

"I use Docs documents to have my graduate students write bibliographic research reports coauthored by them all. As an example, in the course 'Leadership for sustainable development,' my 15 students recently wrote together the report Sustainable communities and cities: cases and plans. Each student was to find out about a planned or real sustainable place, incorporate his or her findings into the report and improve the overall report with the instruction: 'Leave the whole report better than you found it.' Grade for this activity depended both on the quality of the individual contribution and the quality of the whole finished report. It was so good that we then hit 'publish' and here it is [in Spanish]."

Stephan Rinke is a subject area manager in the languages department of Volkshochschule Essen, an adult education college in Essen, Germany. He was also an early contributor to our community channel on YouTube.

"We often use Google Docs in our language courses to give students the opportunity to improve their writing skills cooperatively. Frequently we create Google Documents as a basis for group work. Typical activities include:

making a boring text more interesting by adding more detailed descriptions as well as adjectives, adverbs and conjunctions
changing the tense of a text to practise grammar (e.g. changing a text from present tense into future tense)
spotting and correcting mistakes (e.g. wrong verb endings, typical misspellings, etc.)

Students find these tasks motivating and also create class notes and longer documents collaboratively. And with Google Docs being web-based, students often use the opportunity to complete their group tasks from home. Google Docs plays an important role in our efforts to promote cooperative learning."

António Oliveira teaches Information Systems at IPCA (Instituto Politécnico do Cávado e do Ave) in Barcelos, Portugal.

"My name is Pedro Oliveira and I'm giving a class of information systems on IPCA (Barcelos, Portugal). In the last semester, all my students delivered a document (done in groups of two students) with their final work. They liked very much the possibility of using Docs to work in the same document, without having the problem of managing the versions, worries about the security and backup plus. One of the main features that I found was the ability of following their work (each group gave me access to the document), since the first day, inserting comments along the documents and giving clues to the students. Moreover in the end all of their work was published (with a click) and presented to the student community. All I want to say is thanks for the excellent tools that you have and keep up the excellent work."

Posted by: Andrew Chang, Marketing Manager

Docs in the blogs

2008-07-22T14:01:00.000-07:00

A quick note to point you, yet again, to an exceptional use case described in the Teaching With Technology blog.

In a recent post, Mr. Kirkpatrick goes through the steps of setting up parent:teacher meetings easily using Docs.

Take inspiration from this idea, and as always, feel free to leave a comment and let us know how you use Docs to make things a bit easier :)

Posted by: Meredith Whittaker, Program Manager

Forms take a vacation

2008-07-21T08:13:00.000-07:00

Don Campbell is President of Expand2Web, and dedicates his career to helping small business owners with local store-fronts connect with customers over the web. Here, he proves his tech-savvy creativity by showing us a very fun, and seasonally-appropriate use of forms.

I spend most of my time every day working with small business owners helping them with their local search strategy to get more customers from the web. But sometimes the best solutions emerge from how you use the web at home...

A good friend of mine organizes a family beach camping trip every year on the coast, just South of Santa Cruz. The campground is situated on the bluffs overlooking the beach and the Pacific ocean.

Its a great setup since most of us have young kids, and as you know if you’ve got kids they *love* to play on the beach and in the surf. We’ve figured out how to get a group of campsites that are perfectly placed in the redwoods and eucalyptus trees along the bluff every year. We spend the days down on the beach with the kids and the evenings at the campsite. It’s one of those truly magical trips that we all look forward to every year.

But this year we had a problem - the trip has been getting very popular as our core set of families started telling friends about it, and we were up to 100 people from 24 families who wanted to go on the trip!

We were able to book enough campsites for this many people, but our key challenge was how to manage the meals. Imagine having to cook dinner for 100 people!

We had everyone's email addresses, and were brainstorming on how to coordinate the meals so that everyone could contribute, and there would be enough food for every meal. I had used the new Forms feature in Google Spreadsheets for a few of my customers in the past, and got an idea that it might be able to help us here too.

So here’s what we did:
1) I set up a Google Spreadsheet with the information we wanted to collect from each of the families. We collected information like:

Family name
How many adults
How many children
Which meals will you be eating
Choose a preferred meal to prepare (e.g. Saturday breakfast)
Menu plan
Special requirements
Phone #

2) We turned this into a Form, and sent it out to our list of families. As I mentioned, we already had their email addresses, so we were able to include the form directly in their email! They could also click a link to view the entire spreadsheet - we wanted everyone to be able to see what everyone else was doing, although Google Spreadsheets does allow you to restrict this.

3) Amazingly, we had almost all of our responses within 3 days! I was expecting some phone calls and emails from people who were a little confused or didn’t understand how the form worked, or how to view the spreadsheet. But I had zero questions. And I know that many of the families are not exactly comfortable in front of the computer if you know what I mean. What I DID get were comments from four of the families saying “Hey, I didn’t know you could do that with Google! Can you show me how to do this? So I sent them to Google Docs and shared this video - Quick and Easy Forms - with them and that was all they needed to get going.

A few of the things that made this a very workable solution:

We were able to create and share the form within minutes.
Spreadsheet updates in real time allowed my friend and I - in different locations - to see the same data as it came in, in case we needed to adjust anything or track how things were going.
The ability to include the form in an email made it super easy for people to fill it out right away.
The ability to let everyone view the spreadsheet over the web in their browser allowed them to see what other families were doing, or get their phone number in case they needed to discuss how they were going to team up on a meal, for example.

Our trip is later this month, and now we’ve got the meal plans all figured out two weeks in advance. With that out of the way I’m looking forward to a great camping trip and meeting some fun new families. Oh yeah, and eating some really good meals too!

Posted by: Don Campbell, President of Expand2Web and happy camper

Templates bring Docs to life

2008-07-16T15:45:00.000-07:00

What do wedding planners, gas mileage calculators and photo albums have in common? They're all examples of templates available in the Google Docs Template Gallery that Sarah Beth Eisinger (Docs Templates engineer), Grant Dasher (intern), and I built and (happily!) released today.

When researching how people use templates, we saw that lots of you create documents for all aspects of your lives. You need resumes and cover letters to look for jobs and fax cover letters and invoices to run your businesses. And of course you want to use documents in fun ways with family and friends, such as unique designs and layouts for invitation cards and calendars. Finally, everyone wants to be able to have tools that "just work": print mailing labels, track portfolio values, and manage projects without having to painstakingly create documents from scratch.

These needs inspired our new templates and gallery. We developed these in conjunction with Avery Dennison, Vertex42.com, TemplateZone, and Visa Business.

Many templates leverage the collaborative aspect of Google Docs so that several people can work on a single document online without having to email attachments back and forth. To hear the story behind two templates, watch these videos:

To get started, go directly to the template gallery or access it from the "New" menu in your document list. Templates are currently available only in English, but other languages are coming soon. They're also available to Google Apps users.

Posted by: Valerie Blechar, Google Docs Templates Engineer

(Cross-posted on the Official Google Blog.)

Live blogging with Docs

2008-07-09T06:51:00.000-07:00

Posted by: Amit Agarwal, a professional technology blogger at Digital Inspiration and an exceptionally creative Docs user

We were first introduced to Amit Agarwal when he sent us a video, detailing how to use Docs as an RSS feed reader (check out the accompanying and instructive blog post, as well). We watched the video, read his blog post, and were completely impressed. So, we got in touch, and are now happy to have Amit as a guest blogger, showcasing his newest cool idea for using Docs.

This tutorial will show you how to use Google Docs word processor for blogging a live event – it could be a keynote address or a conference call with media or someone speaking at a local BarCamp in your city.

To get started you would need a laptop computer, a free Google account and few inches of free space to sit (or stand) in the conference room. OK, we are now ready to roll.

Create a new document in Google Docs and give it some descriptive name (like “Launch of Blue Widgets Version 2”) - this will later become the title of our blog post.

Write some placeholder text in the document (like “Stay Tuned, we’ll cover the event live here.”) and save (Ctrl+S).

Now you have two options here. You can either embed this Google document in your blog as an IFRAME or you can republish the contents of this document as a new blog post (better approach though it requires an additional step).

Embed a live document in your blog

From the Share Menu, select “Publish as Web Page” and “Publish Document.” Also check the setting that says “Automatically re-publish when changes are made.”

Go back to the document and select “View as Web Page” from the File menu. What you now see on the screen is a plain vanilla document without any toolbars and menus. To embed this in your blog, copy the URL from the browser bar and use an IFRAME tag (find an example tag linked here).

Now as soon as you write something in this Google document and hit save, the content will appear instantly on your blog. If someone is reading your live blog already, he may have to reload the page.

Republish the Google Document in your blog

From the Share Menu, select “Publish as Web Page” followed by “Post to Blog.”

Now there’s a small trick involved here. Without closing the existing window, open a new tab in the browser and load the same document.

When you add new content to your “live blog” document, switch to the previous window and hit “Republish Post” – Google Docs will overwrite the previous version of your blog post so you readers will always see the latest version. Continue the write –> save –> republish cycle until the even is over.

What are the advantages of using Google Docs for Live Blogging?

First and foremost - you are live-blogging on your own website and not on some third-party platform – that means you retain all the web traffic. Second, Google Docs offers a very rich blog editor so you get to include photos, hyperlinks, tables, etc in your blog post as per the need. And the Ctrl+S keyboard shortcut is your best friend – you can save content without reloading the page.

To insert current date in a Google Document

Most live blogs carry a timestamp next to each update. While there’s no shortcut key to insert dates in Google Docs, you may use the Ctrl + M key that is normally used for inserting comments. It gives you the current date as well as that authors name which you may discard before publishing the blog.

Blogs we like, for teachers

2008-07-07T12:13:00.000-07:00

Posted by: Meredith Whittaker, Program Manager

Reviewing and revising

My colleague, and one of Docs' marketing managers, Andrew Chang, emailed me the other day, thrilled to have discovered an incredibly incisive post covering a number of ways to leave feedback and organize students' writing process using Docs.

I was as impressed with the post as Andrew, and we're pretty sure you'll enjoy it, too. To see for yourself, head over to Tom Barrett's ICT in my Classroom blog.

The play's the thing

Another charming and wonderfully detailed post walks us through using Docs to facilitate a scriptwriting project among teachers and students (a subject dear to my heart, as a theater enthusiast during high school :)

Especially engaging was the way in which the author presents the aim of his post, and the reason he thinks it's valid right up front, before launching into what is one of the nicest descriptions of a collaborative project using Docs that I've seen in some time.

Check it out on the Teaching with Technology blog, and start plotting your own ideas.

***

Finally, if you're a teacher, student, or edu fan new to Docs, get off to a smooth start with our teachers' guide: Using Google Docs in the Classroom, or check out the other Docs resources on the Google For Educators page.

Forms take a hike

2008-07-03T12:03:00.000-07:00

Posted by: Garnet Gratton

Garnet Gratton is back, and in the mood for summer. In her last post, she detailed a creative lesson plan using Docs and Mars Phoenix Lander in the news. This time, she'll be telling us about her experience using Docs forms to make scheduling extremely easy, and leave more time for summer fun.

During the school year, my hiking group and I meet every six weeks or so. We hike all over Santa Barbara and Ventura Counties, as well as the Channel Islands, exploring new trails and renewing our friendships in beautiful surroundings. The last time we met, we climbed rocks, forded streams, and sat at the side of a riverbed to eat lunches from our backpacks. Usually this is when we decide on our next date to get together, but this time we hiked back without deciding anything.

With summer approaching, all six of us all had plans to be away on vacations at different times. Due to so many varied schedules, it looked like we might have to suspend our meet ups for the summer. This, until my friend Mary, who knew I'd been developing Google forms for classroom applications, suggested that I send out a form to collect vacation schedules from our hiking partners. Brilliant!

(A photo from a recent hike.
This is what it's all about in the end :)

Once everyone sent me their away-dates through the form, I plugged them into Google Calendar. We are all going to be busy this summer, but looking at everyone's schedules, I realized that there were still a few hiking days available. Compared to traditional scheduling, rigorous hikes are a breeze. Using Docs forms for scheduling, however, makes even easy hikes seem difficult by comparison :)

Here's the form I used to collect the info (so simple, no?)

Featured gadget: map it in your spreadsheet

2008-06-26T07:19:00.000-07:00

Posted by: Meredith Whittaker, Program Manager

The situation: My good friend Tomashi is visiting New York, and I want to map out a few places for her to visit near my work before we meet for the evening.

What do I do? I use the spreadsheets map gadget, which easily adds a Google map pinpointing all the addresses I've entered.

Here's how:

I choose some places in the neighborhood that I think Tomashi would like visiting, and add their addresses along the first column of my spreadsheet.
In the next column, I enter the name of each place, and a short description.
I highlight all of the cells that contain information I'd like included in the map.
Along the top of the toolbar, I click, "Insert Gadget." In the menu that appears I select "Maps" from the list on the left, and choose, simply, the "Map" gadget.
Finally, I give the map a title, check the box next to "Last column as tooltip" and, as is my preference, choose to allow zoom using mouse wheel. When all's done, I click "Apply and close."

Here's the published map (which can be embedded in any HTML page, if you'd like):

And, here's a link to the full spreadsheet, showing the guide that I'll share with Tomashi when she visits.

Of course, this is great for a lot of other things, apart from visiting friends. These include:

House hunting (enter the addresses in one column, and any corresponding numbers, or information in the next)
Road trip planning
Charting restaurants, shops, or other places you'd like to visit
Anything else where a map could flesh out a list of addresses :)

Hot tip: Create new docs, even faster

2008-06-23T14:38:00.000-07:00

Posted by: Michelle Lee and Dave Young, User experience designers

With all of the meeting notes, design documents, bug lists, presentations, and other files we share with our teams at Google, we create up to a dozen new documents a day. Of course, this means a daily stream of new docs.

To make this as fast as possible, we use these three shortcuts:

1. Drag the links below (one for each type) into your browser bookmarks toolbar (also known as the navigation toolbar).

New Document

New Spreadsheet

New Presentation

2. Now, you can create a new doc simply by clicking the appropriate link. And to create a new doc in a new tab, you can hold Control (command on Mac) while clicking the bookmark.

Google Docs on the Eee PC

2008-06-18T11:23:00.000-07:00

Posted by: Regina Dinneen, Docs User Operations (aka Google Docs Guide 2)

I recently took the plunge and bought an Eee PC to bring with me on my volunteer mission (see the Craigslist / Forms post). If there's Internet on the island and in the schools, I'd really like to use Google Docs with my students. So, after booting up my new computer I noticed that it came pre-installed with a Google Docs icon that automatically sends you to http://docs.google.com.

I was intrigued – could I actually use Google Docs on a computer with such a small screen? Turns out it works pretty well. Here are two pictures to show you how it looks (to get an idea of just how small the Eee PC is, I've put it on top of my Macbook Pro).

Although the toolbar and white space take up a lot of room, spreadsheets is still usable on this subnotebook.

However, if you freeze too many rows, the vertical scrollbar will disappear. Not good at all.If you've tried Docs on the Eee PC, leave us a note in the comments below.

What could we change in Docs to make the experience better on the smaller screen? Let us know by leaving a comment.

Google Docs means business

2008-06-17T07:37:00.000-07:00

Posted by: Meredith Whittaker, Program Manager

Recently, we were introduced to Lynette Chandler through her wonderful video detailing how to create spreadsheets forms.

Well, Lynette and her Docs expertise are back. This time, she's put together a resource for businesses, giving six creative ways to employ Docs in the workplace.

Check out her guide, 6 Ways Google Docs Can Improve Your Team's Efficiency, then leave us a comment here, letting us know how you use Docs in your business life.