Ramblings of A NOOB

Current Learning Affair

2010-07-26T09:03:00.003+08:00

Hello Everyone,
So sorry.Been soo busy lately.
Just a few words to say I'm still alive.LOL!
Yeah, currently i'm learning itsy bitsy of MySQL. Never really get my hands on that but yeah I'm digging something now.Hopefully will gain something out of it.
So many things in my head right now.Juggling between work and personal life.Please pray for me k?

Have a nice day everyone!

Google TV anyone?

2010-06-10T09:21:00.003+08:00

Hello everyone,

So sorry bout the Google Calender entry.Insyallah, will post it tomorrow.tehee.

So anyway, today I browsed bout picasa, what is it and stuffs like that and somehow I encountered something interesting...Google TV!!

Yup lads and gents.Embrace yourself.Fasten your blanket.Get a cup of coffee ( I'm a coffee junkie btw) and enjoy this video.

Happy watching!

I am here, living the moments

2010-05-31T11:04:00.002+08:00

Hi folks,

Sorry for the long pause of updates.

I went to P.Pangkor, finishing my induction.Hopefully can pass the exam with flying colours *crossing fingers*.Pray for me ok?

But hey I'm back, with more updates to come, this I promise you.

My next update will be on Google Calendar.Within my hiatus days, I just noticed the Google Calendar had a brand new look!

Just the perfect time to get it reviewed.So I'm preparing for some screen shots here.Will get it posted as soon as possible.

Stay tuned.

p/s: O yeah that is me,posing with the rope.*grin*

My 7 days with Google Apps : Day 3

2010-04-30T14:54:00.004+08:00

Day 3 : Having fun with Gmail

Did you know that Gmail provide generously about 7++ GB(and still counting)of storage and recently increased 20MB(*NOOB note:It's megabyte by the way,not megabit!) limit of attachment files? That's huge enough to save your regular emails on day-to-day basis without deleting them!

But here,I don't want to write about why you should use gmail instead of other free mails available around(if you would like to know anyway,you can check it here)instead, I would like to ramble about my experience using Gmail to consolidate with my yahoo mail into Gmail(Hey,actually you can do that for multiple email accounts that you have.It's like having huge mailbox with multiple tiny doors attached).

Since the document of captured screens is quite huge, I would suggest you to download it here using Google Docs.It will be better than scrolling up and down this blog post.

You can leave a comment on this post if you are having trouble downloading it or viewing it.I can send a copy in MS Word to you.Until then, have fun!

Refine your search using Google Squared

2010-04-29T09:30:00.002+08:00

Hey there,

Just now I encountered something interesting, again by Google, called Google Squared.It is still under Labs version which means, it is still unstable and under experimental.But here, I would say that it will be a good search engine, when you need to refine your search or make comparisons using nothing but tables on your browser! Life can't be easier than this!Imagine you need to search and compare products that you want to buy on the net using a search engine capability.Let's take a look:

Here, I would like to search about MP3 players.I will need to know things like brands available on the market, sound format it can play, capacity, or even the look of that product.So, let's square it!

 The search results will get populated into a table like this:

 It's too much information for me.Hmmm, so I will need to eliminate certain columns to make my search results more intuitive and suitable for what I'm looking for.Here, I add one more column called manufacturer, so that I know which company made this product.

 Here's what I got!

How cool is that? So now, I want to share it with my one of my friend that I think she will be happy to have this information.But first, I will need to save my search results.Notice that when I click save, the orange label unsaved will be replaced by the green label as public. 

Since I want to share it with my friend, I will need to stick with public visibility and send an email to her.You can use twitter and facebook too if you want!

And now, I want to export it to my Google Spreadsheet, hey, you can save it in CSV file format too!

O yeah, one more thing, please sign in to your Google Account first if you want to try this Google Squared.If you would like to see the quick caps video you can view it here.

Let's squared & have a nice day!

Invitation From Google Wave

2010-04-29T08:46:00.001+08:00

I'm so happy today.I've been invited by the Google team to preview their new product called Google Wave(err but more like I sign up to get invited, lol!)

But hey,they accept it right? So, who cares.But actually Google Wave is still under preview among the Developer.But my task here is to preview their product and keep on giving feedback to them to report bugs....So I can't wait to give it a try!

So, you out there, If you would like to find out what is Google Wave,you can watch this video(It's about 1hour plus long,so beware!I fell in love with Google Wave when I watched this video actually.)

[OR]

You can visit this Google Wave site.

Happy surfing!

My 7 days with Google Apps : Day 2

2010-04-25T22:54:00.002+08:00

Day 2: My own survey form in Google Spreadsheet

Here are some step-by-step visual guide to start your own simple survey form using Google Form.Hope this will get you to kick start somewhere.

You can check out the published form used in this example here

Enjoy! 

Creating your first sample  survey form

From your  Google Docs main page,go to create new and choose form.See the above  picture.You will get this  simple form to start rolling.Here, I'm creating a Customer Feedback form  for a snacks bar of a restaurant.

Now, let's  add a few questions in the survey form.Go to Add item and choose your  desired type of question as below:

Here is the one of the example if you  choose Paragraph Text type of question. 
  
Edit your  form

You can try to explore all of the options given when you start  building your own form.However in this example I'm using:
Text
Multiple Choice
Checkbox 
Grid
to construct my form example.As you  can see in the below picture, I'm using section header for the  title or sectioning my form into multiple parts and also page break to  break my form into pages so that unrelated participant can skip  questions that does not belong to them.Please bear in mind,in order to  use page break, you will need to include and it is ONLY available  through multiple choice type of question in your form.

Choose your template

Now, I would like to  choose a template to make my form more presentable.Google Form is  WYSIWYG type of editor, thus , prohibiting you to change the template  with one of your own(Sigh,I know some of you are CSS gurus!).However,  you can choose from the gallery of templates to suit your need.

Check out  what template I use for this survey.Not bad,huh?

Invite others to  participate in the survey form

There are 3 ways to let others view  your survey in Google Form:

You can invite people to participate  in your survey by sending them invitation through their emails(any  emails will work just fine) and you can choose to include the form in  the email,or;

Embed the link provided to your  website,or;

Copy and paste the URL of the form to others and send it via  emails, instant messengers or social networking sites.You can found the  link at the bottom of the form when you edit the form or get the link  to share option under the share button.

Personalized  you submit confirmation

You can edit how  do you want to say thanks to all the participants after they submit the  form.This personalized submit confirmation let your user know that their  form has been successfully submitted and also serves as a token of  appreciation for their time to fill up the form.

Invite collaborators to edit or  view the survey form

Under the  same share button,you can invite people to become one of the  collaborators of your form.You can define what your collaborator can do  or cannot do to your established form.You can define those access under  the option See who has access under the same button.So,try to explore what other options are capable of on your own. 

Publish your form

This is an example of how a published form will look like on your  browser.A submit button will appear at the end of your form to indicate  the end of the survey questions.When your respondent hit the submit  button,the submit confirmation will appear to the screen.If you did not  personalized the submit confirmation, Google Form will take the default  settings of the confirmation.

View results of the survey 

Finally,when  the closing date ended,you can start viewing the results of your survey  responses.A beautiful summary of responses laid out in nice pie charts  and bar graphs making it easy for you to take a quick look at the  results before analyzing your data further with any available data  analysis software.You can download the nicely populated survey data  through Google Spreadsheet and save it to excel, pdf, csv, odt or even  print it for your own copy.Just un-tick Accepting responses options to stop getting the responses from your respondent.

You can also create various type of  forms using Google Spreadsheet capability,for example, your monthly  budget listings,resume template or even a RSVP invitation to your wedding  reception!

So be creative and have fun!

My 7 days with Google Apps : Day 1

2010-04-23T11:01:00.002+08:00

Day 1: Google-ing Google Docs 

I truly don't remember when I started to use Gmail as my first Google-based product.At the first glance, Gmail seems ugly to me.I'm more familiar with yahoo mail and everything in yahoo look trendy(Mind you I started using yahoo mail at the age of 14 back in 1999).

But now, after I received a task at the office to distribute a survey within 15-30 minutes, gosh, I had no choice but Google-ing the best possible solutions around.I encountered various sites of online survey but none can cater the need which is-yeah u guess it right, FREE survey form that can be distributed without compromising the number of respondents allowed at one particular time.

I'm truly grateful and somehow relieve that I chose Google Docs with form capability to distribute my survey at that time.To my surprise, it worked just fine and very easy to use.After I did a few simple tests among my colleagues, I launched the survey immediately.

The  feedback from users are easily gathered and in fact, the form is still online till now.However, there are a few drawbacks to the form; since it is intended to leverage the capability of spreadsheets, the form implementations are quite, how should I say, need to be improvised again.

I must say the form is functioning as it claims but if the form should cater wider respondent category using extensively jumping through and within form sections, I personally do not recommend this as your survey platform.You can opt for other open source survey program that is available for download and deploy.Otherwise, you may use it as you wish since it is simple and fast to distribute.

As a few of you may notice, the data will get populated into the spreadsheet whenever a user submit a form.Sadly, if I edit my form for example I edit multiple choices options label in the form, the related spreadsheet cell of  an existing respond remains the same(I shall explain it in details on my next post).

Google also added some new features back then to enhance the form capability to let the non-related respondent to skip questions by using page break and section header.These add-on will then create paging capability in that form.

You can also add Google gadgets to include graphs,charts, gauges and many more in your spreadsheet. These definitely a very helpful tool when you need to analyze your data.However, please bear in mind your data should be presented in a right format to let the tool read it for you.Otherwise, you are just barking at the wrong tree.

So what do I like best in this Google product?

Well, I guess it is because the mobile capability it offers where you can access your spreadsheet almost everywhere as long as you have the internet connection, of course.You can also invite your friends to be your collaborators and let them edit and access the spreadsheet for you if you need their input as well.

Forms, gadgets, mobility and collaborate these are the key points that will make it a huge phenomenon(just my personal opinion!) in these upcoming years.Opps, I forgot!Save the best part for the last, did I mention that it's FREE?I think, I did.Twice!