Category: Google Docs
March 26th, 2008
Google Docs gets a facelift, adds new menu
As part of Google’s suite of tools that will one day be a serious threat to Microsoft Office, Google Docs has been going through many incremental changes over the past while. The latest change is the new Menu structure — and it’s very good. I feel a lot more comfortable creating documents online now that I have the tools I’m familiar with, where I’m familiar with them.
The new toolbar has taken some of the usability concepts from traditional windows applications by adding the familiar file, edit, insert, format, and tools menus. Philipp Lenssen has posted a good article about the new changes, and he also has screenshots of Google Docs that takes you all the way back to when it was still Writely. It has almost come full circle with the new menu structure.
[image from Google Blogoscoped]
March 24th, 2008
Set change notifications in Google Spreadsheets
Now in Google Spreadsheets, some people are able to set “notification rules” that keep you up-to-speed with changes being made on spreadsheets. This handy feature gives you the ability to be notified on a daily or an as-it-happens basis when these specific events are triggered:
- Anything in your spreadsheet changes
- Anything on a specific sheet changes
- A specific cell or a range of cells changes
- Collaborators are added or removed
- User submits a form
Both collaborators and viewers are able to set up notifications, however only collaborators will be able to see the usernames attached to updates.
[Thanks Dmitriy!]
March 19th, 2008
The new Google Spreadsheet Feature and Visualization API
Today Google released a new feature for Google Spreadsheets that gives users some very powerful data visualization capabilities. Considering the multitude of different ways people use Google Spreadsheets, Google couldn’t possibly create unique, tailored visualization tools for everything, so they decided to open it up and let both users and developers leverage the Google Gadget platform.
One of the most requested features for Google Spreadsheets is pivot tables — Google still hasn’t delivered their own solution to this problem, but one of the early adopters who started developing with this new Visualization API has done the hard work for them. Google is effectively hiring developers from around the globe to do their dirty work, for nothing.
Panorama Pivot Table for Google Spreadsheets is an interactive table that automatically extracts, organizes, and summarizes your data. You can use this report to analyze the data, make comparisons, detect patterns and relationships, and discover trends. In just a few steps any users can find answers such as the best selling region, and best selling product or analyze results of an academic research. With Panorama Pivot Tables for Google Spreadsheets, you can interact with the data and look at it in various ways in a simple drag and drop environment.
So far, the only “data source” the Visualization API supports is Google Spreadsheets, but there will likely be a day when you can extract information from things including spreadsheets, xml documents or even raw text.
Here are some basic examples Google has created to demonstrate what type of things can be done:
- Motion Chart - Google acquired a company called Gapminder quite a while ago, and have finally made it possible for people to use this powerful tool. These “motion charts” add another dimension by instead of plotting time on an axis, you can plot two different data sets in reference to time, and have it animate as time goes forward. Pretty cool.
- Time Series Chart - This appears to be the same chart control Google Finance uses to show financial information. It’s a flash based chart that represents data over time, and allows for pieces of information to be plotted at various points.
- Gauge - A chart type that gives the viewer an easy to understand speedometer type gauges with ranges.
- Data Table - An interactive table with filters and grouping.
- Heat Map - Lets users visualize geographic data by seeing a map with shades of colors based on numeric values.
- Organizational Chart - The data source specifies relationships, and this gadget will represent them in an easy to understand view.
January 28th, 2008
Offline support for Google Docs being tested
Tony Ruscoe is at it again, he found an experimental server for Google Docs and noticed a link at the top that says “Experimental! Offline Access” in big red letters. Clicking the link popped up a Google Gears box that asks the for access.
Once the user has given Google authority to sync documents, it begins working. After it is done, you are able to launch http://docs.google.com even without internet access. Unfortunately, as Tony points out, you can’t really do much more than rename document files (not even presentations or spreadsheets yet). Given the uselessness of this feature, it’s not hard to imagine it’s still in the early stages and could take a while for it to be officially implemented.
The “experimental server” is still a mystery to me, so I can’t verify this information first hand — however Tony is very trustworthy, and anything he says can generally be taken at face value.
[images via Google Blogoscoped]
November 21st, 2007
Google updates presentation application, still falls short
You can’t expect a product to transform into something amazing overnight, but the set of “updates” made recently didn’t make any drastic improvements to the already less-than-spectacular service.
The new features include:
- Selecting a background image or color
- Organizing and reordering slides
- Duplicating slides
- Copying and pasting slides
Great, but who cares? I’m not suggesting Google needs to incorporate every feature of PowerPoint — look at Google Talk, it has a fraction of the features found in traditional IM clients, but it could still step up and compete with the rest.
What makes Google Presentations different then? Why am I picking on this product and not Google Talk? Well, it comes down to the features that are missing. The reason Google Talk could get away with only having a tiny subset of the most common functionality found in other clients is because the features omitted were annoying or unneeded to most people. Google Presentations is all but useless for practical purposes (most of which are business related) because the features you can’t find are useful and necessary.
I would love to hear what you think about Google Presentations. What features do you love, hate, and miss? Have you used the product for anything other than “testing it out”?
[Thanks Mariano!]
September 18th, 2007
Google launches presentations, but shouldn’t have
Along with its new name (Google Docs & Spreadsheets is now just Google Docs), users are now free to upload Powerpoint presentations or start a new presentation by starting from scratch. That said, I am wondering why Google released such an incomplete product? It’s basically useless for business users who want to make professional looking presentations. This is so far away from a Powerpoint killer that it’s embarrassing I thought it might have had a chance.
Where do I start? Well, first off, there is no support for exporting a document to Powerpoint or as .odp (the open document format for presentations). I guess this isn’t truly a complimentary service to other office suites anymore like they have repeated over and over. Uploading Powerpoint presentations is basically useless too — it butchered the one I tested with.
Most companies have their own Powerpoint template they use to make sure presentations all have the same look and feel. And with that said — don’t bother trying to use it. There is no way to create your own template or upload one that already exists. If you have images that make up your template, you can add them to each slide but they have to be less than 2MB otherwise you will be out of luck. Oh, by the way, your presentation can’t exceed 10MB either.
How about those awful transitions and sounds that your boss likes to use? Well, you will be glad to know that Google Docs doesn’t support transitions or sound at all. There will be no more bouncing text, no fading images, and no screeching sliding text if your company decides to use Google Presentations. In fact, that might actually be a selling feature?
Oh, and bulleted points are sometimes nice to do one at a time — but you can’t do that either. You have to create a copy of the previous slide and add an extra point to emulate click events — who has time to do that?
It baffles me that they decided to launch this product without support for any of the most common features in most presentation software. What do you think? Will this tool useful for anybody?
September 10th, 2007
Google Docs mobile now available?
About a week ago, there was an interesting discussion going on in the Blogoscoped forums about what appears to be a mobile version of Google Docs. Today, Steve Rubel noticed that when he goes to Google Docs on his iPhone, there is a link at the bottom that pointed to http://docs.google.com/m — usually a good indication of a mobile offering.
Now the question is, will it only be for iPhone? I don’t think there are many other mobile devices that can handle (or at least that you would want to handle) a full read/write version of Google’s word processor or spreadsheet service, but a read-only version could likely be made to work on all mobile devices.
September 3rd, 2007
Get ready for JotSpot in Google Docs
A very observant Google follower on the Google Blogoscoped forum noticed yesterday that messing with the URL in Google Apps produced some interesting clues. Google is going to be launching JotSpot soon — the wiki application they purchased last October.
Then Tony Ruscoe (also a brilliant Google digger) even uncovered the “Google Wiki” logo that will likely be used for the new service. You can see the (awful) logo in action on future login pages for the service.
We’ll hope screenshots of the service will be leaked before the Office 2.0 Conference in San Francisco next week — where it’s expected the new service is to be officially launched.
August 11th, 2007
Google kicks Microsoft where it hurts, again
Do you know about Google Updater? There is a good chance you have it installed on your computer already as it’s bundled with other Google products like the browser toolbar. Well, in what seems to be an obvious attempt to steal even more users away from Microsoft Office products, Google just added “StarOffice” to the the list of available downloads that can be installed and updated automatically through Google Pack. If you download it directly from Sun, it will cost you around $70, however Google appears to be giving it away for free — or at least there isn’t a nag screen or an obvious way to upgrade to a full version.
Web applications like Google Docs are very useful in many circumstances, but for power users who need, or prefer, a fat client to do their work — there was no real choice but to keep using Microsoft Office if they don’t know about this suite.
StarOffice, which includes their own version of Access, Excel, PowerPoint and Word, is developed by Sun — but Google has been throwing resources at it since October, 2005. I am going to assume there is a plugin under development that lets users create documents on their PC and synchronize them with their online counterpart through Google Docs. StarOffice already has hooks into Google’s search and desktop capabilities.
It should be interesting to see if this move helps Sun get more exposure for StarOffice. What do you think? Are you surprised Google made this product available through the Google Updater? Will this affect Microsoft in any way?
[via Google Operating System]
July 24th, 2007
Google adds new features to Spreadsheets
Google has introduced some new interface elements to Google Spreadsheets that make it easier to lock rows and sort columns. The new sortbar is a
draggable break between your headers and data — it’s an intuitive way to create locked columns and to sort rows.
Another new feature is quick add. When you highlight a group of numeric cells, you will find their sum in the lower right corner — this change makes using spreadsheets a bit more interactive by allowing the user to perform a simple calculations without writing formulas like “=SUM(A5:A8)” in another cell.
Previously, Google Spreadsheets was only available on supported browsers — now, regardless of your browser (supported or not), you are at least able to view your spreadsheets. It’s too bad this application isn’t 100% compatible with all browsers, but this is a good compromise for now.
Read more about the new features here.
[Thanks Nate!]
Garett Rogers is employed as a programmer for iQmetrix, which specializes in retail management software for the cellular and electronics industry. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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