GilsMethod.com » Google Docs

Keep Track of Your Contacts with the Gmail People Widget

Greg Baden — Mon, 30 May 2011 16:00:03 +0000

Gmail is a great tool for connecting with friends and family, but sometimes it’s hard to find all of the information you need from them. Often enough, you have to look for information in many different areas of Gmail, so now Gmail is making it easier to find all of this information by adding a new widget to the side of Gmail. The new People Widget will pop up on the right side of the email showing recent emails, Buzz posts, calendar and availability, and shared documents.

You’ll also have the ability to quickly start a chat with individuals or groups and even schedule a meeting all right inside the People Widget in Gmail. The new widget should be appearing over the next few weeks, so keep your eye out for an added widget to the side of your emails.

Google Finally Launches Pivot Tables for Spreadsheets

Greg Baden — Mon, 23 May 2011 14:00:05 +0000

Having large sets of data in a spreadsheet can slow down a computer and can often take minutes just to make a simple, calculation for your large set of data. Now you can instantly sort through large sets of data with Pivot Tables for Google Spreadsheets. Pivot Tables allow you to easily work with the data to find out new, interesting information, you might not have seen just by looking at the charts. If you take this list of students, for example, you can easily create a pivot table by going to Data -> Pivot Table Report. Using this table you can find out the number of students in each grade level by gender.

You can use Pivot Tables to your advantage to alter or find out different sets of information by simply moving a couple of items around or adding some new ones. You can also have your data sorted by formulas, whether you use sum, count, or other simple formula to find out even further information. You can also filter out the type of data you want, whether it’s just males and females or only the Track and Field members for this data set; the choice is up to you.

Check out the video below to see a walk-through of the new Pivot Tables:

Google Finally Releases Docs App for Mobile Phones

Greg Baden — Tue, 03 May 2011 16:00:30 +0000

After many awaited years of bad mobile document editing, Google has finally released a new Google Docs App for Android. The app, available only in English and on Android 2.1+ phones, allows you to easily find any document connected to your Google account and edit them with ease, right on your phone. You can even share your documents with others with a few taps of the phone.

One of the most interesting and notable features is the ability to take pictures with your phones camera and turn it into a readable, editable document. Using OCR (optical character recognition), your phone can create a document from a photo. OCR isn’t perfect, but it’s always being tweaked, so don’t expect it to read your doctor’s note.

You can also use the Google Docs for Android app to have a permanent widget to your phones home screen. The widget sits near the top of the phone and allows you to access Google Docs, go to your starred documents, taking a photo with your phones camera, and opening up a new document.

Enjoy Simpler File Uploads with Google Docs Update

Greg Baden — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 16:00:23 +0000

Google Docs has seen its fair share of improvements over the past six months, starting with the ability to drag and drop files from your desktop into Google Docs. Now Google has expanded that even further by offering three new features. The first is the ability to upload folders, which will not only upload the current folder, but all sub folders as well. It’s now available in Chrome as well as Firefox and Safari, which both require an applet to be installed.

The second new feature includes an update with the documents list integration, which gives you a better idea of what’s going on with your documents. A new popup window will now show the progress of your files being uploaded. Once completed, your uploaded files will show in the documents almost instantaneously.

Finally, you will now have the option on all computers using Chrome, Safari or Firefox, to drag-and-drop multiple files at a time into Google Docs. However, due to browser limitations, you can’t upload folders to Google Docs via the drag-and-drop feature.

The new update should be rolling out to all users over the next month in all languages. Keep an eye out at the top of your Google Docs for a popup notifying you of the new features.

Google Docs Finally Supports Pagination

Greg Baden — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 14:00:31 +0000

To the day one year ago, Google released a newly updated version of the Google document editor which included many much needed updates. Now, Google is taking that document editor one step further by adding pagination to all documents. Pagination means that you will now be able to see the physical pages in your document, instead of it being one large document with no separation. You also have the ability to change it back to the original compacted view by going to View -> Document View -> Compact in a Google Doc.

The new pagination feature includes the ability to see headers on the top of every page, rather than just at the top of the document, footnotes on the bottom of pages, and text being automatically pushed to another page when a new page is manually added.

In addition to this new feature Google has used the pagination to help implement a new printing feature to Google Docs. Currently only available in Chrome, the new native printing feature allows you to print exactly what you see in your document, rather than having to convert it to a PDF and then printing that PDF. This new feature is part of a new web standard that has been implemented into Chrome; hopefully other browsers will follow suit.

Google’s Optical Character Recognition Now Supports 34 Different Languages

Greg Baden — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 14:05:44 +0000

Optical Character Recognition, better known as OCR, is a method of converting a file into text. This file could be a scanned copy in a PDF format or just an image you take with your phone. Google took on the personal OCR ability in June 2010 for five different languages, but now has support for 34 different languages. The system allows you to upload a PDF or image file into Google Docs in addition to converting other documents, like Microsoft documents, into the Google Docs format.

Uploading these files will allow you to easily take a formatted document and convert it into a editable Google Doc. The system will do its best in preserving the formatting, text size and alignment of the document. No system is perfect, but Google is constantly upgrading the quality of the OCR converter.

Don’t have the time to convert that 10 page homework assignment into a PDF so you can type out the answers? Save the time and let Google OCR do it in one of the following 34 different languages:

Bulgarian
Catalan
Chinese (Simplified Han)
Croatian
Czech
Danish
Dutch
English
Filipino
Finnish
French
German
Greek
Hungarian
Indonesian
Italian
Japanese
Korean
Latvian
Lithuanian
Norwegian
Polish
Portuguese
Romanian
Russian
Serbian
Slovak
Slovenian
Spanish
Swedish
Thai
Turkish
Ukrainian
Vietnamese

To The Cloud with Google and Microsoft

Greg Baden — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 15:30:35 +0000

Have you have been working on a document with your colleagues, either across the room or across the world, and have had the hassle of sending updated documents back and forth to each other? It’s quite a pain to do and you don’t always get the correct file. Google and Microsoft have teamed up to help solve this problem by integrating the Microsoft Office Suite 2003, 2007 and 2010 with Google Docs.

The new plugin for Microsoft Office, dubbed Google Cloud Connect for Microsoft Office, is now available to everyone with a PC; sorry no Mac support right now. The only downside is that it’s not free, unless you’re already using Google Apps for Business. Otherwise, it will cost you $50 per user per year for the Google Apps for Business Service. Google is running a promotion for a “90-day Appsperience”, allowing you to have unlimited use of services like Google Docs, Sites and Cloud Connect. There’s a flat fee of $7,000 for organizations of 50 to 500 users and $15,000 for organizations with 500 or more users.

Here’s a short video of the new service:

Cloud Connect will allow you to automatically sync files between multiple people and have all of those people be editing the same document at the same time. If two people are working on the same section, the plugin will ask you which version you want to keep, instead of automatically overwriting it. Previous versions of the document are also easily accessible, so you can always roll back your changes.

What do you think?

Hide Those Gridlines in Google Spreadsheets

Greg Baden — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 12:00:13 +0000

Google Docs, a wonderful and free alternative to the Microsoft Office suite, isn’t perfect in terms of options, but it is well on its way. If you’ve used Excel in the past I’m sure you’re aware that you can make some simple changes to the viewing of gridlines. Well, Google Spreadsheets hasn’t offered this feature until just recently, making the Google Docs suite that much better to use. Such a simple feature can mean the difference in a spreadsheet.

To use the hide gridlines feature, just simple click on the View menu and select Hide gridlines and your spreadsheet will look instantly better.

Have any other Google Spreadsheet tips to share? Please use the comments form below.

Google Docs Viewer Adds Support to More File Formats

Greg Baden — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 15:00:50 +0000

If you’ve used Google or Gmail in the past I’m sure you’ve come across a PDF file that you’ve wanted to quickly view, rather than download. Google has been offering the quick view of PDF Files, Word Documents and PowerPoint’s for quite some time now, but now they are expanding those formats to support the 12 most requested formats.

Google is now supporting the following formats, in addition to the ones it already supports:

Microsoft Excel (.XLS and .XLSX)
Microsoft PowerPoint 2007 / 2010 (.PPTX)
Apple Pages (.PAGES)
Adobe Illustrator (.AI)
Adobe Photoshop (.PSD)
Autodesk AutoCad (.DXF)
Scalable Vector Graphics (.SVG)
PostScript (.EPS, .PS)
TrueType (.TTF)
XML Paper Specification (.XPS)

Just like PDFs, DOCs and others that Google has previously supported, these new file types can be easily viewed in Gmail, Google Search or Google Docs Viewer. This is something that many people have requested, including myself, for Google to add. It wouldn’t surprise me if Google adds additional support for more file formats in the future, possibly to cover all Microsoft applications and less popular file formats.

While the support for all of these files isn’t perfect, it is still a great way to get some quick information or even view PDF files on a computer which doesn’t have a PDF reader.

Ditch the Wedding Planner, Use Google Instead

Greg Baden — Fri, 11 Feb 2011 18:05:34 +0000

Planning for a wedding can be a long, painstaking progress for couples and their families. This process typically includes spending lots of money on wedding papers, books, and the sort. The wedding planning process has now been simplified by Google. Google has teamed up with New York’s world renowned wedding planner, Michelle Rago, to assist couples in their wedding planning process. Google’s new Weddings section includes a variety of resources needed for planning a wedding. No longer do you have to go to the book store and buy a wedding planning guide, you can just check out all of the sources Google and Rago have provided.

Some of the main features of Google Weddings include the ability to create your own wedding site, the use of Picnik to create wedding cards and plenty of Google docs with important wedding information. This isn’t really a whole new service for Google, but rather a collaboration of all of their services geared wedding planners. There are a lot of helpful documents and guides to help you along the wedding planning process, such as a budget planner, guest list, address book, seating chart and more.

To help promote the website, Google is giving away a $25,000 dream wedding designed by Michelle Rago for those having a wedding within the next year. Check out the website and enter the drawing if you plan on getting married or even engaged soon.