Posted by: Garnet GrattonGarnet Gratton is an educator with experience teaching university-level literature and writing courses. She has also taught high school, 9th through 12th grades, in both public and private settings. Now, she teaches and consults other educators through her @edu blog, which is where we first encountered her story. Ever since I discovered Google Docs' forms, I must confess that I’m obsessed. I spend an inordinate amount of...
Friday, 30 May 2008
Thursday, 29 May 2008
Posted by: Meredith Whittaker, Program ManagerIdling online the other day, I came across a presentation on the Piraeus Lion, created and posted on P-E Fronning's Martin Klasch blog.The topic is interesting, but I was particularly impressed with the way that P-E used the embedded presentation to communicate a large amount of content in short and manageable pieces. Says P-E, "I've been familiar with the Piraeus Lion, and its history, for awhile. After reading a Wikipedia article on the subject, I thought it might be interesting to others. A fellow...
Wednesday, 28 May 2008
Posted by: Aliza Sherman, author, speaker, TV and radio producerIn my last post, I talked about using Google Docs for long-term collaboration. But what about quick collaboration for one or two documents? Keeping track of them is not the issue, but I've found plenty of reasons to use Docs for quick collaboration.Recently, someone asked me to review a press release for their nonprofit organization. Since I like to do pro-bono work for good causes, I was happy to do it and simply uploaded it to Docs, made my edits, then pointed her to it. Voila! Done.Also...
Friday, 23 May 2008
Posted by: Jonathan Rochelle, Product ManagerWe've heard plenty of great stories about how people are using the Forms feature of Google Docs and how it has really helped them collect information from friends, family, customers, employees and website or blog visitors. But (there's always a "but"), we've also heard some stories about how people have been confused when trying to re-arrange questions or otherwise change the spreadsheet underlying the form. Yes, we're actively fixing these issues, but in the mean time, here's a guide to getting along...
Thursday, 22 May 2008
Posted by: Meredith Whittaker, Program Manager From one of your fellow Docs users, here's a well-made and thorough video covering every part of creating a spreadsheets form. The step-by-step instructions are a good way to get started making forms, and they also inform anyone who wants to help others in creating and distributing a form -- but doesn't want to provide tech support while the others figure it out :)Note that while this video refers to creating a contact form, you can, of course, create surveys, questionnaires, order sheets, and many...
Wednesday, 21 May 2008
Posted by: Aliza Sherman, author, speaker, TV and radio producerLast time I discussed how Google Docs helped me as I migrated documents from my old computer to my shiny new one. This time I'll talk about using Google Docs for long-term collaboration.As I prepared the manuscripts for my upcoming podcast, I started sharing them with my producer on Basecamp. She obliged me and checked them out, but commented that the “writeboard” or whiteboard collaboration feature wasn’t up to snuff because it required its own markup language.“Try Google Docs,” she...
Tuesday, 20 May 2008
Posted by: Stephen Rahn, Information Technology Specialist at Kennesaw State University, currently teaching and working on a Ph.D in Instructional TechnologyWe've been using Google Docs for some time. The fact that it's free helps our rural school district save money that would otherwise be spent on more expensive productivity suites. We've found, especially, that the sharing capabilities have helped facilitate research and collaboration in our school's science classes. Currently, our students are using Google Spreadsheets to enter data collected...
Monday, 19 May 2008
Posted by: Meredith Whittaker, Program ManagerChris Pirillo, Gnomedex Conference founder, CNN.com Live technology contributor, and one of our regular guest bloggers, uploaded a new video recently, giving an overview of using Docs on the iPhone (one of my favorite features :) Check it out, below, and check out the accompanying post on his blog. ...
Friday, 16 May 2008
Posted by: Meredith Whittaker, Program ManagerI'm running late for work, the trains are packed. I arrive at the office a little winded, set down my coffee and open my laptop. Hello? Laptop? Try that again: close and open my laptop. No go. Shoot. I manually restart, plug and unplug; I change power outlets and restart again. Nothing.And so it is, 20 minutes later I'm at the tech stop (our IT department), my laptop declared dead on arrival."How long will it take to get me a new machine?" I ask."That depends," Fernando, one of our IT gurus responds....
Thursday, 15 May 2008
Posted by: Aliza Sherman, author, speaker, TV and radio producerIn my previous post, I talked about finally turning to Google Docs to save my bacon while working on a major client job with multiple players, several simultaneous projects and too many versions of spreadsheets and documents flying around in email. After working with Google Docs for the remainder of the project, I didn't use it again for a while, at least not with my clients. Then I hit another document crisis moment. I was trying to figure out the most efficient way to transfer...
Wednesday, 14 May 2008
Posted by: Andrew Chang, Marketing ManagerSince we launched spreadsheet forms in January, one of the top user questions has been "How can I embed my form into a website or blog?" Last night, we added this option. You'll see this new feature during form creation, when you're prompted to invite people to fill out your form. Just skip the invitation step and look for "Embed" in the upper right-hand corner of the page. Paste the code provided into your...
Tuesday, 13 May 2008
Posted by: Meredith Whittaker, Program ManagerBrian Crosby and Lisa Parisi came to my attention when I stumbled across a video they'd made, showing their students collaborating on short stories using Skype and Google Docs. Over the course of some weeks, we worked together on a post describing the details of their project. The Harris Burdick Collaborative Writing Project began because the teachers and educational professionals involved have become part of a network through their blogs, Twitter, Skype and other web applications. Brian Crosby...
Monday, 12 May 2008
Posted by: Regina Dinneen, Docs User Operations (aka Google Docs Guide 2) If you haven't been following along in the user group, you may have missed the new spreadsheet function documentation that we released a few months ago. Due to frequent requests for help finding and understanding the hundreds of functions available, our own Melissa Louie created Version 1 of the function helper:We're now working on the next version of the documentation....
Friday, 9 May 2008
Posted by: Aliza Sherman, author, speaker, TV and radio producerAliza Sherman first wrote a version of these posts in a shorter item for Web Worker Daily, entitled Learning to Love Google Docs. She's generously expanded the ideas in that post for us here, and included tips and tricks for those of you attempting to incorporate Google Docs into your lives. Here's the first of a 5 part series we're calling Aliza's chronicles. I’ve said it before and I'll say it again: I am a devoted Gmail user. I'm also a big Google fan but must confess that...
Wednesday, 7 May 2008
Posted by: Meredith Whittaker, Program ManagerI'll make this quick, but I have to share. The Google Docs team recently returned from a team-building offsite at Seascape Resort just south of Santa Cruz, CA (hint: many very cool things coming!). After a long day of hiking, eating and thinking big about the future of Docs, we gathered around fire pits on the beach -- drinking hot cocoa, making s'mores, and enjoying the full moon. Ben Margolin, one of...
Tuesday, 6 May 2008
Posted by: Meredith Whittaker, Program Manager and Andrew Chang, Marketing Manager Happy National Teacher Day! To celebrate, we have some inspiration, and some instruction. Awhile back you may remember that we asked teachers to share their stories about using Google Docs. And did you ever. We were humbled by the exceptional creativity that you expressed to us. Reading through these submissions, we realized that we had to share these ideas, and the along with them the evident passion for teaching. For anyone...
Monday, 5 May 2008
Posted by: Andrew Perelson and Jeff Grimes, Google Docs Software EngineersEmbedded presentations now come in multiple sizes (small, medium, and large) to suit all your embedding needs. Small or medium sizes work best in blogs, while large is most suitable for onscreen viewing and reading.And as a bonus, we've just added another new feature to presentations: you can now select and manipulate multiple objects at once. Drag over the objects you want...
Thursday, 1 May 2008
Posted by: Joelle Fornengo, User Operations TeamIf you've ever wished that you could add your own personal style to your documents, wish no more. We've recently enabled custom styles through an 'Edit CSS' function, so that you can apply your unique styles to your documents. Some of you might be wondering what CSS is and how it can help spruce up your documents. CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets. In essence, CSS is a type of style sheet markup...
Posted by: Gill, wildlife enthusiast We're thrilled to have Gill as a guest blogger. Through the evolution of Google Docs, she has been one of the most courteous and helpful members of the Google Docs Help Group, assisting users with all manner of questions. I use Google docs mainly to keep track of the records I keep for the local wildlife group. I try and make a note of anything interesting that I see out and about every day (like this...
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