Spruce up your surveys: 70 colorful themes

We've just launched 70 themes for forms so you can add a little (or a lot of) color to your surveys and questionnaires. Some themes are basic colors schemes (like Blue, Espresso, or Rose) and others are fancier designs (like Picnic, Zen Spring, and Dusk).

How do you choose a theme? When you're editing a form, click the Theme button to find the right theme and apply it to your form. One caveat: These themes will be visible to your respondents when they fill out the form online, not within email (like Gmail).

Try them out and let us know what you think.

Posted by: Andrew Chang, Marketing Manager

Update: Replaced an extra open paren with a comma and corrected the image. Oops.

Read More

Sheet protection gives you finer control of your spreadsheets

When working on a spreadsheet together with others, sometimes it's handy to allow some people to modify specific sheets but restrict them from modifying other sheets.

Today we've added sheet protection - an additional layer of control over who can edit individual sheets, using the list of people invited as collaborators. Just go to the sheet, bring up the menu, and choose Protect sheet.


Say I'm throwing a party (a wild one, of course) and I've invited my friends Frank, Ian, Kev and Veronica to a spreadsheet to help with planning. I know for sure Ian and Kev have good taste in music so I'll let them select some choice tunes... but Frank should probably just stick to bringing chips and salsa. Here's how I set up protection for the sheet titled Music playlist:


Easy as that. Ian and Kev will be able to modify the sheet all they like, while Frank and Veronica will see the sheet but won't be able to make changes. (Later, if Veronica promises to leave her enormous ABBA collection at home, maybe I'll let her edit it too.)

Sheet protection is a great way to add a little fine control over the contents of your spreadsheets. We hope you find it as useful as we have.

Posted by: Joseph Wain, User Experience Designer

Read More

View PowerPoint attachments in Gmail and upload them to Google Docs

If you're an active Gmail user, you probably know that you can open Microsoft Word and Excel attachments from within Gmail and import them to Google Docs. Gmail also provided a basic View as slideshow option for PowerPoint attachments.

Today we're improving this feature by making it easier for you to upload presentations from Gmail and edit them in Google Docs. When you receive a PowerPoint attachment, simply click the View option to open and preview the presentation in a new online viewer, powered by Google Docs. If you'd like to save the presentation to Google Docs, just click Edit Online and it'll be imported into Google Docs.

To read more about this new viewer, check out the Gmail blog.

Posted by: Stephen Drennan, Google Docs Consumer Operations

Read More

For Beginners: 3 Getting Started Guides

My friend Chrystina is an Operations Coordinator at a small software company in Sunnyvale, CA. A few days ago, she told me that she just started using Google Docs. As a beginner, she was trying to figure out how to collaborate with her coworkers and access her docs from both home and work. She's very busy, so she asked me if we had some guides that would give her the basics of how to get started using Google Docs.

The timing of our conversation couldn't have been more perfect. We recently finished Getting Started Guides for spreadsheets, documents, and presentations -- because using a product for the first time can sometimes be challenging.

These three guides cover the basics about Google Docs and have tidbits of information on features you may not know too much about. If you already use Google Docs spreadsheets, but aren't so familiar with presentations, you can read this guide to learn, for example, how to embed an online presentation in your blog.

Don't forget to send these links along to your family, friends, and coworkers who may want to get started with Google Docs.

After you're finished reviewing the guides, check our Help Center for more information. And if you have questions or want to share your suggestions and comments, visit our Help Forum.

Posted by: Estela Arbuco, Docs Online Editor

Read More