Solve feature lets you solve optimization problems

Today we've added optimization capabilities to spreadsheets. Try out the Solve feature at Tools > Solve... It's useful for problems where you'd like to maximize (or minimize) a certain value.Let's say you want to buy a new house. You know that you can afford $2,000/month, and you want to determine how much house you can afford. Just create a spreadsheet with your formulas (in this case, using the equation =B1*SUM(B2:B3)/12 in Sheet1!B4).You'll...

Read More

Take Docs to Work

Collecting information from coworkers is something that many of us do every day. Whether you're chasing after sales figures, budget projections, product feedback or TPS reports, the basic business of requesting, collecting, and processing information is, well, a basic part of business.Here at Google, we use spreadsheet forms for employee surveys, volunteer lists, product feedback and managing events like team offsites. Forms chase information so that we don't have to. Send a form with simple, straightforward questions via email -- and behind the...

Read More

Creating and giving presentations has gotten easier

If you haven't created a presentation in Google Docs in a while, you should consider trying out these recent enhancements:Multi-shape formatting allows you select multiple shapes and/or text boxes, and format them all at once. To select multiple objects, hold down the Shift key while you click each object, or drag over all of the objects that you'd like to select. You can then change the fill color, line color, border weight, font size, etc.Manipulation...

Read More

New Google Web Elements for Spreadsheets and Presentations

We conclude our Spotlight on Developers series with a look at Google Web Elements for spreadsheets and presentations.At Google I/O, the concept of "copy/paste development" was introduced in the form of Google Web Elements. For Google spreadsheets and presentations, these web elements offer a quick way to get a snippet of code that allows you to embed your document anywhere on the web.First you'll need to publish your spreadsheet, then you can go to the Spreadsheets Elements page to enter in the published URL, the size of the element you'd like...

Read More

For Developers: Two New Spreadsheet Data APIs

We continue our Spotlight on Developers series with this Data API announcement.At Google I/O last week, we unveiled two new Data APIs for spreadsheets to a very excited audience. The two new Data APIs, the Tables and Records feeds, provide a structured record-based table for storing and updating tabular data in a spreadsheet. Tables can be placed anywhere on the sheet, with multiple tables per sheet and column-based meta-data for each column in the...

Read More

The file formats keep on coming! Announcing .xlsx and .docx support

I still remember the first time I was introduced to Google Docs by a friend. I had one of those "aha" moments. Here was a product where I could easily share documents with people all over the world, and never have to worry about overlapping revisions or heavy email attachments. And with everything stored online, it meant that I didn't have to always carry around my computer or back up my files.Aha.Well, it didn't take long for me to start telling...

Read More