Using Google Docs as a data mashup platform

Guest post: Tony Hirst is a lecturer in the Department of Communication and Systems at the UK's Open University, co-founder of document discussion platform WriteToReply.org and member of the JISC's DevCSI Developer Focus Group. An aspiring "mashup artist", he blogs regularly at OUseful.info.For several years, I have been exploring various ways of using online applications to grab and display data from around the web and represent it in a visual form....

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Google Docs: the tool for the 21st century classroom

Guest post: Tara Seale teaches 9th grade English in the Bryant Public School District and recently attended the Google Teacher Academy. English teachers polled in the last decade of the last century about the one tool that they could not live without in their classrooms would probably select the overhead projector. In the first decade of the 21st Century, English teachers would probably choose a document camera, but in future decades, the tool will...

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A web clipboard for Google Docs

We want copying and pasting content within Google Docs to just work. So, today we’re launching a new web clipboard that improves copy and paste in Google Docs. This new clipboard temporarily stores items you’ve copied in the cloud, then allows you to paste them with proper formatting into other Google Docs.Say you work for a cheese company and you've created a table in a Google spreadsheet summarizing cheese sales. You want to present the results...

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Simple wedding planning with Google Docs

Cross posted on the Official Google BlogWe all want important life moments — like graduating from school, getting married or having your first baby — to be perfect. For many couples, your wedding is a chance to celebrate with everyone you care about; it's also the largest, most complicated party you'll ever host. From tracking guest RSVPs, to picking the right florist, DJ and caterer, to coordinating every last detail with your wedding party, it's...

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Save safely with new saving buttons

Many of you have told us you'd like consistent and intuitive features across all the Google Docs editors, so today, we’re happy to launch a couple of improvements to the way saving works in all of Google Docs.Now it's much easier to tell, at a glance, when documents need to be saved, when documents are busy saving, and when documents have been saved into the cloud:A clickable save button means your document has edits which haven't been saved yet...

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Free e-commerce catalogs managed with Google Docs

Guest post: Dan Salcedo is founder of the DC based international development organization OpenEntry, with the mission of helping small and medium enterprises (SMEs) worldwide benefit from the exciting new opportunities opened up by global e-commerce. Working with a team of volunteer developers, he built a catalog generator that enables SMEs in developing countries to create their own free e-commerce catalogs, managed via a Google spreadsheet.Years...

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