Formula highlighting in spreadsheets

In the new version of Google Spreadsheets, cell references and the corresponding cells are now highlighted to make it easier to keep track of your formulas.

Please note that this new feature is available in Chrome 4.0+, Safari 3.0+, and Microsoft Internet Explorer 7.0+. We plan to add support for Mozilla Firefox 3.7+ soon.

Let us know if you have more feedback and ideas for improvements.

Posted by: Ben McCann, Software Engineer

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Tips & Tricks: Comments in Google documents

In April, we launched a new version of Google documents. One feature that makes collaboration easier is improved commenting.

Connecting text to note
Comments let you make suggestions about the text in your document without modifying the document itself. When you click on a comment, the text it’s referring to is highlighted. And vice-versa -- when you select highlighted text in your document, we identify the associated comment.

Additionally, when you move highlighted text around within the document, the comments will follow the text and re-arrange to keep your annotations in order.

Comment on the sidelines
Comments live outside the margins of the editing space -- but are linked to text in the document. This means you can leave notes for others without cluttering the document.

We’ve also made it easier to hide comments in your document. You can show or hide all comments by checking or un-checking the Show comments menu item.

A detailed view of the comment box
Finally, we think the comment feature will give you flexibility to work with your notes in an intuitive and user-friendly way.

You can delete a comment by pressing the trash can icon above a comment. Or, you can respond to a comment by pressing the reply arrow, and it will show up just below the comment you’re responding to. You can hide a comment by marking the “X” button at the top of the comment.

Collaboration at the next level
The new version of Google documents is a built around collaboration, allowing you to work in real-time and to see what others are typing character by character. The new comment features makes it much easier to keep track of your ideas and notes while you work closely with others.

To try out improved commenting and other features, you’ll need to take the new preview version of Google documents for a test drive. You can opt-in by visiting the Editing tab in the Google Docs settings.

Posted by: Edgard Lindner, Software Engineer

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Faster finding and other document tweaks

Today we added a few features to the new version of the Google document editor.

Faster find
When you press Ctrl+F (⌘+F on Macs) you’ll see a drop-down box where you can type the word or phrase you’re looking for in your doc. As you type, all the matches in the doc will be highlighted and you can press to jump to the next match.

If you want more advanced find options or if you want to replace text, you can access the full Find and Replace dialog from the Edit menu.

Headings in the toolbar
We also added Paragraph Styles to the toolbar. This makes it much easier to quickly apply headings to things you’ve selected in your doc, or to change your selection to normal text.

Bookmarks in the link dialog
Finally, we added bookmarks to the link dialog. If you go into that dialog, you’ll see a list of all the bookmarks in your document and the snippet of text that’s near that bookmark.

Let us know if you have feedback on the forums.

Posted by: John Day Richter, Software Engineer

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Advanced sorting rules in spreadsheets

In the new version of Google spreadsheets, you can now sort a range of cells according to rules set for one column or across multiple columns. To sort your data, go to Tools > Sort... and then add your sorting rules. You should check Data has header row if your columns have titles and choose ascending or descending depending on how you want your data sorted. Click +Add another to add additional rules:

Let us know if you have more feedback and ideas for improvements.

Posted by: Michael Schidlowsky, Software Engineer

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New themes in Google forms

Today, I’m happy to announce that we’ve added 24 new themes to Google forms, which take advantage of the new Google Font API and images from iStockphoto. As a reminder, when you're editing a form, click the Theme button to find the right theme and apply it to your form.

I first got involved with themes at Google when I designed a few templates for the Google Page Creator launch in 2006. Since then, I’ve worked on a number of theme projects in my 20% time, as they presented a far different design challenge compared to my regular projects as a webmaster at Google. You can see my “Spring/Zen Branches” in a number of products.

When I learned about the Google Font API, I wanted to give it a test drive by creating some new Google forms themes. Forms seemed like a good place to start, since they have a pretty standard structure, which makes them fairly simple to style. Initially I was just playing around with different font combinations, but when we added in imagery from iStockPhoto, things really took off. For example it made sense to create a wedding theme using cake imagery and the script font Tangerine, or a digital theme using binary number imagery and the monospaced font Inconsolata. And what better way to present a stack of old books than a font like Crimson Text, which brings to mind classical serif fonts from print? I had a lot of fun combining imagery, colors and font styles to match each other, and I hope you have fun using these themes on your forms.

Posted by: Melissa Louie, Webmaster

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Dictionary, improved comments and more in the new documents

We’re working hard to bring features from the old document editor over to the new editor. Today we added a few more, so we wanted to summarize them here.

Dictionary
If you select a word in your doc, you can look up the definition for that word by going to Tools -> Define...

Special Characters
To insert characters that you can’t create with a regular keyboard, we also added a special characters dialog via Insert -> Special characters...

So if you’ve been dying to make a maze in the new word processor, then you’re in luck:

Metric Units
If you’ve set your language to English US your ruler will be set in inches. But now, all other locales see the ruler with metric units:

In the future, we’ll make this a preference that can be changed, no matter what language you’ve set for your account.

Comment Scrolling
One of the big pieces of feedback we heard is that the new documents didn’t handle long comments very well. If comments got too long, it became hard to tell which comments were associated with which text in the document.

Today we added automatic scrolling for comments, so whenever you click in a comment it will scroll so that it’s directly beside the associated text.

If you have feedback or ideas, let us know on the forums and product ideas page.

Posted by: Isabella Ip, Software Engineer

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Google drawings enhancements

Since we launched the new drawings editor, we’ve received lots of helpful feedback from you. Based on your comments, we’ve made some usability improvements to Google Docs drawings over the last week.

• Selecting shapes
• Press Alt (Option on Mac) and drag your mouse to select only those objects completely within the selection region (this is useful for selecting objects in a busy part of the diagram)
  


• Holding Shift while you drag now adds shapes to your current selection instead of creating a new selection
  




• Polyline improvements
• When you finish drawing a polyline by clicking on the end of the last segment, you remain in polyline mode so you can immediately draw another one. Hit Escape to return to selection mode.
• While drawing a polyline, press escape on your keyboard to cancel the last segment and return to selection mode
• Draw very small segments in a polyline more easily

• Word art
• Add word art directly from the insert menu
  
  

Let us know if you have more feedback and ideas for improvements.

Posted by: Chris Nokleberg, Software Engineer

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What’s different about the new Google Docs?

Editor’s Note: This post is more technical than most posts on the Google Docs blog.

A month ago we introduced the latest version of the Google document editor. The new editor comes with features like a ruler, tabs stops, and floating images. Those features might seem pretty basic, but they’re nearly impossible to support in a regular online text editor. This post unwraps some of the core technical changes with the new editor to make this new functionality possible.

The old Google documents

As background, most online text editors (including the old Google documents) use an editable HTML element, which means the application tells the browser to make a certain string of text editable, and the browser takes care of letting the user edit that text. So when you type in the old Google document editor, the browser inserts the characters you type into the page’s HTML. Likewise, when you bold a word, the browser changes the HTML so that the word displays as bold.

Relying on the browser like this has several advantages:

1. Easy implementation -- Browsers know when a user triple clicks, they want to select an entire paragraph. The application doesn’t need to think about these basic text behaviors.


2. Easy to make it fast -- The browser (not the app) handles the most computationally intensive task: text layout. Since layout is a core component of browser functionality, you can trust that layout performance has already been heavily optimized.

But using the browser’s native text editing means less control over how the document behaves: if one browser has a bug in its list behavior, people using that browser will have trouble working with lists in Google Docs and we won’t be able to fix the behavior for them. It also means we can support only the least common denominator of features: if inserting tabs works in some browsers but not others, we can’t really support it because the doc won’t look right if you open it in a browser that doesn’t understand tabs.

The new Google documents

To get around these problems, the new Google document editor doesn’t use the browser to handle editable text. We wrote a brand new editing surface and layout engine, entirely in JavaScript.

A new editing surface

Let’s start by talking about the editing surface, which processes all user input and makes the application feel like a regular editor. To you, the new editor looks like a fairly normal text box. But from the browser’s perspective, it’s a webpage with JavaScript that responds to any user action by dynamically changing what to display on each line. For example, the cursor you see is actually a thin, 2 pixel-wide div element that we manually place on the screen. When you click somewhere, we find the x and y coordinates of your click and draw the cursor at that position. This lets us do basic things like slanting the cursor for italicized text, and it also allows more powerful capabilities like showing multiple collaborators’ cursors simultaneously, in the same document.

Multiple users editing in the same paragraph

A new layout engine

By far the most difficult thing the editor does is figure out where to draw text. For this, we built a new layout engine. Here’s an example of how the new engine works: say you type the letter ‘a’. We notice you pressed the ‘a’ key and respond by drawing a single ‘a’ off-screen. We then measure the width and height of that ‘a’, combine those measurements with the x and y position of your cursor, and place the ‘a’ at the correct spot on the screen. If you’re in the middle of a word, we push the characters after your cursor over. If you’re at the end of a line, the editor moves your word to the next line and pushes any overflow to the lines after it.

Tab stops and other basic features are impossible to support if you’re using the browser’s HTML layout engine for your text. That’s why we wrote our own engine: once we tell our layout engine how to draw a feature, we don’t have to worry about which features browsers support.

The formatting in this basic menu couldn’t be supported without writing a new layout engine

Improved collaboration

What I’ve just described is pretty standard architecture for a desktop word processor. But the new Google Docs isn’t just an online version of existing desktop software: it’s designed specifically for character-by-character real time collaboration. That kind of collaboration is only possible because we built the editor around a technology called operational transformation. It’s what lets multiple people edit the same area of a document at the same time without needing to wait for the server to say a particular edit is okay.

Building an extensible, fully collaborative online word processor required rewriting every part of the document editor from scratch. We’re still adding more features and polish before turning it on for everyone, but for an early peek, you can opt-in by visiting the Editing tab in the Google Docs settings.

Posted by: Jeff Harris, Product Manager, Google Docs

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Rapid wireframe sketching in Google Docs

Guest post: Morten Just is a product manager in Vodafone. Based in Copenhagen, Denmark, he spent most of his career as an interaction designer churning out wireframes and diagrams, and also co-founded Imity, a Bluetooth-enabled social network for mobile phones in 2006. On his personal blog he writes mostly about user experience.

When I saw Google drawings on a Twitter update a few weeks ago, I didn't really think about it until I got a feeling I might not have understood a rather complex problem at work. I drew a diagram and asked my colleague to edit it in case I had misunderstood him. It worked out well, we're still using the drawing as a basis for discussion, and it is constantly being refined as we go along. So taking the next step and trying out a wireframe was an obvious decision.

For quite a while I’ve been wanting a simple and fast way to burst out interface ideas, and then quickly share them with my colleagues in Düsseldorf and London. Since a relatively large portion of a wireframe looks like something I’ve sketched out before, I figured modifying a template like a list view or a landing page would speed things up.

In fact, I wanted to speed it up to the point where I all I had to do was to add a few words before I had a wireframe.

From the templates I extracted the scroll bars, buttons, and sliders and put them in the gutter outside the drawing’s canvas, ready to be duplicated and dragged onto the wireframe.

Here's a generic page displaying product details:


... and a typical mobile phone drill-down of items in groups:


To begin working on a wireframe

1. Open the template you want to use
2. Click 'Sign in' in the upper right
3. Choose file > make a copy
4. Make your wireframe

Packing it up

When you have several individual wireframes it can be a neat thing to pack them all up into one single document that you can send around, have people print out, or even present in meetings.

Since there’s no way to import a drawing into a presentation yet, here’s a trick using the web clipboard feature. You'll still be able to edit the imported drawing should you need to.

1. Go to File > New Presentation. A blank presentation opens in a new window.
2. Switch back to your drawing and select everything.
3. Click the web clipboard icon > Copy to web clipboard
4. Switch back to your presentation and paste your drawing using the web clipboard.

Building the library

I'd love for this to be the beginning of a shared wireframe template repository in Google Docs. For now, I've shared a folder in which I'll add user contributed templates and stencils. Get in touch if you want to contribute.

I hope you'll enjoy the templates and that it will help you actually sketch out your ideas rather than just describe them in words. As Dan Roam said in his keynote at this year’s IA Summit, “The person who draws the picture wins."

Links

• All wireframe templates
• Morten Just's blog and his Twitter account

Posted by: Morten Just, mortenjust.com

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Answering your FAQs about the New Google Docs

We’ve been excited by how many of you have chosen to try the new Google documents, spreadsheets and drawings editors over the last month. We’ve received a lot of great questions in our forums, in blog comments, on the ideas page, and through webinars.

In fact, at a webinar two weeks ago hosted by members of the Google Docs team (watch the video), we ran out of time before we could answer all the great questions people had. A lot of the questions echoed ones we’ve seen from many of you, so we wanted to post those questions -- and the answers to them -- online for everyone.

Check out a couple of answers below, or see the full list in the Google Docs Help Center.

Q: ­Do all the features work with IE8?

Almost. Google documents, spreadsheets, and presentations should work in IE8. If you’d like to use the full Google drawings tool in Internet Explorer, you can install Google Chrome Frame. The embedded drawings editor (i.e. ‘Insert > Drawing’) in documents, spreadsheets and presentations works in IE7 and IE8.

Learn more about the system requirements for Google Docs in the Help Center.

Q: Where is the web clipboard in the new docs editor?

We released the documents editor as a preview so we could get your feedback early in our development process. As you can tell, there are still some features, like the web clipboard, which aren’t yet ready in the new version. The web clipboard will definitely be available before we take the new editor out of preview.

Q: When will gadgets work with the new version of Google spreadsheets?

Very soon! This has been one of the most common pieces of feedback from users, and it’s high on our list of priorities.

Want more Q&A? Check out the full list of questions. Have a question that’s still not answered? Visit the Google Docs Help Forum.

Posted by: Ben Softness, Google Docs Operations Strategist

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Copy sheets from one spreadsheet to another

A few weeks ago we introduced a new version of the spreadsheet editor in Google Docs.

Today, we’re adding the ability to copy a sheet from one spreadsheet to another in the new version. To start, simply click on the sheet tab at the bottom of the page and select “Copy to...”.



You’ll see a pop-up dialog box where you can search for the destination spreadsheet. You can choose any spreadsheet you own or have editing access to:

Once you’ve selected a spreadsheet, you can open it to find that the sheet has been copied.

To give the new spreadsheet editor a try, click the New version link in the top right corner of any spreadsheet. There’s more info about this feature in the help center and let us know what you think in the forums.

Posted by: Josh Danziger, Software Engineer

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