Online petition for an organic farm at the White House

In early September, Daniel Bowman Simon and Casey Gustowarow visited Google in their modified double-decker school bus. Their bus is really two buses fused together with an organic garden on the roof. (The picture above shows our very own Jen Mazzon holding a cauliflower in front of the bus).

Daniel and Casey are leading a petition-based initiative to request that the next president plant an organic farm on the grounds of the White House. Their visit to Google was one stop in their cross-country drive in the bus. At Google, they had lunch with employees, including a Google chef. Daniel and Casey recently arrived in Washington, D.C., just in time for election day.

Everywhere they've gone, from farmers markets to truck stops, they carry a physical petition with them. They've also created an online version of their petition using a Google Docs spreadsheet form. Daniel tells us that they've collected over 1,500 online signatures so far using this form. Check out their online petition and then let us know in the comments of this post if you've used forms for your own petition or cause.

Posted by: Andrew Chang, Marketing Manager

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Create and embed presentations in your LinkedIn profile

You're now able to embed a Google Docs presentation in your LinkedIn profile, allowing you to enhance your professional profile with text, images, and even videos.

For those of you unfamiliar with LinkedIn, it's the world's largest online professional network. LinkedIn allows you to create a profile that showcases your skills and talents, and helps you find and connect with your trusted contacts and share ideas and opportunities.

Who might benefit from an embedded presentation in their profile? Graphic designers and photographers can showcase examples of their work or even their entire portfolios. Musicians and media producers can display performances and videos using embedded YouTube videos in their slides. But these are just a few ideas.

Our LinkedIn application was built on OpenSocial, an open standard for building social applications across the web, which means that in the future, it will be easy to run this app on any site that supports OpenSocial.

Add our app in LinkedIn to display your own Google Docs presentation in your profile.

Posted by: Andrew Chang, Marketing Manager

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Interesting ways to use Docs in the Classroom

Tom Barrett is back again for a third guest post. This time, he offers practical tips for using Google Docs in class and asks for help adding more tips. The collaborative presentation he and other teachers are creating will be a great complement to all of the ideas and projects we collected from K-12 teachers in September. We're in the process of sorting through the many great submissions and will share them with everyone in the near future. And so, without further ado, here's Tom.

The mornings are becoming darker and the leaves are changing colour here in England, the Autumn school term is in full swing. We have been using Google Docs (as part of Apps Education Edition) with a new year group for 8 weeks and we are putting into action some of the many things we learned from last year's implementation.

Whilst in the previous two posts I have explored many of the broader themes that must underpin the way sharing online docs should be approached in the classroom, I am now knee deep in the practicalities of using Google Docs with our classes. This post will hopefully give you some practical ways to use the tool in the classroom, some inspiration as to where to start and some usage tips that will help it all run smoothly.

Over the last year I have begun two presentations that share practical tips in the use of Google Earth and the Interactive Whiteboard in the classroom. I have set the presentations up so that anyone with a practical tip can become a collaborator by sharing editing rights with them. In this way the presentation expands with the advice and tips from real users and from a much wider audience of educators. All you need to do is send me your email and I will be able to add you as a collaborator to the presentation, so you can add just 1 or even 10 tips for the use of Google Docs in the classroom. (See details at the end of the presentation)

The first five are my tips, in no particular order, to get the presentation started. It is currently called "[Insert #] interesting ways (and tips) to use Google Docs in the Classroom" - but I hope that you can find time to add your own and share your advice with Google Docs users so that the name changes! Or perhaps you would prefer to just use the presentation as part of your staff training - it is all licensed under Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial Share Alike 3.0. 

Posted by: Tom Barrett, Assistant Headteacher

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Featured gadget: Gantt charts in spreadsheets

Recently, the Google Docs team started working with Viewpath, a company dedicated to providing project management solutions. In keeping with this commitment, they recently added a Gantt chart gadget to the spreadsheets platform. Here on the Docs team, we're thrilled to have this top-notch external developer contributing their expertise, and adding value to Google Docs. To introduce this gadget, we're happy to have Dean Carlson here as guest blogger. Dean is CEO ofViewpath, and helped in the development of Docs' Gantt chart gadget.

One of the great things about Google Docs is the opportunity it offers developers to create and integrate their own products into the spreadsheets application as gadgets.

Here at Viewpath, we took this opportunity to create a Gantt chart gadget. For those of you not familiar, a Gantt chart is a bar chart that illustrates a project schedule, and can be invaluable in managing large initiatives.

Our Gantt chart gadget displays timelines based on data entered in your spreadsheet. You can enter a few numbers, representing the progress in different areas of a project. Quickly and easily, our gadget displays it graphically in an easy-to-read chart that refreshes automatically whenever you change the data on your spreadsheet.

One of the clear advantages of hosting this chart in a Google spreadsheet, instead of in a separate document, is that you no longer need to elect one person to keep track of and update the chart. Instead, everyone working on the team can access the spreadsheet, enter progress as it happens, and have that progress displayed instantly for all to see. They can even add tasks, being confident that everyone on the team will see the most recent plan.

At Viewpath, one of our goals is to make project management as seamless as possible. In keeping with this goal, we're thrilled to be able to create practical project management resources for Google Docs users.

For instructions on creating your own Gantt chart, check out the short video we created.



For more info on creating and integrating your own gadget using the Spreadsheets API, see "Getting Started with Spreadsheet Gadgets".

Posted by: Dean Carlson, Viewpath CEO

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Featured gadget: Gantt charts in spreadsheets

Recently, the Google Docs team started working with Viewpath, a company dedicated to providing project management solutions. In keeping with this commitment, they recently added a Gantt chart gadget to the spreadsheets platform. Here on the Docs team, we're thrilled to have this top-notch external developer contributing their expertise, and adding value to Google Docs. To introduce this gadget, we're happy to have Dean Carlson here as guest blogger. Dean is CEO of Viewpath, and helped in the development of Docs' Gantt chart gadget.

One of the great things about Google Docs is the opportunity it offers developers to create and integrate their own products into the spreadsheets application as gadgets.

Here at Viewpath, we took this opportunity to create a Gantt chart gadget. For those of you not familiar, a Gantt chart is a bar chart that illustrates a project schedule, and can be invaluable in managing large initiatives.

Our Gantt chart gadget displays timelines based on data entered in your spreadsheet. You can enter a few numbers, representing the progress in different areas of a project. Quickly and easily, our gadget displays it graphically in an easy-to-read chart that refreshes automatically whenever you change the data on your spreadsheet.

One of the clear advantages of hosting this chart in a Google spreadsheet, instead of in a separate document, is that you no longer need to elect one person to keep track of and update the chart. Instead, everyone working on the team can access the spreadsheet, enter progress as it happens, and have that progress displayed instantly for all to see. They can even add tasks, being confident that everyone on the team will see the most recent plan.

At Viewpath, one of our goals is to make project management as seamless as possible. In keeping with this goal, we're thrilled to be able to create practical project management resources for Google Docs users.

To get a sample project plan spreadsheet with an embedded Gantt chart, click .

For instructions on creating your own Gantt chart, check out the short video we created.

For more info on creating and integrating your own gadget using the Spreadsheets API, see "Getting Started with Spreadsheet Gadgets".

Posted by: Dean Carlson, Viewpath CEO

Adding footnotes to your documents

Last week, we added support for footnotes. You can find footnotes in the Insert menu. When you create a footnote, it'll appear to the right of the document margin and a footnote marker (#) will appear within the actual document. You can drag and drop footnotes anywhere you'd like by clicking on the pound sign and dragging it.

When you print or save as your document as a PDF, your footnotes will appear at the bottom of the page. You can see how your footnotes will appear when printed by selecting Print (Ctrl+P) or Download file as... PDF from the File menu. However, if you download your document as a Word, OpenOffice, RTF or HTML file, your footnotes will appear as endnotes, at the end of your document.

Update: Added a video that shows you how to insert footnotes.

Posted by: Andrew Chang, Marketing Manager

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Adding footnotes to your documents

Last week, we added support for footnotes. You can find footnotes in the Insert menu. When you create a footnote, it'll appear to the right of the document margin and footnote marker (#) will appear within the actual document. You can drag and drop footnotes anywhere you'd like by clicking on the pound sign and dragging it.

[Insert image of a footnote in the margin]

When you print or save as your document as a PDF, your footnotes will appear at the bottom of the page. You can see how your footnotes will appear when printed by selecting Print (Ctrl+P) or Download file as... PDF from the File menu. However, if you download your document as a Word, OpenOffice, RTF or HTML file, your footnotes will appear as endnotes, at the end of your document.

[Insert an image of a footnote at the bottom of a PDF]

Posted by: Andrew Chang, Marketing Manager

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