Holiday themes and templates in Google Docs

The Google Docs team is celebrating the holiday season with holiday themes in Google forms and holiday templates in the Google Docs template gallery.

Whether you are planning a recipe swap, family potluck, ski trip, a charity trip or need a party RSVP form, the new holiday themes in forms can make this season a little brighter. To try out the holiday themes, create a form and the click "Theme: theme name" to see all the themes that are available.


There are also a lot of great holiday templates available in the Google Docs template gallery. Templates include holiday shopping lists, holiday newsletters, party invitations, RSVP forms and much more.

Not sure where to start? We'll be highlighting some of our favorite holiday templates over the next week, so stay tuned.

Posted by: Eric Bogs and Bob Rose, Software Engineers, Google Docs

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Co-editor presence for Google Docs presentation slides and elements

Most of you know that when you co-edit a Google Docs spreadsheet, you can see the cells other people are editing. That presence information helps you simultaneously edit without stepping on each others' toes.

Today, we launched real time presence to Google Docs presentations as well. Now, when editing a presentation with a co-editor, you can see which slides he is editing, and if he is editing the same slide, then you can see which element -- text box, shape, image, video, etc -- he is editing.

Happy collaborating, and we'd love your feedback on our forum and ideas page.

Posted by: Roshni Malani, Software Engineer

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Google Docs viewer Chrome extension

The Google Chrome team launched beta support for extensions on Tuesday. We didn't want to miss the extension party, so we created a Google Docs extension. The Google Docs PDF/Powerpoint Viewer makes it easy to preview PDFs, Powerpoint presentations, and other documents you find across the web in the Google Docs viewer, instead of downloading them.

Let us know how you like the extension and what you like to see us add by posting a review on our extension's page.

Note that extensions are currently available only for the beta channel of Google Chrome for Windows and Linux.

Happy viewing!

Posted by: Wes Carr and Jesse Kinkead, Software Engineers, Google Docs

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Sharing emails get a facelift

Starting today, more colorful emails might be waiting in your friends' and colleagues' inboxes if you've shared Google documents with them. Check out the difference:

Old Email
New Email
In addition to the visual update, the new emails showcase your custom message rather than placing it at the bottom. Your buddy won't miss that important note about your shared document being a work of fiction (sound familiar?), because it's now prominently featured.

No more hunting for links either, just click the header:

Or, if multiple docs are shared, peruse a simple list:

The email's color and icon indicate the type of document at-a-glance:

Spreadsheets
Presentations
We know you're mighty busy, so we're always looking for ways to make Google Docs quicker and easier to use and share. Let us know what you think on the forums.

Posted by: Vance Vagell, User Interface Software Engineer

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Sort by relevance, export all and more

Over the next few days, we will be enabling several new features in your Docs list.

Sort by relevance

The first is the addition of relevance ranking in your Docs list search results. Until now, anytime you searched for a document, the results were sorted by "last modified date".

Now, your search results will display the items most relevant to your search at the top of the list. We also added a new menu on the right side of the toolbar, which lets you decide whether you'd like to sort your Docs list by "Relevance," "Starred" or "Last Modified".

This improvement to search within Docs also includes automatic stemming and synonyms. So if you search for "check account", we'll also include results for a few variations of those words, including "checking account" (which is what you probably meant to type). Or if you search for "mac book", we'll also include results for "macbook".

Export all your files

There's also more good news from the Data Liberation Front. A few weeks ago we launched the new "Export..." functionality. Today, we added an "Export all" option, which lets you export all your docs (up to 2GB at a time) with one click. This is the equivalent of almost 100,000 Google Docs.


You can also export a single file and email it to anyone you'd like in a single step. Once you select an item, click "Share" and select "Email as attachment...". Then pick which format (PDF, MS Office, etc.) you want to use to send the item, compose your email, and hit send.


Sunsetting Email-In Your Documents and Files

Lastly, a change that we aren't excited about. We're removing the existing "email-in" feature. As you may know, it's been a bit buggy recently and only supports a small subset of document types compared to the Docs list. In order to address this, we'll be taking down the feature and working on a bringing it back in the future with more functionality and better integration.

In the meantime, you can use the multi-file upload in your Docs list or the GData API to programatically upload docs. You can also take attachments from GMail and open them in Google Docs.

If you have any questions, please let us know over on the forum.

Posted by: Vijay Bangaru, Product Manager, Google Docs

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Change owner in a Google spreadsheet

A month ago, we standardized the look and feel of the Google Docs editors. Consistency across all the editors remains an important goal, which is why we are happy to report that you can now change the owner of a Google spreadsheet. This feature was already available in documents and presentations.

Changing the owner of a document is helpful if you are working in a group and the owner of the document leaves your group or no longer needs to work on that document.

Do you have ideas on how to improve Google Docs spreadsheets? Submit your idea on the Google Docs product ideas page.

Posted by: LB Lincoln and Josh Danziger, Software Engineers, Google Docs

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Now even easier: use Google Docs & Checkout to sell online

As you may recall, the Google Checkout store gadget, available in Google Labs, allows you to create an online store with inventory managed from a Google spreadsheet and payments accepted through Google Checkout. Today, using Google Docs and Checkout to sell online became easier with the introduction of a new store gadget wizard.

Interesting in learning more about the store gadget wizard? Check out the post on the Google Checkout Blog.

Posted by: Mike Giardina, Strategist, Google Checkout

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