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 quickly see that you can buy a house worth $320,000.

Check out this more complex profit maximization example that's documented in this help center article. This example shows how the Solve feature could help a farmer who is trying to determine how much of three different crops to plant given his land, fertilizer, and budget constraints.

For those of you who are familiar with optimization functions in spreadsheets, note that we only support linear equations in the constraints and in the cell you want to optimize.

Still, the Solve feature is a great way to solve a multitude of everyday problems without hurting your head too much. We hope you find it useful.

Posted by: Ben McCann, Software Engineer

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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 scenes, your form busily updates your online spreadsheet with responses in real-time.

If you're already a convert to forms and were struggling to explain how they work to your co-workers, check out this short video we've created and then pass it along:



Posted by: Jason Cook, Product Marketing Manager

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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 of text boxes got easier in some more ways, too. Text boxes now grow in size as you type and you can now vertically align the text within multiple boxes using a new Text Vertical Alignment button in the toolbar:

When you are giving live presentations, you now can better navigate to specific slides within your presentation. Click the Start Presentation button to launch into presentation mode. Then look for a toolbar at the bottom of the window. At any time, you can immediately jump to a different slide.

We love feedback, so visit our Help Forum to share your feedback on these and other features.

Posted by: Jen Mazzon, Product Manager

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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 and the range of data you are interested in displaying, and "voila!", the snippet is there for you to copy and paste into any webpage. Here's an example spreadsheet:

You can do this with published presentations as well. After you publish your presentation, you can go to the Presentations Elements page to enter the published URL and the size of the element you'd like. Get the snippet of code and paste in into any webpage.

While you're on the Google Web Elements page, be sure to check out the other Google products that you can embed into your website.

Posted by: Ronald Ho, Product Manager, Google Docs

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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 table. The Records feed is a feed of rows within a table, which we are calling records, with stable IDs (moving the rows around will maintain the same row ID).

The APIs allow for creating, reading, updating and deleting records and tables in a spreadsheet. We've also improved the permissioning so that we use the same simple permissions as those given through the Share menu in a spreadsheet. Here's a simple Java demo showing the Tables and Records feed in action.

One exciting and simple example of the Tables and Records feed is through an online store that's powered by Google Checkout and has inventory managed and stored in a spreadsheet.

A feed of the products for sale is parsed and rendered by the Google Checkout store gadget to display a store. The Tables and Records feeds are used to communicate between the store and the sheet and the full text search is also implemented through the records feed.

Learn more about building these mashups in this tutorial.

Posted by: Radhika Lakshmanan, Software Engineer

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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 everyone I knew (and even some people I didn't!) about my experience with Docs. But there was one recurring question from my friends - how do I get my Word and Excel 2007 documents into the cloud?

Today, I'm happy to be able to answer their question: we've added .docx and .xlsx to the list of file formats that we accept for uploading documents (which already included .doc, .odt, xls, .ods, .ppt, .csv, .html, .txt, .rtf, and others).

To import a .docx or .xlsx file, simply click the "Upload" button in your Docs List menu, select your file, and voila! We'll upload and convert your document for use in Google Docs. This is a another great benefit of Google Docs - you don't have to worry about what format the file is in. Just upload it and we'll figure it out for you.

And if you have lots of files and would prefer to upload them all at once, then be sure to check out the Google Documents List API.

Posted by: Anil Sabharwal, Product Manager, Google Apps

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Spotlight on Developers: Gadgets to Visualize Data in New Ways

Continuing our Spotlight on Developers series, we present a few gadgets that give you new and exciting ways to visualize your data.

Our spreadsheet gadgets API is all about giving developers the power to extend the functionality of Google Docs spreadsheets. The following four spreadsheet gadgets display information in unique ways.

1. Tree Map Gadget (By Yaar Schnitman, former Technology Program Manager intern) - A color-coded area diagram that helps you understand complicated hierarchical data at a glance. Required columns: one or more text columns describing a hierarchy of items, and a single numeric column describing the weight of each item. Optional: supply one additional numeric column to create a heat map. Check out this visualization of the 2008 U.S. budget.

2. Advanced Word Cloud Gadget (by Seth Glickman, former Web Development Intern) - Word clouds are a great way to visualize the popularity of words from large amounts of text, say for example a feedback form, where the more often used words appear in a larger font. With this advanced world cloud gadget, you can customize your word cloud by choosing the color, excluding words of your choosing (like "or" and "the"), and best of all, turn each tag into a link with an easy-to-use search string. Check out a word cloud for Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.

3. Spider Chart Gadget (by Greg Marra, former Software Engineering Intern) - With spider charts you can visually compare the values of multiple attributes. In this example, the handling, acceleration, top speed, firepower and armor of a race car is compared to a tank.

4. QR Code Gadget (by Greg Schechter, former Software Engineering Intern) - Use this gadget to quickly encode data into the QR code format from a Google Docs spreadsheet so that it can be scanned and read by mobile devices that have a QR code reader. An easy way to send web addresses, phone numbers and notes. Try out the QR code gadget.

There are two ways to get started using these gadgets. First, you can use the templates above since they already have the gadget inserted within the spreadsheet. Or you can add these gadgets to your own spreadsheet by creating a new spreadsheet and using Insert > Gadgets. There you can check out all of the gadgets that are available.

Posted by: Ronald Ho, Product Manager, Google Docs

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