Official Google Docs Blog

Get started with Google Sites templates

2009-11-16T21:15:00.000-08:00

Google Sites makes creating and sharing a website easy. It is powerful enough for a company intranet, yet simple enough for a family website. Today, we’re happy to simplify the site creation process even further with the introduction of the Google Sites template gallery. When you select a template from the new Sites template gallery, your new site will come setup with custom page layouts, links for navigating to each page, embedded gadgets, themes and much more.

The public template gallery is open for anyone to contribute templates, and we look forward to seeing what you create and submit. Do you have a great wedding site that you think other couples would use or have you built a club website that everyone loves? Follow these steps to submit your template to the gallery:

Open up the site you want to add to the gallery. Note: the site must be published and you must be an owner to submit the site.
Select ‘More actions’, ‘Manage site,’ ‘General’, and chose ‘Publish this site as a template.’
Choose a template name, a category, enter a description and click ‘Submit template.’
Your site template will appear in the gallery for everyone to see within hours.

We started the gallery with some initial templates, which cover a variety of uses. For example, if you're building a site for your club or association, you can get started with this template:

Or, if you're a teacher, try out the classroom template:

If you're a restaurant looking to create a website, there are restaurant templates available:

You can also use Google Sites at work to manage projects internally. Take a look at our project wiki template:

There are also pre-built templates designed specifically for families, weddings, schools, internal profiles, churches, and much more. To see all the available templates, choose "Browse the gallery for more" when creating a new Google Site. For an overview of Google Sites templates, check out this video:

If you're using Google Apps, read more about how businesses are working more efficiently with Google Sites. If you have any feedback on site templates, please let us know on the forums.

Posted by: Scott Johnston, Senior Product Manager, Google Sites

New additions to the settings page

2009-11-10T15:25:00.000-08:00

Earlier today we made two additions to the Google Docs settings page. The first, "Where items open," lets you pick if you want items to open in a new window (how it works today) or in the same window.

A couple weeks ago, we launched "New!" and "Viewed/unviewed" indicators in the docs list which allow you to easily spot brand new and updated items. Since not everyone loves these -- shocking, I know :-) - we also added an "Update indicators" setting, which lets you turn these indicators off.

Posted by: Vijay Bangaru, Product Manager, Google Docs

Building your business around Google Docs

2009-11-03T14:02:00.000-08:00

How do you turn Google Docs and a passion for music into a business? Ask Taylor McKnight, co-founder of SCHED*, who used Google Docs spreadsheets to help attendees of more than 80 conferences and festivals more easily organize their event schedules and not miss a thing. It all started at SXSW when Taylor wanted an easy way to share his band recommendations to friends. His solution - an easy to update and customize scheduling application built on Google Docs spreadsheets that spread like wildfire. It helped him organize information on the 4,000 panels, films, and parties happening at SXSW 2008 and now powers interactive scheduling for other events like Lollapalooza, The Next Web, and theUK Labour Conference. Here's an example from another event:

Taylor credits Google Apps' easy learning, freedom from server overhead, and reliability with enabling his app to support rapid growth. He also made use of the Google Docs API and built-in chat, which let him provide real-time suggestions as clients entered and formatted new information. Read more on the Google Enterprise blog about how Taylor created an elegant solution to a problem "rabid music fans" like Taylor might appreciate.

Posted by: Serena Satyasai, The Google Apps Team

With Google Sites and Docs planning Thanksgiving is easy

2009-11-03T11:43:00.000-08:00

Every year families come together from all over to celebrate the Thanksgiving holiday. To some people, Thanksgiving brings to mind images of family gathering around a turkey dinner and catching up over heaping servings of pumpkin pie. Others, especially the hosts and hostesses out there, worry about the stress of cooking for 20 people, getting stuck in traffic, picking up relatives from the airport and figuring out where everyone will sleep. If you fall into the second group, why not use Google Docs and Sites to help organize your Thanksgiving chaos this year?

A Google Site is a great way to let everyone know what to bring, provide directions, organize flight arrival times and even plan some post-Thanksgiving events, like football marathons or a little exercise to burn off those pumpkin pie calories.

Use a list page to split up the cooking and show your family what meals they need to prepare.

You can also embed a Google spreadsheet to keep track of everyone's arrival times and get volunteers to pick people up from the airport. You can even insert a flight arrival time gadget so you can avoid circling the airport by making sure flights aren't delayed. To find this gadget, choose 'More gadgets' from the 'Insert' menu and then search for "flight."

Adding announcements to your site will help family members get up to date information. You can display the announcements on the front page of your site, or your family can subscribe to RSS feeds so they get updates whenever there is a new announcement.

Hopefully Sites and Docs make planning your Thanksgiving a little easier this year. Happy Thanksgiving from everyone on the Google Docs and Sites teams.

Posted by: Ashley Chandler, Sites and Docs User Operations

Taking charge of your document sharing

2009-10-28T14:47:00.000-07:00

We designed Google Docs to make it easier for users to collaborate with one another — students working on assignments, colleagues designing projects and presentations, and friends and families sharing ideas and planning events together. We think collaboration inspires innovation and learning. That being said, we also recognize that sometimes you may want to share your documents and collaborate with a more limited group. In the spirit of National Cyber Security Awareness Month, we recommend you keep the following document sharing tips in mind.

Share your documents wisely

You can share your Google documents with just about anyone, but if your information is sensitive or confidential, make sure you are only sharing it with people you trust. Avoid inviting an entire mailing list or group if you aren't sure who is in that group or who may be added in the future. Instead, you can individually invite the specific people with whom you'd like to share your document.

By default, if you give other users edit rights to your document, they are able to invite others to view or edit the document, too. We designed the sharing feature this way because we assume that the people with whom you're sharing your documents are people you trust. If it's important to you that your document is only accessed by the people you specifically invite, go to the 'Advanced permissions' tab in your sharing settings and un-check the boxes next to 'Allow editors to invite others to edit or view' and 'Allow invitations to be forwarded.' Un-checking these boxes will make you the only one who can invite people to your document.

Editors and Viewers can also make a copy of your document

Anyone with edit or view access to your document, presentation or spreadsheet can make a copy of that doc. Remember that copying would be possible simply by copying/pasting the contents of a document into another program — even without this specific copy feature. When someone uses the "Make a copy" function (from the File menu) in Google Docs, that person becomes the owner of the new document and can choose to carry over all the collaborators of the copied document or remove them. They can then change the content and publish or share the document with whomever they want. Again, be sure to only share your docs with people you trust.

Removing a viewer or editor from your document

If you would no longer like one or more of your collaborators to have access to your documents, you can remove them. To remove a viewer or editor from a document, go to the 'People with access' tab in your sharing settings and choose 'None' from the drop-down list next to their name. Make sure you also go to the 'Advanced permissions' tab and un-check the box next to 'Allow invitations to be forwarded.' This will disable the invitation that you had originally sent and prevent that person from accessing your doc using that invitation.

These are just some of the options you have available for sharing your documents. For more information about sharing options, visit our Help Center.

Posted by: Ashley Chandler, Online Operations, Google Docs

Google Docs now more consistent

2009-10-27T09:30:00.000-07:00

You have given us clear (and sometimes colorful!) feedback that we should improve consistency across our products. In fact, the highest-ranked idea on the recently launched Google Docs product ideas page today asks us for a "uniform interface."

Today, we're happy to let you know we've standardized the look and feel of the Google Docs editors. Check this out:

The links, title area, menus, menu terminology, and toolbar are now nearly uniform across documents, spreadsheets and presentations.

We're going to continue to converge on smooth, consistent appearance and behavior across all aspects of Google Docs, so stay tuned, and if you have suggestions, let us know on our forum and ideas page.

Posted by: Garry Boyer, Software Engineer and Joseph Wain, User Experience Designer

Data Liberation, "Mark as viewed", and New!

2009-10-26T13:30:00.000-07:00

A couple weeks ago, we launched a multi-file uploader to make it much easier for you to put files into the cloud. Today we're launching a new feature to make it much easier to get your content out.

That's right, it's our first major offensive on the Data Liberation Front: "Convert, Zip and Download."

Select one or more files and then click on "Export" from the "More Actions" menu. Next, pick the format (e.g. PDF, Microsoft Word, etc) you want for your exported files. Finally, click "Continue" and we'll give you a nice zip file to download that has all your content.

For now, you can "export" up to 500 MB of content in a single zip file, which is over 20,000 typical files. Sometimes it takes us a few minutes to export really large amounts of files, so instead of making you wait, we added an "Email when ready" option. We'll send you a link when the zip file is ready.

We've made some other improvements to Docs as well. We've added indicators on whether you've "viewed" an item or not. "Unviewed" files are in bold, while "viewed" files are not. You can toggle this setting by selecting the item and clicking on "Mark as (Un)Viewed" in the "More Actions" menu.

We rounded out this feature with a "New!" indicator that is displayed when items are initially shared to you. So when an item is first shared to you, it will be bold ("Unviewed") and marked as "New!". Once you view this item, the item is listed normally. And, of course, when the item is updated by someone else, we mark it as "Unviewed" again.

Give the features a whirl and let us know what you think.

Posted by: Vijay Bangaru, Product Manager, Google Docs

Spotlight: Great public templates in the template gallery

2009-10-20T14:20:00.000-07:00

Three months ago, we opened up the template gallery to everyone. Since then, we have seen a lot of great templates that cover many different use cases, from fun and imaginative to purely functional. We want to share some with you.

First, let's take a look at one template contributor, Jenny Blake, who has created a number of templates to help you think about your career and your life in general.

Template: Life checklist template
Genre: Life planning
We all get very wrapped up in our busy lives and forget to think of the 'big picture'. This template makes it easy to remember and keep track of what's important in your life.

Template: Professional development strategy
Genre: Career development planning
The path of our career is extremely important and having the right plan is essential to success. This template helps you create a step by step plan from six months down the road to the more long term future. It will help you better understand your goals and where you need to go in order to get to the next step in your career trajectory.

Template: Job interview one sheeter
Genre: Career development-interviewing
Have you ever gone into an interview and weren't prepared for a certain question? The best way to avoid this uncomfortable situation is to be organized and prepared. This template should cover all the basics and helps you better know and articulate your story when interviewing for that important position.

Here are three additional templates highlighting a variet of use cases.

Templates: A 2000 purple calendar, January 2010 monthly calendar
Creator: on-lineordering.com
Genre: Organization
With 2010 just around the corner, choose from 6 different 2010 calendar colors to start organizing your year. If you prefer to organize your life month by month instead of a yearly glance, simply upload the January 2010 template below when the New Year hits and you'll be able to have a month by month look at what's ahead.

Template: Maths planning template
Creator: James Mansell
Genre: Lesson planning
For all you math teachers or teachers of any subject really, this is a lesson plan template which will guide you through a days lesson from beginning to end on a weekly basis.

Templates: Paper writing outline #1, Paper writing outline #2
Creator: Lutz Hohle
Genre: Paper writing
Whether you're writing a book or a paper for school, these templates provide a nice outline for many types of writing, including ways to reference citations and headings to break up the various sections of the writing.

If you like what you see, click on any template above and choose 'Use this template'. This will create a copy of the template and store it in your docs list so you can use it and share with others.

Do you have a Google document, presentation or spreadsheet you think others could use as a starting point? Contribute it to the public template gallery.

Posted by: Joelle Fornengo, Docs User Operations

Google Docs previews in Gmail

2009-10-15T12:22:00.001-07:00

Starting today, you can preview Google documents, spreadsheets, or presentations right in your Gmail inbox by enabling a new Gmail Labs feature, Google Docs previews.

For more information on Google Docs previews in Gmail, check out the post on the Gmail blog.

Posted by: Steven Saviano, Software Engineer

Shared folders and more in Google Docs

2009-10-12T13:05:00.000-07:00

Today, we are happy to announce the updates to the Google Docs docs list that we promised in July. We're rolling out these updates gradually, so they should be available to everyone soon. The biggest update is the introduction of shared folders -- far and away the most requested Google Docs feature. Shared folders work how you would expect them to and we hope they will make it easier for teams and groups to collaborate on documents together.

To share a group of items, all you have to do is put them all into a folder and share the folder. As you'd expect, if you add an item to a shared folder, it will automatically be shared and if you add someone to an existing shared folder, they will instantly get access to all of the folder's content.

We've also made it easy to upload multiple items to Google Docs. Instead of picking one file at a time, our new upload page lets you choose multiple files and upload them simultaneously, in just a couple of steps.

First click on "Select files to upload" and use "Shift" or "Ctrl" to pick multiple files. Then press "Start upload". We added progress bars so you'll be able to watch the upload as it progresses.

We've also brought back "Items not in folders" (under "More searches"), based on your feedback.

On the whole, "Items not in folders" works the same

When you create an new item or an item is directly shared to you, it's in "Items not in folders".
When an item is shared to you via a folder, it's not in "Items not in folders".
When you add an item to a folder, it will no longer be in "Items not in folders".
When you remove an item from all its folders, it will once again be in "Items not in folders".

Since many of you have been using this view as a workflow tool (perhaps you keep drafts and to-do's "not in folders" and then when they are done, move them to a folder), we've made one change to ensure the filter functions as expected in light of the new shared folders. If you share an item with me and I put it in a shared folder, it is still in your "Items not in folders" view. The reason is that I shouldn't be able to change your workflow. As a result, you'll occasionally see an item with a folder tag in your "Items not in folders" view. This is an item that someone else put in a shared folder, but you've never put in a folder.

And finally, we've also updated the look of the interface. For the most part, we changed colors, spacing and moved some buttons around, but we also improved the old "Move to" dialog. The new "Folders" dialog let's you completely control which folder or folders an item is in. And when you're in a folder, you also have the "Move to" dialog which lets you quickly move an item to a different folder.

Please try out the new features and let us know what you think.

Posted by: Vijay Bangaru, Product Manager, Google Docs

New features for drawings in Google Docs

2009-10-09T10:00:00.000-07:00

We'd like to let you know about a few new features we added to drawings in Google Docs. Choose 'Insert Drawing' in any document, spreadsheet, or presentation to check them out.

Custom shapes and lines
You can now draw lines with multiple segments and create your own custom filled shapes. To try this, select 'Polyline' from the toolbar (to the right of the scribble tool). You can close shapes, fill them, and even move around points on a line by double-clicking the line.

We know many of you may be frustrated by the lack of ninja-related clip art in Google Docs presentations. Check out this example built with polylines:

Here is another example of a polyline.

And another.

Snap to Guides

When creating complex diagrams, drawings, and workflows, you usually want shapes to line up well, even when they're not right next to one another. Unfortunately, it's tricky to line up shapes by hand. Snap to Guides helps you align shapes with the canvas and with other shapes. This feature can be enabled by selecting 'Snap to Guides' from the edit menu.

Draw multiple lines

Finally, we made it easier to quickly draw a sequence of related lines. Now when you finish drawing a line, arrow, or scribble, you stay in line drawing mode so you can start a new line immediately. This new mode is always on, but you can return to the select tool by hitting escape or clicking the arrow on the toolbar.

Please let us know what you think on the help forum.

Posted by: Chris Nokleberg, Katie McGrath, and Steve Kobes, Software Engineers

Picasa Web Albums integration, site feeds, and page templates in Google Sites

2009-10-08T14:13:00.000-07:00

Many people use Google Sites as a way to keep friends and family updated on what's going on in their lives. Great photos add color and personality, which is why we've made it easier to insert your Picasa Web Albums photos into a site. The 'Insert' menu now includes an option to insert a photo.

You can also upload a photo directly to Picasa Web Albums from within Google Sites using the 'Upload Photo' tab in the insert dialog.

Note that Picasa Web Albums is not available in Google Apps, so this option will not appear for Google Apps users.

We've also made it easier for your friends and family to follow updates on your site. You can now access any announcement page as a feed by adding posts.xml to the end of that announcement page URL. For example, this is the feed URL for our sample ski club site:

http://sites.google.com/a/googleuniversity.org/ski-club/Home/Ski-Club-Announcements/posts.xml

Feeds are also available for site comments (add "comments.xml") and site activity (add "activity.xml"). Announcement and comment feeds follow the permission of the site and require authentication for private sites. This means online feed readers which don't support authenticated feeds won't be able to subscribe to private site feeds or site activity.

Lastly, we also added the ability to create custom page templates for a site. Creating a page template lets you define default content as well as settings, like layout, that other collaborators can use when they create a new page. For example, if you are working on an intranet site, you can create a department page template and use that template for each department page. This saves time and adds consistency to your site.

Posted by: Scott Johnston, Senior Product Manager, Google Sites

Quickly view formatted PDFs in your search results

2009-10-07T11:20:00.000-07:00

Two weeks ago, we launched the Google Docs viewer, which made it easier for webmasters to embed PDFs in their sites and let visitors view these PDFs in their browsers with the formatting intact. Today, the search team has brought the same functionality to PDFs in Google search results. To learn more, check out the post on the Official Google Blog.

Posted by: Jesse Kinkead, Software Engineer

Translation functions in spreadsheets

2009-10-01T16:20:00.000-07:00

Earlier this week, we added two functions to Google spreadsheets that add translation and language detection capabilities.

=GoogleTranslate("Hola, ¿cómo estás?","es","en") gives "Hi, how are you"
=DetectLanguage("Hola, ¿cómo estás?") gives "es"

Breaking down the first function, =GoogleTranslate("field one", "field two," field three"), the first field should be the text you want to translate -- in this case "Hola, ¿cómo estás?". The second field should be the two letter language code of the text you want to translate -- "es" is the two letter code for Spanish. Lastly, the final field indicates which language you want want the text to be translated into -- "en" is the two letter code for English. If you leave out the last field, the function will automatically translate the text into the language of the spreadsheet. The second function, =DetectLanguage("field one") works similarly and outputs the two letter language code of the text.

These functions open up some fun and interesting ways to use forms. For example, you could collect comments in many languages and use the two functions together to automatically translate responses into your native language.

If you hover over a cell with translated text, the original text is displayed.

If you want to try it out for yourself, check out this template. We're excited about the possibilities this opens up and we hope you enjoy translating your spreadsheets.

Posted by: Frank Tang, Software Engineer

Call to participate in the National Day on Writing

2009-09-28T14:38:00.000-07:00

The National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) has established October 20, 2009 as the National Day on Writing. For the National Day on Writing, the NCTE is collecting thousands of writing samples to be unveiled on that day and showcased online. The Google Docs team has partnered with the NCTE to curate a gallery and we're looking for contributions from you that speak to our theme: "The Internet and its impact on our lives."

Interesting in contributing? Go to the National Gallery on Writing and submit your writing piece as a published Google document.

Posted by: Peter Harbison, Product Marketing Manager

Add page break and go to page in forms

2009-09-28T10:00:00.000-07:00

Have you ever wanted to create a form that changes which questions to show next based on an answer received earlier in the form? The two features we launched today make that easy. First, we've added one of the most requested features for forms: page breaks. Now it is easy to create a form with multiple pages by going to "Add item" and selecting "Page break."

We've also added another highly requested feature, logic branching. Once you've created a form with multiple pages, you can select "Go to page based on answer" to control the flow of your form based on the user's answers. For example, you can create a form asking the person to select their language and then direct them to a form in the correct language.

If you want to see both of these new features in action, let us know what your favorite holiday is.

Page breaks and go to page open up a whole new realm of possibilities. For example, you can create a product survey that asks a different set of questions based on whether someone has used the product before or a conference feedback form that branches off based on the session someone attended. You can even create your own interactive murder mystery or adventure using a Google form, share it with your friends and publish it in the public templates gallery. We hope you enjoy these new additions to forms!

Posted by: Dan Ferrara & Jackie Tsay, Bold Practicum Interns

View online files using the Google Docs Viewer

2009-09-24T14:44:00.000-07:00

Last year, we added PDF upload and view to Google Docs, and the "View" link for PDF attachments in Gmail. We also added support for viewing PowerPoint and TIFF files in Gmail this April. Feedback on these features has been very positive - viewing files right in your browser is fast, and it keeps your downloads folder clean. Plus, it spares you the hassle of saving your files to the machine you're using, which could be a shared or public computer.

Starting today, we're opening up this technology to all webmasters and blog owners with the Google Docs viewer. All you have to do is give the URL of a PDF, Powerpoint or TIFF document to us and we'll display it directly in your browser with no download required - like this. For complete documentation, and a form to generate code for embedded viewers (example below), check out our webpage.

Are you a Box.net user? You'll be happy to know you can use this service to view documents stored within your Box - just add the Google Docs Viewer OpenBox Service to your account.

Enjoy!

Posted by: Jesse Kinkead, Software Engineer

Day in the Life of a Docs Student

2009-09-24T11:08:00.000-07:00

(Cross-posted on the Google students blog)

The Google Docs team is getting ready for back to school. We've been doing our homework this summer to make your school year go a little smoother. Today we're launching a handful of features that will benefit both students and teachers. Speaking from experience, as students ourselves, we know that these features will come in handy on any given day. Check out the schedule below to see how.

Time
Schedule

9:00am
Spanish Literature [Bldg200-253]

Writing essays about Gabriel García Márquez is hard enough in English; try it in Spanish. At least now I can make sure I'm on the right track by defining and translating Spanish words.

Like any research essay, I have to double space the document and cite my sources. I use footnotes to cite sources. They are automatically numbered so I don't have to keep track of them and they sit in the margins for easy reference. As of today, I can even print footnotes as endnotes, consolidated on separate pages at the end of my document.

10:00am
Gym break

I keep track of my daily workout progress using a variety of Docs templates. Today I'll be using the Runner's Log:

11:00am Hiking Club [Student Union]

The other club officers and I make sure that we cover all important topics by collaborating on an agenda outline before each weekly meeting. As the secretary, I also take notes on the outline so I like being able to customize how the list is formatted.

The officers also work together to make sure our website is up to date. With Google Sites we can each edit the site when necessary without learning html. My favorite feature is the ability to embed maps, documents, and calendars directly into a page.

12:00pm
Lunch

I keep up to date on the go by viewing and editing my docs on a mobile phone.

1:00pm
Probabilistic Systems Analysis Lecture [Bldg32-123]

This class moves pretty fast. My friends and I sit near each other and take notes on a single Google Doc to make sure we don't miss a thing. With the new equation editor feature, it's much easier to read and understand each others' equation notations.

And whenever I walk into class a little late, I can just do a revision comparison of our shared notes document to see exactly what I've missed.

2:00pm
Solid State Chemistry Tutorial [Bldg5-320]

In order to lead this tutorial, I often put together some slides beforehand and share them with my students. Now that Google Docs Presentations supports subscripts and superscripts, it's even easier to make and edit these slides.

Want to try out these features in your routine? Find some more detailed information about the features here.

Posted by: Rita Chen and Stephanie Vezich, Google Docs Summer Interns

Electronic Portfolios with Google Apps

2009-09-22T10:17:00.000-07:00

Guest post: Dr. Helen Barrett is a retired teacher educator, an independent researcher, and international trainer/consultant on electronic portfolios and digital storytelling in education. This year, she is writing a book about using Web 2.0 tools to create Interactive Portfolios.

In schools and colleges across the world, students are developing "E-Portfolios" which include digital collections and reflections on their work, created for a wide variety of purposes. According to this website, "An e-portfolio is a learner-driven collection of digital objects demonstrating experiences, achievements and evidence of learning. E-portfolios provide learners with a structured way of recording their learning experiences... and can include a range of digital evidence such as audio, video, photographs and blogs."

An e-portfolio is created from many small, inter-connected pieces. Google's suite of web-based products offers a rich environment for creating e-portfolios, which incorporates several different elements and tools, depending on your purpose:

"E-Portfolios for Learning" provide an environment to reflect about your learning, telling your own story of growth over time. These working portfolios are often structured as journals or blogs where you can include samples of your work along with personal reflections. (This is my Blogger blog, where I document my activities, achievements, and reflections... my personal learning environment.)
"E-Portfolios for Personal Branding and Self-Marketing" let you develop a "resume on steroids" for showcasing skills and samples of your best work to potential employers, customers, or graduate schools. (This is my Google Site, set up with my own domain name in Google Apps, highlighting my professional achievements.)
"E-Portfolios for Assessment/Accountability" are used by educational institutions to document achievement, sometimes replacing or supplementing standardized tests, or more traditional forms of evaluation. (I don't have an example, because many of these highly structured portfolios are behind passwords and most universities use customized systems for this purpose.)

If you are interested in creating an e-portfolio for one of these purposes, here is a recommended process:

Begin with a working portfolio, that could be as simple as a reflective journal or blog in Blogger, the Announcements page type in Google Sites, or even a Google Docs document set up as a diary.
Using several Google tools, collect digital documents that represent your best or typical work:

Google Docs provides a great environment for developing and storing documents, spreadsheets, and presentations as well as PDFs. Google Docs also lets you share your work with others for commenting and feedback.
Share videos and images using YouTube and Picasa.
Upload other file types as attachments in Google Sites.

To create a more structured presentation of your work for a particular audience, select certain pieces to go into a more tailored portfolio/website. Google Sites can help you organize your work with a reflective narrative, telling your story while linking to supporting evidence (selected entries from your journal/blog and links to files in your digital archive) to meet your intended purpose. Here is a high school portfolio where a student documents his senior project.

To learn more about creating electronic portfolios using Google Docs and Google Sites, see a Google Site I set up to support e-portfolio development in both K-12 schools and Higher Education. As part of my research for my book, I am looking for K-12 teachers who want to create e-portfolios using GoogleApps for Education. Interested? Email me.

Posted by: Helen C. Barrett, Ph.D.

Give us your feedback with Product Ideas for Google Docs

2009-09-15T10:48:00.000-07:00

With Google Docs, we've learned that some of our most valuable insights come from our users, and we are always excited by what you have to say. Now, with Product Ideas for Google Docs, we're opening up the floor to everyone and asking you to help decide what is most important.

With Product Ideas, you can submit your feedback for everyone to see, read the thoughts other users have, and vote on the ideas you like best. We'll be checking in and responding to some of the ideas with the highest number of votes.

The more feedback we get the better, so please take a moment to check it out and tell your friends.

Reminder: all support issues should still be directed to the Help Forum. Off-topic submissions may be removed by the team.

Posted by: Ethan Ambabo, Product Ideas Lead

Create and embed presentations on Ning

2009-09-14T13:26:00.000-07:00

Last week, Ning launched a new feature that lets any Ning network add social applications. Ning Apps include a Google Docs presentation app, which means you're now able to embed a Google Docs presentation on your Ning social network. This makes it easy to add text, images, and even videos to your profile.

For those of you unfamiliar with Ning, it's social network platform that lets users build their own social networks. Who might benefit from an embedded presentation on their profile? A small business owner might want to post an overview of their service, a thought leader might want to post a presentation from a recently delivered talk, or a teacher might want to post a lecture from a class or a lesson plan.

Our Ning application was built on OpenSocial, an open standard for building social applications across the web. Last year, we launched this same app on LinkedIn.

Posted by: Praveen Vutukuru, Software Engineer, Google Docs

Using Google Docs to manage a website redesign

2009-09-09T11:06:00.000-07:00

Guest post: Michelle Madhok, the founder and CEO of SheFinds Media, a New York, NY company that publishes editorial websites that help women shop online, recently used Google Docs spreadsheets to manage her site's relaunch. Here's what she told us about her experience:

The five employees at SheFinds Media write, manage and promote all of the content on SheFinds.com and MomFinds.com, which keeps us pretty busy - so we outsource a lot of the tech work to other firms.

We recently re-launched our flagship site, SheFinds.com, and the process was bumpy to say the least. All three parties working on the re-launch - the SheFinds staffers, our SEO firm, and our design and development agency - were finding random bugs, broken links, and failed redirects on the new site. After a few days of incessant back-and-forth e-mails about fixing one-off issues, our inboxes were stuffed and the whole team was confused about who was assigned what responsibilities.

Switching the process over to Google Docs streamlined the whole thing. We listed all the bugs and errant links in a spreadsheet, color-coded the status of each issue, and added comment columns so everyone could see the nitty gritty of each problem without doing a dozen inbox searches.

Our Google Doc also made managing the whole process a lot less stressful, since I knew all the items were accounted for and nothing would be overlooked.

We're re-launching MomFinds.com in a few weeks, and I can say right now, there will be a Google Doc up and waiting when the site goes live - I anticipate some of the same re-direct and broken link issues, and I'm glad to be prepared to solve them in an organized way from the outset. The tool makes coordinating information from three different companies in three different locations logistically simple - we're happy to have discovered it the first time around.

Posted by: Michelle Madhok, Founder and CEO, SheFinds Media

New flowchart shapes and multi-line text in drawings

2009-09-03T15:34:00.000-07:00

We've just released two new improvements to the drawings in Google Docs. First, we made it easier for you to build flowcharts in drawings by adding 20 new shapes for standard flowchart components. Second, we made it possible for you to have more control over drawing text layout by supporting explicit line breaks in text boxes and text within shapes.

Try out these new features by going to any document, spreadsheet, or presentation, and inserting a drawing.

Posted by: Evan Adams & Chris Nokleberg, Software Engineers

New Features in Forms

2009-09-03T03:48:00.000-07:00

Today, we added a few new features to Google forms:

Grid question type

You can now quickly gather responses for a group of similar questions in a new, compact grid format. The new grid question type allows you to label a few columns and create as many rows as you like.

Each row result appears in its own spreadsheet column, with its own summary chart, which brings us to...

Improved results summary charts

We've polished up our results summary charts, with clearer formatting of statistics and better formatting of charts for each question type.

Bi-directional language support

The form editor now supports right-to-left (RTL) text input. When you enter RTL text in the form editor, it will automatically switch the directionality of the form editor and rendered forms (similar to Gmail and other Google Apps). This means your text and questions will flip directionality, making it easier for RTL users to create and use forms.

Sign-in to view form

If you are a Google Apps customer, there are now two options to help you use forms within your organization. In addition to the being able to automatically collect respondent's usernames, we now offer the ability to require sign-in to view a form. This provides an additional layer of security for sensitive forms.

Pre-populate a form with parameters

For developers who would like to integrate forms with their own applications, we now provide an easy way to pre-populate a form with data. Simply append an entry string for each response field you'd like to pre-populate. As an example, this URL...

http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?formkey=12345&entry_0=Barack&entry_1=Obama&entry_2=1600+Pennsylvania+Ave&entry_3=pistachios|spinach|broccoli&entry_4=8/4/1967

... pre-populates the form below....

Posted by: Eric Bogs, User Interface Software Engineer

Google Docs and college life

2009-08-27T09:30:00.000-07:00

As the start of the academic year draws close, students are always looking for new ways to make life at school run more smoothly, whether it's working on group projects or keeping track of dorm budgets.

With that in mind, we're launching a new Google Docs page for college students. This page has new Google Docs tips including some templates designed specifically for resident assistants, teaching assistants, and student leaders. We've also made a video showcasing how a lovestruck student collaborates with friends using Docs.

To learn more about how Google Docs can help college students, check out our new page.

Posted by: Stephanie Vezich, Summer Intern, Google Docs

Time	Schedule
9:00am	Spanish Literature [Bldg200-253]
	Writing essays about Gabriel García Márquez is hard enough in English; try it in Spanish. At least now I can make sure I'm on the right track by defining and translating Spanish words. Like any research essay, I have to double space the document and cite my sources. I use footnotes to cite sources. They are automatically numbered so I don't have to keep track of them and they sit in the margins for easy reference. As of today, I can even print footnotes as endnotes, consolidated on separate pages at the end of my document.
10:00am	Gym break
	I keep track of my daily workout progress using a variety of Docs templates. Today I'll be using the Runner's Log:
11:00am	Hiking Club [Student Union]
	The other club officers and I make sure that we cover all important topics by collaborating on an agenda outline before each weekly meeting. As the secretary, I also take notes on the outline so I like being able to customize how the list is formatted. The officers also work together to make sure our website is up to date. With Google Sites we can each edit the site when necessary without learning html. My favorite feature is the ability to embed maps, documents, and calendars directly into a page.
12:00pm	Lunch
	I keep up to date on the go by viewing and editing my docs on a mobile phone.
1:00pm	Probabilistic Systems Analysis Lecture [Bldg32-123]
	This class moves pretty fast. My friends and I sit near each other and take notes on a single Google Doc to make sure we don't miss a thing. With the new equation editor feature, it's much easier to read and understand each others' equation notations. And whenever I walk into class a little late, I can just do a revision comparison of our shared notes document to see exactly what I've missed.
2:00pm	Solid State Chemistry Tutorial [Bldg5-320]
	In order to lead this tutorial, I often put together some slides beforehand and share them with my students. Now that Google Docs Presentations supports subscripts and superscripts, it's even easier to make and edit these slides.