Googlified

When Google announced offline Google Docs, users can only view and edit text documents, but the Google Docs blog announced that we can now view (but cannot edit) the spreadsheets and presentations offline as well.

Along with the offline update also comes with several new features like inserting videos and speaker notes to presentations, and edit CSS for documents. To insert a video, you will just need to click on the “Insert Video” button on the toolbar and select YouTube videos to be added to the presentation. Google probably has plans to include more video sites for this feature in the future, but for now you are stuck with YouTube.

To edit the document’s CSS just to to Edit -> CSS and start styling your document. Keep in mind that Google Docs automatically comments out some CSS like background images (at least for body), so don’t panic when your CSS isn’t working. (Turns out that they just don’t allow external images to be used in CSS.)

Alas, Google Presentation finally lets its users to save presentation as .PPT, a presentation file format that works with Microsoft’s Office’s Powerpoint, Apple’s Keynote, and OpenOffice.org’s Impress. When it first launched last September, Google Presentation only allows users to save the presentations in HTML format, for which Googling Google’s Garett Rogers commented, “Google launches presentations, but shouldn’t have“.

The presentation can at last present themselves.

Both the Official Google Blog and the Official Google Docs Blog announced that they have started rolling out offline Google Docs to “a small percentage of users” and all users should have it in the “next few weeks”. In the short video above, Google Docs product manager Ken Norton briefly demonstrates how Google Docs offline works.

As I (and many others) have predicted, the offline function is backed by Google Gears - “an open source browser extension that lets developers create web applications that can run offline.” The only other Google online application that uses Gears right now is Google Reader, but Google Calendar will soon follow, and possibly Gmail as well.

When editing documents offline, the documents will saved locally on your computer, and once you get back online again, the local copy will update the online version by syncing the the copy on your computer to Google Docs.

It’s still a few hours away from April 1st here in the U.S., so I don’t think this is the annual Google April Fool’s prank. :)

A little bit behind on this one, but for those who haven’t noticed yet, Google Docs‘ document editor now has a new menu, bridging the gap between the online word processor and Microsoft Word, one little step at a time.

The above diagram from Google Blogoscoped shows that the menu of the document editor’s menu over time, since the time of Writely (before relaunching as Google Docs). As you can see, it ran a whole circle for one and a half years and pretty much back to where it started, except that it changed from yellow-green/olive to blue.

Also, you can now apply color to the name of your folders, like in Google Calendar and Gmail, and transfer ownership of documents with people that have the same domain in the email address (i.e. a@example.com can transfer document to b@example.com but cannot transfer to c@domain.com).

UPDATE: Forgot to add that Google Docs is now available in 48 languages.

The Google Code team released add two new APIs to the AJAX API family this week, the Visualization API and Language API. The Google Visualization API enables users to use the API to create visualizations from raw data using SQL-like queries with the API and it is integrated into Google Spreadsheet so that you can include the visualizations in the Spreadsheet.

The other one, Google Language API, offers language translation and detection for all the languages that Google Translate supports - currently at 13 language and 29 language pairs. Basically, they stole the idea that I stole from them. :) Of course, they got everything covered.

The Google Docs team released a revamped version for the toolbars of Google Documents and Presentations. The new toolbar removed same essential buttons - copy, paste, and cut, but added buttons for printing and saving - which I think is taking up space because Google Docs has an autosave feature which saves opened documents in a quite high frequency. I appreciate that they moved the spellcheck button up there though, and the overall design is pretty neat.

[via Google Blogoscoped]

Google is all out today to celebrate Valentine’s Day - the special holiday for your special someone.

Valentine’s Day or Saint Valentine’s Day is a holiday celebrated on February 14. In North America and Europe, it is the traditional day on which lovers express their love for each other by sending Valentine’s cards, presenting flowers, or offering confectionery. [Wikipedia]

Other than the logo shown above, Google also changed Google Docs’ theme to pink, matching the holiday’s color, and that the little person in Google Maps is now standing on a heart-shaped thing instead of the green, bubble-shaped thing - too bad, still alone.

And the YouTube logo.

I still prefer to call it Singles Awareness Day, or perhaps, even simpler, February 14th or  the 45th day of the year. :)

Google Docs announced a new feature for Spreadsheets today that allows users to invite people to fill out forms generated by Google Docs without having the owner to send email invitation (to collaborators). The responses then will be stored to the spreadsheet automatically. Some of the things you can make with this feature are survey forms, contact forms, and for other data collections.

If you like, you can then use the Google Spreadsheets API to display (on your website) and process the data. Or you can use this iGoogle gadget Google created to view the form entires.

It reminds me of Wufoo, a more sophisticate form building service.

Google Presentations today gets two brand new features, PDF export and vector shapes for presentations.

• PDF export: Export presentation in PDF format, can be found under File->Save as PDF
• Vector shapes: Add vector shapes into the presentation. Here’s a list of shapes that’s currently available. You can flip the shapes horizontally and vertically by right clicking on the shape and select the option you want.

With the “PDF Import Extension“, OpenOffice.org users can import PDF files into OO.o Impress as presentations, but still, it would be a million times nicer if Google Presentations can export files in presentation formats (and this is the Nth time I have said this).

Jeff Fisher of the Google Data APIs Team released a sample application (for Windows users) to manage your documents on Google Docs. You can use the DocList Uploader to upload multiple documents at once, as well as deleting documents.

Since this application is used to demonstrate the functionalities of the Documents List Data API, there’s an article on Google Code “detailing the construction of the sample.”

Last January, Google Reader introduced a feature that enabled showing embedded Flash video player in blog posts from selected video sites. Since then, Google Reader opened itself to more multimedia contents (mostly from Google), like displaying photo slideshows from Picasa Web Albums, Yahoo! Video, Blip.tv, and more recently, Google Presentations slideshow.

I remember seeing a Flash Yahoo! logo one time. Ahh, here it is (I am guessing that Google Reader okays everything from Yahoo.com).

Google today introduced a series of new features to Google Docs - mostly to Google Presentations - to kick off the new year. For Google Presentations, we have:

• Embeddable presentations - code can be found under the “Publish” tab
• Importing slides from other presentations
• Drag and drop image insertion from other websites
• Rearranging slides
• Changing the background
• Prettier toolbar

And for managing documents on Google Docs, we have a new feature that allows us to created sub-folders and we can rename the documents from the home page of Google Docs, without the hassle of opening the document first. I am not sure if this is new, but the URL changes (well, the fragment part) as you go to different sections in Google Docs, like that of the new version of Gmail.

So, when are we going to be able to export the presentations in formats that can be read by other presentation programs?