Google Docs Viewer on Mobile Browsers

Google Docs Viewer on Mobile Browsers: "Cross posted on the Google Mobile Blog

Last week, we announced that the Google Docs viewer supports .doc and .docx attachments. Today we’re also releasing a mobile version of the Google Docs viewer for Android, iPhone and iPad to help you view PDFs, .ppt, .doc and .docx files you’ve uploaded to your documents list, without needing to download the file.



With our mobile viewer you can switch quickly between pages and pan/zoom within a page. On your iPhone and iPad, you can pinch to zoom in or out.

You can try it out by going to docs.google.com on your Android-powered device, iPad or iPhone and select any document in these formats that you've previously uploaded. Let us know what you think in the Mobile Help Forum.

Posted by: Mickey Kataria, Software Engineer

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Google Adds OCR for PDF Files and Images

Google Adds OCR for PDF Files and Images: "When you upload files to Google Docs, you'll notice a new option that tells Google to convert the text from PDF and image files to Google Docs documents. The feature has been released last year as an experiment, so Google had enough time to improve the accuracy of the results.


I've tried to convert an excerpt from the book Rework and the result wasn't great. About 10% of the text has been incorrectly converted and the formatting hasn't been preserved.

'This document contains text automatically extracted from a PDF or image file. Formatting may have been lost and not all text may have been recognized,' explained Google in a note included in the document.


To be fair, ABBYY Online wasn't able to produce much better results:


{ spotted by George }

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Built-in PDF Reader for Google Chrome

Built-in PDF Reader for Google Chrome: "Chromium's blog announced that the latest Google Chrome dev build for Windows and Mac includes a plug-in for viewing PDF files. The plug-in can be enabled by going to chrome://plugins/ and clicking on 'Enable' for the 'Chrome PDF Viewer' plug-in.

When you click on a link to a PDF file, Chrome no longer opens the file using the Adobe Reader plug-in. Instead, Google Chrome uses a basic PDF viewer that lacks many useful features like pagination and bookmarks.


'PDF files will render as seamlessly as HTML web pages, and basic interactions will be no different than the same interactions with web pages (for example, zooming and searching will work as users expect). PDF rendering quality is still a work in progress, and we will improve it substantially before releasing it to the beta and stable channels. To further protect users, PDF functionality will be contained within the security sandbox Chrome uses for web page rendering. Users will automatically receive the latest version of Chrome's PDF support; they won't have to worry about manually updating any plug-ins or programs,' explains Google.

This is especially useful for Chrome OS users, who won't be able to install PDF viewers like Adobe Reader or Evince. Instead of relying on Google Docs Viewer, Chrome will be able to display PDF files faster, especially if they're saved locally.

{ Thanks, Arpit. }

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Easier sharing in Google Docs

Easier sharing in Google Docs: "Today, I rarely work on documents in isolation. I share docs with teammates for feedback, help them with their design docs and presentations and regularly make my files available to all of Google.

When using applications to collaborate with others, it's important to have control over your data and how it's shared. With Google Docs, you've always been able to share documents with individuals and groups. Today, we're making it even easier with a new simplified interface that make it even easier to share and see who has access to your files. For an overview of what's new, take a look at this video:



Documents, spreadsheets and presentations can now be identified as “Private,” “Anyone with a link” or “Public on the web.” As before, all docs start out as private by default.


These new visibility options appear as a link next to the title of every doc. Clicking this link or the “Share” button takes you straight to the new interface where you can see who has access, manage sharing access and invite others to share the doc.

These improvements have started to roll out and should be available to everyone in the next week. If you’re interested in learning more about these changes and other new sharing features, check out our post on the Google Docs blog. If you’re using Google Apps for your school or business, our post on the Enterprise Blog covers how you can share docs more easily within your organization.

Posted by Vikki Chou, Software Engineer

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Try Google Docs Without a Google Account

Try Google Docs Without a Google Account: "Now you can try Google Docs even when you don't have a Google account. It's not difficult to create a Google account, but sometimes you want to show someone how Google Docs works without revealing sensitive information from your Google account.

If you go to https://docs.google.com/demo/, you can start editing a document, a spreadsheet or a drawing and share the links with other people, so you can collaborate in real-time. Google says that the documents are only available for 24 hours from the time they are created.


It would be nice to create documents in Google Docs or upload files to Google Docs without associating them to a Google account. Maybe they aren't very important or maybe they include important information that you aren't allowed to post.

{ via Matt Cutts }

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Gmail sweatshirts

Gmail sweatshirts: "Posted by Arielle Reinstein, Product Marketing Manager

When Gmail came out of beta, we embroidered the Gmail logo onto sweatshirts for the team. Any given day in the office, a couple of people are wearing them. When other people asked us where they too could get their very own Gmail sweatshirt, we didn't like replying with 'Oh...they're not really available, it was just something we did for the team,' so we made them available in the Google Store.

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Decrypting the RLZ Parameter

Decrypting the RLZ Parameter: "If you install a Google software that lets you perform searches, you'll notice that Google search URLs include a new parameter called RLZ, which has a cryptic value. Google has open-sourced the RLZ library and we can now decrypt the value sent to Google every time you search.


'Client applications with the RLZ library can use explicit cohort tagging to manage promotion analysis. A client application with a particular tag can transmit that tag as it chooses for payments and analysis purposes. As an example, the RLZ parameter 'rlz=1T4ABCD_enUS202' indicates the client application is Toolbar version 4, distributed with Abcd software bundle, English version, to a US user in December 2006. This empowers computation of metrics broken down into useful dimensions,' explains Google.

'T4' is a codename for Google Toolbar 4 for Internet Explorer, but Google uses many other values: 'C' for Google Chrome, 'D' for Google Desktop, 'B' for Google Toolbar for Firefox, 'U' for Google Pack. 'ADBR' is a code that identifies the distribution channel. 'This correlates to how the user got the software (ie. they downloaded it by itself vs. it came pre-installed on their new computer vs. it came with a partner's software).' 'c' is a value that tells Google if someone was already a Google user.

The library sends Google two other interesting values: install cohort (the country and week of the user's installation event) and first search cohort (the country and week of the user's first Google search). The week is measured as the number of weeks since Feb 3, 2003. For this example, 'US239' informs Google that the user performed a search from the US in September 2007.

It's interesting to notice that Google measures the success of a campaign that promotes Google Toolbar, Google Chrome or other Google software by counting the number of Google searches.

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15 Things You Probably Didn’t Know About the Brain

15 Things You Probably Didn’t Know About the Brain: "

Did you know that the belief that people only use 10% of their brains is a myth? Or that a brain has 100,000 miles worth of blood vessels, and over 100 billion neurons? Hit the jump for other interesting facts about the the organ that makes us, human beings, so special.

[Via Onlineschools]