New Charts Editor in Google Spreadsheets

New Charts Editor in Google Spreadsheets: "Google Spreadsheets has a new editor for charts. The editor recommends charts, lets you select colors and has a bigger preview pane.


Charts look much better and you can now add timelines, organizational charts, gauges, and motion charts without using gadgets. Here are some of the new charts.

What's not so great is that you have to manually update each chart to see the new features:

Now that we have a new version of charts, you may be wondering what will happen to your old charts. You'll be able to edit your old charts for a short time, but you'll be able to create charts using the new version only. In the long term, you can keep your old charts as view-only or you can upgrade your charts to be able to edit them. When you upgrade, your data and chart type will remain the same, but the look and feel of your chart will be improved.

That's cumbersome and completely unnecessary.

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Things that go bump in the night

Things that go bump in the night: "On the Picnik team, Halloween is one of our favorite times of year. We get a bit giddy anticipating our braaaaainstorm session for this holiday. We love dreaming up ghouls and ghosts that bring spooky effects to your photos.


This October, we brought back mob favorites, like Vampire and Zombie, Lightning and Ghostify. And we’ve introduced new effects like eeriness with one click, unearthly textures and heaps of new stickers.

Halloween Effects: Feeling beastly? Our mad scientists created tools to turn you into a zombie, vampire or other creature of the night, and many other effects to give your photo a mysterious cast.
Halloween Stickers: We went up to the attic and dusted off trunks full of stickers, so you can add everything from witch hats, ghosts and jack-o-lanterns to fangs, lesions and tombstones.
Halloween Fonts: We unearthed some of the spookiest fonts around so you can add text to your photo written in skeletons, ghosts or other treacherous text.

To find these fiendish delights, go to picnik.com/halloween. This Halloween, you can dress up your photos without even putting on a costume.
Posted by Lisa Conquergood, Picnik team

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Online Office Hours with Google Docs

Online Office Hours with Google Docs: "Cross-posted on the Google Student Blog

Guest Post: Alex is a senior at Harvard University, and interned this summer on Google's marketing team. Here he shares how he uses Docs to save time (and body heat) braving the cold Eastern winters

Now that the dorm move-in dust has settled and you have your class schedules all figured out, I wanted to share one of my favorite ways to use Google Docs that might help you stay on top of your work, save some time and maybe even stay a little warmer this school year!

I use the real-time collaboration in Google Docs to hold online office hours with my professors and TAs (teaching assistants). This allows me to collaborate, edit and revise my papers and reports in real-time no matter where my TAs or professors are on campus.

The air is already getting pretty crisp here in Boston and – if your school is in a similarly cold climate – you know exactly how nice it can be to avoid that icy trek across campus to office hours during the winter months. Here is how I use real-time collaboration in Google Docs to hold online office hours with my TAs so that I can review, revise and edit my assignments from the comfort and warmth of my own dorm room:

Set up some time to ‘meet’ with your professor or TA (hint: it's easy to do using Google Calendar). Sign into Google Docs at docs.google.com to get started.

Once in Google Docs, click the 'Share' button in the upper right hand corner. Enter your professor or TA’s email address in the ‘Add people’ field and click ‘Share’.

Your professor or TA will receive a link to the doc and a notification telling them that you have shared your doc with them. When they open the doc you will notice that their user name will appear in the top right corner of the screen. You are now collaborating in Google Docs.

Your professor or TA can now help you revise your doc in real time. Clicking the blue box in the upper right hand corner of the screen will allow you to chat with them and ask questions as you move through the doc. Your editor can also add comments to your doc without actually rewriting the text. Highlighting a passage and then selecting 'Insert > Comment' will allow them to make a note about that section to the right of the page.


Your professor or TA’s cursor will be visible as they move through the doc to show where there are currently reviewing or editing. Their cursor will appear in the color corresponding to the box next to their display name in the chat box. When they highlight a passage you will also be able to see their highlighted section in their color. As more people are invited to collaborate on the doc they will have different colors assigned to them so that you can tell who made each comment or revision.

Holding online office hours with Google Docs is just one of the ways to use Google to simplify your life as a student.

Posted by: Alex Roux, Harvard University

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Keyboard shortcuts in Google Sites

Keyboard shortcuts in Google Sites: "We’re big believers in speed and saving time, which is why we’re happy to announce that we’ve added keyboard shortcuts to common actions like create page and edit page for site collaborators using Google Sites. You can see a full list of keyboard shortcuts here, or simply type Ctrl / (⌘ / on a Mac) to open the shortcut help.

You can disable keyboard shortcuts on the Sites user setting page. Are there other common actions that you’d like to see added to keyboard shortcuts? Let us know in the comments.

Posted by: Michael Verrilli, Software Engineer

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Google Docs Adds a Revision History Sidebar

Google Docs Adds a Revision History Sidebar: "When Google released the new version of Google Docs, one of the missing features was comparing revisions. The latest update to Google Docs brings this feature back, but only for consecutive revisions.

Google Docs adds a sidebar that lists the most recent revisions and lets you preview them. 'Click on a time stamp in the right column to see what changes were made at a given time or use the arrow keys to quickly scan through many revisions. Changes are color-coded based on each collaborator, making it easy to tell what has been added or deleted,' explains Google.

Google groups the changes from a short period of time into a single revision, but you can click on 'Show more detailed revisions' to see all the changes.


You can also use the up/down keys to scan through revisions and press Escape to go back to the editor.

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More Options for Importing Files into Google Spreadsheets

More Options for Importing Files into Google Spreadsheets: "Google Spreadsheets improved the feature that lets you import files. After uploading a file, you can preview it, select a separator character and choose where to put the data. You can create a new spreadsheet, insert a new sheet, replace the spreadsheet or only the current sheet, append the data to the current sheet or replace the data starting from the selected cell.


You can't select multiple delimiters, exclude certain columns or pick the data format before importing the file. These features are available in Microsoft Excel and, even though some them aren't necessary, they make it easier to properly import the data you need.

{ Thanks, Daniel. }

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Behind the Scenes of Gmail's Priority Inbox

Behind the Scenes of Gmail's Priority Inbox: "Ario Jafarzadeh, Experience Designer on the Gmail team, gave a great talk about Priority Inbox at the Google Zürich headquarters. 'Priority Inbox, to me, typifies what I hope will be a much larger trend in online consumption... one that gives users more control over what can grab their attention vs the pure chronology based world that has dominated the web for so long,' says Ario.

Priority Inbox started as a '20 percent project' at Google Zürich, back in 2008. It's been initially called Magic Inbox, a name that was referenced in Gmail's source code last year. Google wanted to hide the complexity of the feature by using a simple interface that can be customized to suit your needs. The '+'/'-' buttons that let you change the importance of a message were inspired by the street signs from Zürich.


Ario says that Priority Inbox could be improved by grouping related conversations, so you can quickly deal with multiple messages. It's just one of the many improvements that could make Gmail's inbox smarter, especially for those who receive a lot of messages.

{ via Piers Fawkes }

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