Talking about productivity tools, one can never forget Microsoft Office on desktop and Google Docs on web. They’re competing product that invade each other turf (Google with Gears that allow Google Docs to go Offline, and Microsoft with it’s Office Web Apps) but surprisingly ‘close’ thanks to OffiSync.
OffiSync is an Office extension that ultimately allow you to save your Office documents to Google Docs & Google Sites, and at anytime open it back from within Microsoft Office. It is also collaboration tools (via Google Docs) that allow multiple editing with changes update done automatically, but the later is not so relevant if you’re the only one who using it. But whatever it is, it is a must have application if you use both of them.
Here is how OffiSync works for you.
1. As Office extension, OffiSync is accessible from your Office application screen shot from Office 2007). No hassle of opening other application in order to upload/download the copy of your files. It is also compatible with Office 2010 Beta.
2. Save/Open Office Documents To/From Google Docs/Microsoft Office just like they are inside your computers!
3. Sharing is caring, and here how you can show your generousness. To start collaboration, an invitation email to the participants must be send beforehand. Recipients who receive the invitation opened the document and start editing via Google Doc.
Other than that, you can email, copy link as well as open the document online.
Here is how invitation email looks like
The easiest way to embed Google Docs in any HTML page or blog post is using iframe.
Every Google Docs files are assigned with unique URL as an identifier. So we’ll need this unique identifier in order to embed it to any HTML pages.
1. Get the unique URL. Open any Google Docs file. To get the URL, you have to publish the files to public. From the top right of that page, click on ‘Share‘ -> ‘Publish As Web Page‘. New page will be opened. Click on the ‘Publish Document’ button. You’ll see the message saying the document has been published such as below.
Your document is publicly viewable at:
http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dcrwnphc_255dc6vhnf6
2. We’ll use iframe in order to embed the URL above. This iframe code is taken from Google blog. Copy URL above and replace the red font color code below. You can set the parameters such as width, length and frame border to suit your page. Learn more about iframe.
<iframe src=”http://spreadsheets.google.com/lv?key=pDDaecJdkAYQ1Lb5HTswLBA&type=view&gid=0&colid0=1&filterstr0=Associate&sortcolid=-1&sortasc=true&rowsperpage=5″ width=”500″ frameborder=”0″ height=”330″></iframe>
3. Finally copy and paste this code to any HTML page or into your blog(HTML) mode. Read how to embed iframe code in this post. You should see the Google Docs document now.
One of the long list of new features introduced in Google Docs, Insert Drawing allow user to draw right from the Google Docs. To open the drawing ‘canvas’, choose Drawing within the Insert menu.
On this ‘canvas’, there are many shapes to choose from, variety of line type, fill line and colours to spice up you the drawing. You can as well, group, order, align and distribute an objects that you choose.
Once satisfied with the drawing, click small ‘x’ to close this windows, and the drawing will show up in the main Google Docs pages. The draws can be edited, resized and even duplicated.
Draw your own here.
Google Aps admin can now automatically collect user name from the form submitted by the users on their organization. To do so, follow these steps
1. Sign into Google Apps.
2. On the Google Aps dashboard, choose Google Docs.
3. When Google Docs opened, go to menu ‘New‘ -> ‘Form‘. Click on the ‘Automatically collect respondent’s user name‘ check box at the top of your form. When the form is saved, a new column called “Username” will be added to your form’s spreadsheet. The user’s’ user names will appear there.
notes: this is for Google Docs in Google Aps only, available to all Google Aps version.
Last month, Google Docs team added new feature on Google Doc’s spreadsheet that allow mobile phone users easily update the spreadsheet, by switching to view that they called ‘List View‘.
Yesterday, the similar feature for desktop, introduced to all users. To switch to ‘List View‘, go to ‘View‘ followed by ‘List View‘. You can control the number of lines you want to view, add new records and even sort the records here.
It can be embedded on any page, using ‘iframe’ such as the sample below. Check it out, and sure you’ll love this feature.
