Template spotlight: Gift tags

Once you've bought all your gifts and wrapped them, the last step is to label them. The holiday gift tag (string of lights theme) and holiday gift tag (snowflake theme) templates are perfect for adding that final touch. Simply customize the labels and print them out.



If you're looking for more themes, Avery Dennison also has some great gift tag templates to choose from.

Posted by: Peter Harbison, Product Marketing Manager

Template spotlight: Gift shopping list

Keeping track of gifts can be overwhelming, especially when you're buying and delivering gifts for people in a lot of different places. If you haven't done all of your holiday shopping or deliveries yet, check out the holiday gift shopping list template. You can reference the list on the go from your mobile phone and update it from any computer.



Posted by: Peter Harbison, Product Marketing Manager

Automatic site translation and more in Google Sites

Just in time for the holidays, we've added three new additions to Google Sites. First, we've integrated Google Sites with the Google Translate element. Now, visitors to your Google Site with a different language setting than your site can hit the translate button on the bottom right of the page to translate the whole site to the language of their choice. Try it out for yourself.

Before:


After:

Second, PDFs attached to pages and file cabinets can now be previewed in the Google Docs viewer. As we've mentioned before here and here, the Google Docs viewer is a good alternative to downloading a file.

Lastly, you can set a default location for a page template. This makes it simpler for you to keep the pages of your site organized. For example, if you have a recipe template in your family site, set /recipes/ as default location for pages created from that template so all your recipes show up together within your site.

We hope you enjoy these new additions to Google Sites.

Posted by: Russ Vrolyk, Software Engineer, Google Sites

Template spotlight: Holiday newsletter

Holiday newsletters are a great way to keep friends and family up to date on what's happened over the past year, and this holiday newsletter template is an easy way to jump right in. Add your family photo, share it with everyone in the family, and you'll be done in record time.

If you're looking for other themes, check out the holiday newsletter (candy cane theme) or the holiday newsletter (string of lights theme).

Posted by: Peter Harbison, Product Marketing Manager

Template spotlight: Party RSVP form

The Google Docs team is celebrating the holidays, and over the next week, we'll be highlighting some of our favorite holiday templates.

If you're planning a holiday party this holiday season, this Party RSVP form template makes it easy to gather the info you need without having to email back and forth with each person you've invited. As with all forms in Google Docs, your guests' RSVPs are automatically recorded in a spreadsheet connected to your form.



If you want to use a different theme for your RSVP form, you can start from this template, and if you're planning a company party, try this template out.

Posted by: Peter Harbison, Product Marketing Manager

Happy holidays from the Picasa team

A lot of people who Google Docs also use Picasa Web Albums, so we wanted to let you know about a special offer. We made extra storage for Gmail and Picasa Web Albums more affordable about a month ago, and now we've partnered with Eye-Fi to make it even easier to get your photos into the cloud. Eye-Fi offers WiFi-enabled memory cards that let your existing camera access wireless networks, so it's easy to upload photos and videos right to Picasa Web Albums or straight to your computer -- no cables required. For a limited time, when you buy 200 GB of Google paid storage for $50, you'll get a free Eye-Fi card (a $95 value) with free shipping.

Visit picasa.google.com/eyefi.html to get yours today, and happy holidays from the Picasa team!


Posted by: Zach Yeskel, Product Marketing Manager

New legal templates by RocketLawyer.com™

Guest post: Rob Elhardt is the Senior VP of Product Management at RocketLawyer.com. Bringing easy legal documents to more people is Rob’s passion, and here’s what he told us about the new RocketLawyer.com legal templates in Google Docs. RocketLawyer.com legal templates, and the information contained in them: (a) are meant to serve as suggestions only; and (b) are not a substitute for professional advice or specific, authoritative knowledge or direction.

Did you know that you can choose from 76 new RocketLawyer.com™ legal form templates to help you get started with your next legal task in Google Docs? In addition to personal legal forms like Living Wills for all 50 states, there are many legal templates covering business contracts, real estate, and more.

Here are a few of the new RocketLawyer.com legal templates that I'd like to highlight. Please remember that these legal document templates are provided for reference and covers a common scenario that may not be right for you.

Template: California Living Will
Area of Law: Estate Planning
You can use this Living Will template to specify your health care preferences and to choose someone to make health care decisions for you if you are unable to do so. This template combines the best features of a living will and a health care power of attorney. Living Wills are available for all 50 states.

Template: Simple Promissory Note
Area of Law: Personal and Business
You can use this Promissory Note template to loan or borrow money. It states the terms, rights and obligations that apply to a loan. It specifies the amount of the loan, the interest rate, the repayment terms and includes other specific provisions.

Template: Non Disclosure Agreement (Unilateral)
Area of Law: Business
You can use a Non Disclosure Agreement template to help protect your proprietary and confidential information. In this agreement, a party agrees not to disclose certain information received from another party.

You can browse the complete list of RocketLawyer.com legal templates in Google Docs.

Posted by: Rob Elhardt, Senior VP of Product Management, RocketLawyer.com

Holiday themes and templates in Google Docs

The Google Docs team is celebrating the holiday season with holiday themes in Google forms and holiday templates in the Google Docs template gallery.

Whether you are planning a recipe swap, family potluck, ski trip, a charity trip or need a party RSVP form, the new holiday themes in forms can make this season a little brighter. To try out the holiday themes, create a form and the click "Theme: theme name" to see all the themes that are available.


There are also a lot of great holiday templates available in the Google Docs template gallery. Templates include holiday shopping lists, holiday newsletters, party invitations, RSVP forms and much more.

Not sure where to start? We'll be highlighting some of our favorite holiday templates over the next week, so stay tuned.

Posted by: Eric Bogs and Bob Rose, Software Engineers, Google Docs

Co-editor presence for Google Docs presentation slides and elements

Most of you know that when you co-edit a Google Docs spreadsheet, you can see the cells other people are editing. That presence information helps you simultaneously edit without stepping on each others' toes.

Today, we launched real time presence to Google Docs presentations as well. Now, when editing a presentation with a co-editor, you can see which slides he is editing, and if he is editing the same slide, then you can see which element -- text box, shape, image, video, etc -- he is editing.

Happy collaborating, and we'd love your feedback on our forum and ideas page.

Posted by: Roshni Malani, Software Engineer

Google Docs viewer Chrome extension

The Google Chrome team launched beta support for extensions on Tuesday. We didn't want to miss the extension party, so we created a Google Docs extension. The Google Docs PDF/Powerpoint Viewer makes it easy to preview PDFs, Powerpoint presentations, and other documents you find across the web in the Google Docs viewer, instead of downloading them.

Let us know how you like the extension and what you like to see us add by posting a review on our extension's page.

Note that extensions are currently available only for the beta channel of Google Chrome for Windows and Linux.

Happy viewing!

Posted by: Wes Carr and Jesse Kinkead, Software Engineers, Google Docs

Sharing emails get a facelift

Starting today, more colorful emails might be waiting in your friends' and colleagues' inboxes if you've shared Google documents with them. Check out the difference:

Old Email
New Email
In addition to the visual update, the new emails showcase your custom message rather than placing it at the bottom. Your buddy won't miss that important note about your shared document being a work of fiction (sound familiar?), because it's now prominently featured.

No more hunting for links either, just click the header:

Or, if multiple docs are shared, peruse a simple list:

The email's color and icon indicate the type of document at-a-glance:

Spreadsheets
Presentations
We know you're mighty busy, so we're always looking for ways to make Google Docs quicker and easier to use and share. Let us know what you think on the forums.

Posted by: Vance Vagell, User Interface Software Engineer

Sort by relevance, export all and more

Over the next few days, we will be enabling several new features in your Docs list.

Sort by relevance

The first is the addition of relevance ranking in your Docs list search results. Until now, anytime you searched for a document, the results were sorted by "last modified date".

Now, your search results will display the items most relevant to your search at the top of the list. We also added a new menu on the right side of the toolbar, which lets you decide whether you'd like to sort your Docs list by "Relevance," "Starred" or "Last Modified".

This improvement to search within Docs also includes automatic stemming and synonyms. So if you search for "check account", we'll also include results for a few variations of those words, including "checking account" (which is what you probably meant to type). Or if you search for "mac book", we'll also include results for "macbook".

Export all your files

There's also more good news from the Data Liberation Front. A few weeks ago we launched the new "Export..." functionality. Today, we added an "Export all" option, which lets you export all your docs (up to 2GB at a time) with one click. This is the equivalent of almost 100,000 Google Docs.


You can also export a single file and email it to anyone you'd like in a single step. Once you select an item, click "Share" and select "Email as attachment...". Then pick which format (PDF, MS Office, etc.) you want to use to send the item, compose your email, and hit send.


Sunsetting Email-In Your Documents and Files

Lastly, a change that we aren't excited about. We're removing the existing "email-in" feature. As you may know, it's been a bit buggy recently and only supports a small subset of document types compared to the Docs list. In order to address this, we'll be taking down the feature and working on a bringing it back in the future with more functionality and better integration.

In the meantime, you can use the multi-file upload in your Docs list or the GData API to programatically upload docs. You can also take attachments from GMail and open them in Google Docs.

If you have any questions, please let us know over on the forum.

Posted by: Vijay Bangaru, Product Manager, Google Docs

Change owner in a Google spreadsheet

A month ago, we standardized the look and feel of the Google Docs editors. Consistency across all the editors remains an important goal, which is why we are happy to report that you can now change the owner of a Google spreadsheet. This feature was already available in documents and presentations.

Changing the owner of a document is helpful if you are working in a group and the owner of the document leaves your group or no longer needs to work on that document.

Do you have ideas on how to improve Google Docs spreadsheets? Submit your idea on the Google Docs product ideas page.

Posted by: LB Lincoln and Josh Danziger, Software Engineers, Google Docs

Now even easier: use Google Docs & Checkout to sell online

As you may recall, the Google Checkout store gadget, available in Google Labs, allows you to create an online store with inventory managed from a Google spreadsheet and payments accepted through Google Checkout. Today, using Google Docs and Checkout to sell online became easier with the introduction of a new store gadget wizard.

Interesting in learning more about the store gadget wizard? Check out the post on the Google Checkout Blog.

Posted by: Mike Giardina, Strategist, Google Checkout

Get started with Google Sites templates

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:

1. 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.
2. Select ‘More actions’, ‘Manage site,’ ‘General’, and chose ‘Publish this site as a template.’
3. Choose a template name, a category, enter a description and click ‘Submit template.’
4. 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

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

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

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

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

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!

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

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

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

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

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