Call to participate in the National Day on Writing

The National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) has established October 20, 2009 as the National Day on Writing. For the National Day on Writing, the NCTE is collecting thousands of writing samples to be unveiled on that day and showcased online. The Google Docs team has partnered with the NCTE to curate a gallery and we're looking for contributions from you that speak to our theme: "The Internet and its impact on our lives."

Interesting in contributing? Go to the National Gallery on Writing and submit your writing piece as a published Google document.

Posted by: Peter Harbison, Product Marketing Manager

Add page break and go to page in forms

Have you ever wanted to create a form that changes which questions to show next based on an answer received earlier in the form? The two features we launched today make that easy. First, we've added one of the most requested features for forms: page breaks. Now it is easy to create a form with multiple pages by going to "Add item" and selecting "Page break."

We've also added another highly requested feature, logic branching. Once you've created a form with multiple pages, you can select "Go to page based on answer" to control the flow of your form based on the user's answers. For example, you can create a form asking the person to select their language and then direct them to a form in the correct language.

If you want to see both of these new features in action, let us know what your favorite holiday is.

Page breaks and go to page open up a whole new realm of possibilities. For example, you can create a product survey that asks a different set of questions based on whether someone has used the product before or a conference feedback form that branches off based on the session someone attended. You can even create your own interactive murder mystery or adventure using a Google form, share it with your friends and publish it in the public templates gallery. We hope you enjoy these new additions to forms!

Posted by: Dan Ferrara & Jackie Tsay, Bold Practicum Interns

View online files using the Google Docs Viewer

Last year, we added PDF upload and view to Google Docs, and the "View" link for PDF attachments in Gmail. We also added support for viewing PowerPoint and TIFF files in Gmail this April. Feedback on these features has been very positive - viewing files right in your browser is fast, and it keeps your downloads folder clean. Plus, it spares you the hassle of saving your files to the machine you're using, which could be a shared or public computer.

Starting today, we're opening up this technology to all webmasters and blog owners with the Google Docs viewer. All you have to do is give the URL of a PDF, Powerpoint or TIFF document to us and we'll display it directly in your browser with no download required - like this. For complete documentation, and a form to generate code for embedded viewers (example below), check out our webpage.



Are you a Box.net user? You'll be happy to know you can use this service to view documents stored within your Box - just add the Google Docs Viewer OpenBox Service to your account.

Enjoy!

Posted by: Jesse Kinkead, Software Engineer

Day in the Life of a Docs Student

(Cross-posted on the Google students blog)

The Google Docs team is getting ready for back to school. We've been doing our homework this summer to make your school year go a little smoother. Today we're launching a handful of features that will benefit both students and teachers. Speaking from experience, as students ourselves, we know that these features will come in handy on any given day. Check out the schedule below to see how.

Time	Schedule
9:00am	Spanish Literature [Bldg200-253]
	Writing essays about Gabriel García Márquez is hard enough in English; try it in Spanish. At least now I can make sure I'm on the right track by defining and translating Spanish words. Like any research essay, I have to double space the document and cite my sources. I use footnotes to cite sources. They are automatically numbered so I don't have to keep track of them and they sit in the margins for easy reference. As of today, I can even print footnotes as endnotes, consolidated on separate pages at the end of my document.
10:00am	Gym break
	I keep track of my daily workout progress using a variety of Docs templates. Today I'll be using the Runner's Log:
11:00am	Hiking Club [Student Union]
	The other club officers and I make sure that we cover all important topics by collaborating on an agenda outline before each weekly meeting. As the secretary, I also take notes on the outline so I like being able to customize how the list is formatted. The officers also work together to make sure our website is up to date. With Google Sites we can each edit the site when necessary without learning html. My favorite feature is the ability to embed maps, documents, and calendars directly into a page.
12:00pm	Lunch
	I keep up to date on the go by viewing and editing my docs on a mobile phone.
1:00pm	Probabilistic Systems Analysis Lecture [Bldg32-123]
	This class moves pretty fast. My friends and I sit near each other and take notes on a single Google Doc to make sure we don't miss a thing. With the new equation editor feature, it's much easier to read and understand each others' equation notations. And whenever I walk into class a little late, I can just do a revision comparison of our shared notes document to see exactly what I've missed.
2:00pm	Solid State Chemistry Tutorial [Bldg5-320]
	In order to lead this tutorial, I often put together some slides beforehand and share them with my students. Now that Google Docs Presentations supports subscripts and superscripts, it's even easier to make and edit these slides.

Want to try out these features in your routine? Find some more detailed information about the features here.

Posted by: Rita Chen and Stephanie Vezich, Google Docs Summer Interns

Electronic Portfolios with Google Apps

Guest post: Dr. Helen Barrett is a retired teacher educator, an independent researcher, and international trainer/consultant on electronic portfolios and digital storytelling in education. This year, she is writing a book about using Web 2.0 tools to create Interactive Portfolios.

In schools and colleges across the world, students are developing "E-Portfolios" which include digital collections and reflections on their work, created for a wide variety of purposes. According to this website, "An e-portfolio is a learner-driven collection of digital objects demonstrating experiences, achievements and evidence of learning. E-portfolios provide learners with a structured way of recording their learning experiences... and can include a range of digital evidence such as audio, video, photographs and blogs."

An e-portfolio is created from many small, inter-connected pieces. Google's suite of web-based products offers a rich environment for creating e-portfolios, which incorporates several different elements and tools, depending on your purpose:

• "E-Portfolios for Learning" provide an environment to reflect about your learning, telling your own story of growth over time. These working portfolios are often structured as journals or blogs where you can include samples of your work along with personal reflections. (This is my Blogger blog, where I document my activities, achievements, and reflections... my personal learning environment.)
• "E-Portfolios for Personal Branding and Self-Marketing" let you develop a "resume on steroids" for showcasing skills and samples of your best work to potential employers, customers, or graduate schools. (This is my Google Site, set up with my own domain name in Google Apps, highlighting my professional achievements.)
• "E-Portfolios for Assessment/Accountability" are used by educational institutions to document achievement, sometimes replacing or supplementing standardized tests, or more traditional forms of evaluation. (I don't have an example, because many of these highly structured portfolios are behind passwords and most universities use customized systems for this purpose.)

If you are interested in creating an e-portfolio for one of these purposes, here is a recommended process:

• Begin with a working portfolio, that could be as simple as a reflective journal or blog in Blogger, the Announcements page type in Google Sites, or even a Google Docs document set up as a diary.
• Using several Google tools, collect digital documents that represent your best or typical work:
• Google Docs provides a great environment for developing and storing documents, spreadsheets, and presentations as well as PDFs. Google Docs also lets you share your work with others for commenting and feedback.
• Share videos and images using YouTube and Picasa.
• Upload other file types as attachments in Google Sites.
• To create a more structured presentation of your work for a particular audience, select certain pieces to go into a more tailored portfolio/website. Google Sites can help you organize your work with a reflective narrative, telling your story while linking to supporting evidence (selected entries from your journal/blog and links to files in your digital archive) to meet your intended purpose. Here is a high school portfolio where a student documents his senior project.

To learn more about creating electronic portfolios using Google Docs and Google Sites, see a Google Site I set up to support e-portfolio development in both K-12 schools and Higher Education. As part of my research for my book, I am looking for K-12 teachers who want to create e-portfolios using GoogleApps for Education. Interested? Email me.

Posted by: Helen C. Barrett, Ph.D.

Give us your feedback with Product Ideas for Google Docs

With Google Docs, we've learned that some of our most valuable insights come from our users, and we are always excited by what you have to say. Now, with Product Ideas for Google Docs, we're opening up the floor to everyone and asking you to help decide what is most important.

With Product Ideas, you can submit your feedback for everyone to see, read the thoughts other users have, and vote on the ideas you like best. We'll be checking in and responding to some of the ideas with the highest number of votes.

The more feedback we get the better, so please take a moment to check it out and tell your friends.

Reminder: all support issues should still be directed to the Help Forum. Off-topic submissions may be removed by the team.

Posted by: Ethan Ambabo, Product Ideas Lead

Create and embed presentations on Ning

Last week, Ning launched a new feature that lets any Ning network add social applications. Ning Apps include a Google Docs presentation app, which means you're now able to embed a Google Docs presentation on your Ning social network. This makes it easy to add text, images, and even videos to your profile.

For those of you unfamiliar with Ning, it's social network platform that lets users build their own social networks. Who might benefit from an embedded presentation on their profile? A small business owner might want to post an overview of their service, a thought leader might want to post a presentation from a recently delivered talk, or a teacher might want to post a lecture from a class or a lesson plan.

Our Ning application was built on OpenSocial, an open standard for building social applications across the web. Last year, we launched this same app on LinkedIn.

Posted by: Praveen Vutukuru, Software Engineer, Google Docs

Using Google Docs to manage a website redesign

Guest post: Michelle Madhok, the founder and CEO of SheFinds Media, a New York, NY company that publishes editorial websites that help women shop online, recently used Google Docs spreadsheets to manage her site's relaunch. Here's what she told us about her experience:

The five employees at SheFinds Media write, manage and promote all of the content on SheFinds.com and MomFinds.com, which keeps us pretty busy - so we outsource a lot of the tech work to other firms.

We recently re-launched our flagship site, SheFinds.com, and the process was bumpy to say the least. All three parties working on the re-launch - the SheFinds staffers, our SEO firm, and our design and development agency - were finding random bugs, broken links, and failed redirects on the new site. After a few days of incessant back-and-forth e-mails about fixing one-off issues, our inboxes were stuffed and the whole team was confused about who was assigned what responsibilities.

Switching the process over to Google Docs streamlined the whole thing. We listed all the bugs and errant links in a spreadsheet, color-coded the status of each issue, and added comment columns so everyone could see the nitty gritty of each problem without doing a dozen inbox searches.

Our Google Doc also made managing the whole process a lot less stressful, since I knew all the items were accounted for and nothing would be overlooked.

We're re-launching MomFinds.com in a few weeks, and I can say right now, there will be a Google Doc up and waiting when the site goes live - I anticipate some of the same re-direct and broken link issues, and I'm glad to be prepared to solve them in an organized way from the outset. The tool makes coordinating information from three different companies in three different locations logistically simple - we're happy to have discovered it the first time around.

Posted by: Michelle Madhok, Founder and CEO, SheFinds Media

New flowchart shapes and multi-line text in drawings

We've just released two new improvements to the drawings in Google Docs. First, we made it easier for you to build flowcharts in drawings by adding 20 new shapes for standard flowchart components. Second, we made it possible for you to have more control over drawing text layout by supporting explicit line breaks in text boxes and text within shapes.

Try out these new features by going to any document, spreadsheet, or presentation, and inserting a drawing.

Posted by: Evan Adams & Chris Nokleberg, Software Engineers

New Features in Forms

Today, we added a few new features to Google forms:

Grid question type

You can now quickly gather responses for a group of similar questions in a new, compact grid format. The new grid question type allows you to label a few columns and create as many rows as you like.

Each row result appears in its own spreadsheet column, with its own summary chart, which brings us to...

Improved results summary charts

We've polished up our results summary charts, with clearer formatting of statistics and better formatting of charts for each question type.

Bi-directional language support

The form editor now supports right-to-left (RTL) text input. When you enter RTL text in the form editor, it will automatically switch the directionality of the form editor and rendered forms (similar to Gmail and other Google Apps). This means your text and questions will flip directionality, making it easier for RTL users to create and use forms.

Sign-in to view form

If you are a Google Apps customer, there are now two options to help you use forms within your organization. In addition to the being able to automatically collect respondent's usernames, we now offer the ability to require sign-in to view a form. This provides an additional layer of security for sensitive forms.

Pre-populate a form with parameters

For developers who would like to integrate forms with their own applications, we now provide an easy way to pre-populate a form with data. Simply append an entry string for each response field you'd like to pre-populate. As an example, this URL...

http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?formkey=12345&entry_0=Barack&entry_1=Obama&entry_2=1600+Pennsylvania+Ave&entry_3=pistachios|spinach|broccoli&entry_4=8/4/1967

... pre-populates the form below....

Posted by: Eric Bogs, User Interface Software Engineer