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

Picasa Web Albums integration, site feeds, and page templates in Google Sites

Many people use Google Sites as a way to keep friends and family updated on what's going on in their lives. Great photos add color and personality, which is why we've made it easier to insert your Picasa Web Albums photos into a site. The 'Insert' menu now includes an option to insert a photo.

You can also upload a photo directly to Picasa Web Albums from within Google Sites using the 'Upload Photo' tab in the insert dialog.

Note that Picasa Web Albums is not available in Google Apps, so this option will not appear for Google Apps users.

We've also made it easier for your friends and family to follow updates on your site. You can now access any announcement page as a feed by adding posts.xml to the end of that announcement page URL. For example, this is the feed URL for our sample ski club site:

• http://sites.google.com/a/googleuniversity.org/ski-club/Home/Ski-Club-Announcements/posts.xml

Feeds are also available for site comments (add "comments.xml") and site activity (add "activity.xml"). Announcement and comment feeds follow the permission of the site and require authentication for private sites. This means online feed readers which don't support authenticated feeds won't be able to subscribe to private site feeds or site activity.

Lastly, we also added the ability to create custom page templates for a site. Creating a page template lets you define default content as well as settings, like layout, that other collaborators can use when they create a new page. For example, if you are working on an intranet site, you can create a department page template and use that template for each department page. This saves time and adds consistency to your site.

Posted by: Scott Johnston, Senior Product Manager, Google Sites

Quickly view formatted PDFs in your search results

Two weeks ago, we launched the Google Docs viewer, which made it easier for webmasters to embed PDFs in their sites and let visitors view these PDFs in their browsers with the formatting intact. Today, the search team has brought the same functionality to PDFs in Google search results. To learn more, check out the post on the Official Google Blog.

Posted by: Jesse Kinkead, Software Engineer

Translation functions in spreadsheets

Earlier this week, we added two functions to Google spreadsheets that add translation and language detection capabilities.

• =GoogleTranslate("Hola, ¿cómo estás?","es","en") gives "Hi, how are you"
• =DetectLanguage("Hola, ¿cómo estás?") gives "es"

Breaking down the first function, =GoogleTranslate("field one", "field two," field three"), the first field should be the text you want to translate -- in this case "Hola, ¿cómo estás?". The second field should be the two letter language code of the text you want to translate -- "es" is the two letter code for Spanish. Lastly, the final field indicates which language you want want the text to be translated into -- "en" is the two letter code for English. If you leave out the last field, the function will automatically translate the text into the language of the spreadsheet. The second function, =DetectLanguage("field one") works similarly and outputs the two letter language code of the text.

These functions open up some fun and interesting ways to use forms. For example, you could collect comments in many languages and use the two functions together to automatically translate responses into your native language.

If you hover over a cell with translated text, the original text is displayed.

If you want to try it out for yourself, check out this template. We're excited about the possibilities this opens up and we hope you enjoy translating your spreadsheets.

Posted by: Frank Tang, Software Engineer