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