Forms move out of their parents' basement (and other improvements)

We made a few improvements to the spreadsheets editor this week, which you can read about in our user group. Among the changes were some improvements to Forms.

The most visible change makes the whole Forms feature more accessible to you, since "spreadsheets" isn't the first place you'd look to create a form. We noticed that many of you search for "Forms" from your Docs List and from within the other editors (documents, presentations). So, we've made Forms accessible directly from your Docs List in the "New" menu.

Next, we changed the Forms interface a bit to make it easier for you to add and edit the questions in a form while giving you more clues about the types of questions available. You can also delete a form completely now in addition to just turning it off (not accepting additional responses).

We also now identify each spreadsheet with a Form using a special icon on your Docs List.


Moving out from under the shadow of its spreadsheet parent seems like a good step - but give us feedback if you've got other ideas. Just wait until Forms is old enough to drive... Oh, the places we'll go!

Posted by: Andrew Bonventre, Engineer

Students will tell us... what issues matter the most

The U.S. presidential campaign is drawing unprecedented interest among young people. What issues matter most to America's youth? Are they concerned about the economy and gas prices? Or is climate change, Iraq, or global terrorism foremost on their minds? We'd like to find out by giving them the ability to express themselves through their words during the period of the presidential election.

We've teamed up with the National Writing Project to create Letters to the Next President: Writing Our Future, an online writing and publishing project that invites young people to write about the issues and concerns they want America's next president to address.

During the presidential campaign, high school teachers will guide students through the process of writing a persuasive letter addressed to the candidates. Topics will be chosen by the students themselves to reflect their specific personal, regional, and age-related interests. Google Docs will allow teachers to incorporate peer review, revisions, and publishing into support of these letters. Participating students will publish their letters online to a Letters to the Next President website (which launches in September) for their peers, parents, and the public to read.

Students and teachers, visit our Letters to the Next President project page learn more. The registration deadline is Sept 12, 2008.

To see how teachers and students are using Google Docs to enable effective peer review and publishing, watch the following video:





Update: Due to popular demand, registration has been extended to September 12, 2008.

Posted by: Andrew Chang, Marketing Manager

2008 Editors’ Best award

A big "thank you" goes out to the editors of Windows IT Pro Magazine for naming Google Docs a winner in the "Breakthrough Product" category. We're honored.

Update: Corrected the name of the magazine.

Posted by: Andrew Chang, Marketing Manager

Educators in Portugal, México, and Germany speak out

Several months ago, Joelle asked teachers to tell us how they've been using Docs in the classroom. We received stories from professors and instructors all over the world. In today's post, I'd like to highlight three specific educators from México, Germany and Portugal:

Jose I. Icaza is a professor at Tecnológico de Monterrey in Monterrey N.L., México. He teaches courses in Leadership for Sustainable Development.

"I use Docs documents to have my graduate students write bibliographic research reports coauthored by them all. As an example, in the course 'Leadership for sustainable development,' my 15 students recently wrote together the report Sustainable communities and cities: cases and plans. Each student was to find out about a planned or real sustainable place, incorporate his or her findings into the report and improve the overall report with the instruction: 'Leave the whole report better than you found it.' Grade for this activity depended both on the quality of the individual contribution and the quality of the whole finished report. It was so good that we then hit 'publish' and here it is [in Spanish]."

Stephan Rinke is a subject area manager in the languages department of Volkshochschule Essen, an adult education college in Essen, Germany. He was also an early contributor to our community channel on YouTube.

"We often use Google Docs in our language courses to give students the opportunity to improve their writing skills cooperatively. Frequently we create Google Documents as a basis for group work. Typical activities include:

• making a boring text more interesting by adding more detailed descriptions as well as adjectives, adverbs and conjunctions
• changing the tense of a text to practise grammar (e.g. changing a text from present tense into future tense)
• spotting and correcting mistakes (e.g. wrong verb endings, typical misspellings, etc.)

Students find these tasks motivating and also create class notes and longer documents collaboratively. And with Google Docs being web-based, students often use the opportunity to complete their group tasks from home. Google Docs plays an important role in our efforts to promote cooperative learning."


António Oliveira teaches Information Systems at IPCA (Instituto Politécnico do Cávado e do Ave) in Barcelos, Portugal.

"My name is Pedro Oliveira and I'm giving a class of information systems on IPCA (Barcelos, Portugal). In the last semester, all my students delivered a document (done in groups of two students) with their final work. They liked very much the possibility of using Docs to work in the same document, without having the problem of managing the versions, worries about the security and backup plus. One of the main features that I found was the ability of following their work (each group gave me access to the document), since the first day, inserting comments along the documents and giving clues to the students. Moreover in the end all of their work was published (with a click) and presented to the student community. All I want to say is thanks for the excellent tools that you have and keep up the excellent work."

Posted by: Andrew Chang, Marketing Manager

Docs in the blogs

A quick note to point you, yet again, to an exceptional use case described in the Teaching With Technology blog.

In a recent post, Mr. Kirkpatrick goes through the steps of setting up parent:teacher meetings easily using Docs.

Take inspiration from this idea, and as always, feel free to leave a comment and let us know how you use Docs to make things a bit easier :)

Posted by: Meredith Whittaker, Program Manager

Forms take a vacation

Don Campbell is President of Expand2Web, and dedicates his career to helping small business owners with local store-fronts connect with customers over the web. Here, he proves his tech-savvy creativity by showing us a very fun, and seasonally-appropriate use of forms.

I spend most of my time every day working with small business owners helping them with their local search strategy to get more customers from the web. But sometimes the best solutions emerge from how you use the web at home...

A good friend of mine organizes a family beach camping trip every year on the coast, just South of Santa Cruz. The campground is situated on the bluffs overlooking the beach and the Pacific ocean.

Its a great setup since most of us have young kids, and as you know if you’ve got kids they *love* to play on the beach and in the surf. We’ve figured out how to get a group of campsites that are perfectly placed in the redwoods and eucalyptus trees along the bluff every year. We spend the days down on the beach with the kids and the evenings at the campsite. It’s one of those truly magical trips that we all look forward to every year.

But this year we had a problem - the trip has been getting very popular as our core set of families started telling friends about it, and we were up to 100 people from 24 families who wanted to go on the trip!

We were able to book enough campsites for this many people, but our key challenge was how to manage the meals. Imagine having to cook dinner for 100 people!

We had everyone's email addresses, and were brainstorming on how to coordinate the meals so that everyone could contribute, and there would be enough food for every meal. I had used the new Forms feature in Google Spreadsheets for a few of my customers in the past, and got an idea that it might be able to help us here too.

So here’s what we did:
1) I set up a Google Spreadsheet with the information we wanted to collect from each of the families. We collected information like:

• Family name
• How many adults
• How many children
• Which meals will you be eating
• Choose a preferred meal to prepare (e.g. Saturday breakfast)
• Menu plan
• Special requirements
• Phone #

2) We turned this into a Form, and sent it out to our list of families. As I mentioned, we already had their email addresses, so we were able to include the form directly in their email! They could also click a link to view the entire spreadsheet - we wanted everyone to be able to see what everyone else was doing, although Google Spreadsheets does allow you to restrict this.

3) Amazingly, we had almost all of our responses within 3 days! I was expecting some phone calls and emails from people who were a little confused or didn’t understand how the form worked, or how to view the spreadsheet. But I had zero questions. And I know that many of the families are not exactly comfortable in front of the computer if you know what I mean. What I DID get were comments from four of the families saying “Hey, I didn’t know you could do that with Google! Can you show me how to do this? So I sent them to Google Docs and shared this video - Quick and Easy Forms - with them and that was all they needed to get going.

A few of the things that made this a very workable solution:

1. We were able to create and share the form within minutes.
2. Spreadsheet updates in real time allowed my friend and I - in different locations - to see the same data as it came in, in case we needed to adjust anything or track how things were going.
3. The ability to include the form in an email made it super easy for people to fill it out right away.
4. The ability to let everyone view the spreadsheet over the web in their browser allowed them to see what other families were doing, or get their phone number in case they needed to discuss how they were going to team up on a meal, for example.

Our trip is later this month, and now we’ve got the meal plans all figured out two weeks in advance. With that out of the way I’m looking forward to a great camping trip and meeting some fun new families. Oh yeah, and eating some really good meals too!


Posted by: Don Campbell, President of Expand2Web and happy camper

Templates bring Docs to life

What do wedding planners, gas mileage calculators and photo albums have in common? They're all examples of templates available in the Google Docs Template Gallery that Sarah Beth Eisinger (Docs Templates engineer), Grant Dasher (intern), and I built and (happily!) released today.


When researching how people use templates, we saw that lots of you create documents for all aspects of your lives. You need resumes and cover letters to look for jobs and fax cover letters and invoices to run your businesses. And of course you want to use documents in fun ways with family and friends, such as unique designs and layouts for invitation cards and calendars. Finally, everyone wants to be able to have tools that "just work": print mailing labels, track portfolio values, and manage projects without having to painstakingly create documents from scratch.

These needs inspired our new templates and gallery. We developed these in conjunction with Avery Dennison, Vertex42.com, TemplateZone, and Visa Business.

Many templates leverage the collaborative aspect of Google Docs so that several people can work on a single document online without having to email attachments back and forth. To hear the story behind two templates, watch these videos:





To get started, go directly to the template gallery or access it from the "New" menu in your document list. Templates are currently available only in English, but other languages are coming soon. They're also available to Google Apps users.


Posted by: Valerie Blechar, Google Docs Templates Engineer

(Cross-posted on the Official Google Blog.)