Google Docs, the online office suite from the search giant, now has some limited but still useful support for PDF files.
PDF files now show in Google Docs' interface.
People using the service now can upload and view documents encoded with the widely used and now standardized Portable Document Format initially created by Adobe Systems. People also can transfer PDFs stored on the Web. (Look below for a screenshot showing the two-pane PDF view.)
The move, announced on the Google Docs blog Friday, isn't much of a surprise. In addition to the fact that it makes eminent sense, close observers already had begun seeing signs that hinted at imminent Google Docs PDF support.
Google Docs, still in beta testing, competes with Microsoft Office but is relatively primitive when it comes to feature support.
However, because it's Web-based, Google can add new features relatively easily; users simply use the Web site, and they appear, one of the chief advantages of the software-as-a-service approach. And given that Google's three big areas of focus are search, ads, and applications, expect lots of resources to be poured into this area.
I found the PDF support snappy and very handy. However, my quick test of the service showed some rough spots with the PDF support.
For example, I couldn't find a way to zoom in or out, which definitely is essential, even on ordinary 1024x768-pixel screens. Being able to hide the minidocument page view pane on the right, which lets you scroll quickly through the document, might help.
Search also doesn't scour the contents of PDF files, a feature whose significance Google, of all companies, presumably understands.
Editing has a long way to go. You can't type text in a PDF, though you can export other Google Docs files to PDF. And copying uses a peculiar box to select text, not the familiar cursor with highlighted words.
You'd better have a screen at least 1024 pixels wide. Most of us with PCs these days do, of course, but what about support for mobile devices?
I also didn't like one user interface moment: the site offered a very unhelpful error page when I tried to upload a file exceeding the 10MB size limit.
Overall, though this is a big step in the right direction.
An example of Google Docs showing a PDF file.
It's tough to stay on top of Google, but I thought I'd draw some attention to some developments involving the search powerhouse.
Google Street View now blurs all over, not just in Manhattan.
(Credit: Google)• More Street View with more privacy: One year into Google's launch of the Google Maps feature to show a driver's-eye view of the world, Google added 37 new cities, including Atlanta, Buffalo, N.Y., Ann Arbor, Mich., Fresno, Calif., and Cincinnati. It effectively doubles the coverage of Street View, engineer Jiajun Zhu said in a Google LatLong blog posting.
In addition, Street View face-blurring technology that first was tried with Manhattan imagery now is deployed all over, Google said.
• WordPress snafu: Google blocked e-mail sent to Gmail from WordPress.com on Wednesday, including notifications that blogs at the site had been updated. "A handful of third-party sites had problems sending email to Gmail users. We resolved the issue within a half hour of discovering it," Google said in a statement.
• Updated Trends. Google added two new abilities to make its Google Trends service more useful as a tool to monitor what's popular in searches and the chatter of news and blogs. First is a quantitative element that more precisely compares different search terms--for example Windows XP vs. Windows Vista; the chart is now calibrated so the relative popularity can be judged. Second is the ability to export Trends results as a data file.
• Journalism on YouTube: The Google video-sharing site now is able to call specific attention to journalistic efforts by creating a new "reporter" channel, according to the YouTube blog.
• PDF support in Docs: The Google Operating System blog has uncovered some evidence that points to support of Portable Document Format within Google Docs, the online applications suite. That makes sense given how widely used it is and that it's an openly documented and now standard format.
• Bypass Flash. On search results, Google now lets users bypass Web pages' Flash introductions--the kind of whiz-bang animations that rarely are worth watching more than once. Google search results now can let users, in effect, click the "skip intro" button on such sites if they want, Google Blogoscoped reported.
• Members of Google's mobile device team discuss how its Google Maps for Mobile service (think GPS Lite) works. The technology lets some phones figure out their rough location based on proximity to cell phone towers. It's available through Gears for Windows Mobile, and Google is adding support for geolocation in general to the new 0.4 version of Gears under development now.
What I really want to do is add a link to Google Docs on the right-click (context) menu in Windows Explorer. That way, I could open a file in Google Docs by right-clicking it in Explorer and choosing Send To > Google Docs.
Well, I wasn't able to figure out how to do this. So instead, I created a shortcut to open Google Docs, and then I browsed to the file and opened it the old-fashioned way.
This won't save you a lot of time, but at least Google Docs makes it easy for you to transmit the file to the service as an e-mail attachment. And, of course, you can send the file to other e-mail recipients at the same time.
To create the shortcut to Google Docs, log in to the service, copy the URL in the address bar, right-click the desktop or any folder window, choose New > Shortcut, paste the URL in the Location field, click Next, type Google Docs (or the name of your choice), and press Enter (or click Finish).
Now navigate to the shortcut you just created, right-click it, and choose Properties. Click in the "Shortcut key" box, and type your preferred keyboard shortcut (I chose Ctrl-Alt-G).
Give your Google Docs shortcut a keyboard sequence to open the service in a flash.
(Credit: Microsoft)Now you can open the service by pressing the keyboard shortcut you just entered. Once it opens, choose Upload in the top-left corner of the window, browse to and select the file, give it a name (or use the existing file name), and click Upload File.
Alternatively, you can copy the unique e-mail address Google Docs generated for you under E-mail Your Documents and Files, open your e-mail program, paste the address in the To: field, and add any other recipients you want to send the file to. The file will be attached to the message automatically.
Google Docs limits your HTML and text files (including Word's .doc and .rtf) to 500KB, presentations to 10MB from your computer, and 2MB from a Web site (500KB as e-mail attachments), and spreadsheets to 1MB (spreadsheets can't be uploaded as e-mail attachments).
I'll keep looking for a way to add Google Docs to my right-click menu (either via the Open With or Send To submenus, or directly on the context menu), and when I find it, I'll let you know.
Tomorrow: remove unwanted items from your Send To menu.
Update 10:30 p.m. PT: I corrected the description of the old favicon.
Google updated its 'favicon' with a softer, bluer look.
Overnight, Google got a new face on the Web--one measuring 16x16 pixels.
The search giant updated its favicon, the eensy little 256-pixel logo that appears in browser locations such as bookmarks, URL location bar, and window tabs. The old icon, a capital G in a multicolored box, has been supplanted by a cuddlier-looking blue lower-case g.
It's a minor change, to be sure. But coming from a company obsessed not only with design choices but also the effect those choices have, I can't help but draw attention to it. And given how often most Web users see that icon sprinkled across their browsers, it's probably smart to pay some attention to that aspect of branding.
Note that the new favicon doesn't appear on all Google sites yet. And in some areas, there are other favicons: Google Docs, for example, shows different icons for online spreadsheets, word-processing files, and presentations. Conveniently, those favicons are color-coded with the same green, blue, and red colors used by Microsoft Excel, Word, and PowerPoint.
OK, Google watchers, you can slow down your pulse. That to-do list posting on the Google Docs blog appears to have been an innocent mix-up.
Google marketing manager Andrew Chang inadvertently published his to-do list on a blog while testing his posting software. It wasn't a hastily removed preview of a new Google online to-do list application, a possibility some raised.
"I was testing out a feature that allows you to create and edit blog posts in Docs and publish them directly to your blog," Chang said in a follow-up post afterward. "One button click later, my list was out there for the world to see. I've since changed my settings to not post to this blog."
Correction: the original article misattributed comments to the two Google executives I interviewed. The attributions have been changed.
Google's move on Wednesday to open up an online shop for third-party Google Apps add-ons, called Google Solutions Marketplace, may make more people take Web widgets more seriously--even enterprise developers.
Widgets, or gadgets, allow people to embed small applets within a Web page for things like displaying the weather, or set alarms on a PC or other Web device.
A motion chart made with Google gadgets, a way to customize Google Docs.
(Credit: Google)But Google Gadgets is also one way that Google encourages software developers to customize Google Apps.
In March, Google launched a visualization API (application programming interface) for its Google Docs and a gallery of gadgets that use the API. With it, people can display data from a Google Web spreadsheet in a variety of ways, like a pie chart, map, time chart, or funnel chart.
But that visualization API is the beginning of more to come, Google executives told me back in March. And gadgets allow you to tap those APIs to customize Google applications.
The ability to tailor applications for a specific purpose or industry is very important to businesses, and thus any company trying to sell to them.
Microsoft refers to Office as a "platform" that can be customized with its flagship Visual Studio programming tool.
Salesforce.com has invested heavily in AppExchange and its Force.com hosted development platform to create an ecosystem of third-party add-ons and hosted applications.
The advantage of the gadgets approach is that it's relatively simple--a Webmaster could put something together. Also, gadgets are portable to other Web pages, like iGoogle's customized home page.
"Gadgets are a very approachable coding model and you can do surprisingly useful things very quickly," said Sam Schillace, the engineering director who oversees collaborative applications at Google. "We haven't been shy about talking about programming the Web in smaller pieces and gadgets work really well."
Another benefit to the gadget approach, from Google's perspective, is that they are "native to the Internet," in that they are written using Ajax and designed to run in the "cloud."
Google is hosting its second developer conference in May, called Google I/O, to encourage developers to write more applications for the Web. On Monday, it launched Google App Engine, a place where they can test and host those applications.
Jonathan Rochelle, senior product manager who manages the spreadsheet editor at Google Docs, said he wrote a gadget to translate content in Google Docs. Another simple example is creating charts for soccer team statistics, he said.
But in the context of a business, one could imagine more complicated applications. For example, a business could mash up information from an order management system and customer database and then present it in a Google spreadsheet for its customers to view over the Web.
How far Google's gadgets approach will go into business is not clear yet as it's early on. But it's obvious that gadgets makes sense for businesspeople--even SAP is doing it.
Now it's a question of how far developers can push the limits of this gadget business.
For the next three weeks, office workers across the country will have visions of buzzer-beaters dancing in their heads.
It's NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament time, and that means brackets will be zipping through e-mail systems in organizations large and small. There are dozens of sites that let you make your tournament choices online, whether to test your basketball-prediction acumen against the masses, or to recruit friends and coworkers in a private pool.
You can even use Google's Basketball Bracket Battle gadget to place your choices on your iGoogle page. After you select the "Create a bracket on iGoogle" link, the gadget is added to your iGoogle page, and you're invited to join a league, or to form a league of your own. Clicking the first option leads to a window where you give your bracket a name, or enter an existing league, which requires a password. The gadget lets you complete as many as five separate brackets, which you can share with friends and coworkers. The brackets weren't available as of 9 p.m. PDT last night, so I can't tell you anything about the selecting your winners, but you're also asked to predict the score of the championship game. You have to complete your picks by the start of the first game this Thursday.
DIY approach to basketball brackets
I got the fever early and spent part of my weekend creating my own brackets on Google Docs. First, I added rows for the first and second rounds, Regionals, Semifinals, and Championship. Since I followed the standard custom of putting two regional brackets side by side, I made mirror images, with the Midwest and West regions on one side, and the East and South regions on the other. Then I created the "brackets" themselves by adding lines to the bottom and sides of the appropriate cells by clicking the Borders icon on the toolbar and selecting one of the eight options.
Create your 'brackets' by choosing the appropriate border option from the Google Docs toolbar.
(Credit: Google)After I entered the seeds in each of the four brackets, the worksheet was ready to share with everyone, or a select few. I made it available to everyone by clicking the Publish button in the top-right corner of the window, which generates a URL you can send to anyone. I can also limit who has access to the brackets by clicking Share and choosing "to fill out a form" under Invite people on the left, and then the Start editing your form button.
Share your NCAA Basketball Tournament brackets with friends and coworkers by converting it into a form.
(Credit: Google)The only problem with the form approach is that you have to create a separate question for each game, and since you don't know who'll be playing after the first round, you have to use text fields rather than checkboxes or a two-item list; the other choices--paragraph text and multiple choice--aren't suitable in this instance. Still, the form approach simplifies management by making it easy to collect everyone's choices. It's also an effective alternative to the Microsoft Word approach to conducting surveys that I described last week. (My thanks to the readers who pointed out the online-survey technique).
After you complete the form questions, or if you share the worksheet as is, you add the e-mail addresses of your "collaborators", and decide whether they can invite others. You're also given the options to make the file read-only, or include its URL.
Now that you've set up your pool and made your picks, you can get back to work--at least until tipoff on Thursday.
Tomorrow: reduce your PC's power consumption.
Looks like Google is hard at work on offline access to Google Docs. Google Blogoscoped has screenshots of what looks like the beginnings of such a service.
No doubt Google will try to enable offline access for all of its Web apps. This was pretty apparent when the company announced Google Gears last May. Google Gears is a browser plug-in that lets people run Web applications even when they are not connected to the Internet. The Blogoscoped screenshots appear to be the first public evidence of such testing.
In response to questions, a Google representative said: "We're working on enabling many of our applications to work with Google Gears, but we don't have anything more specific to share at this time."
Enabling offline access to its Web apps would further intensify the competition between Google and Microsoft, whose desktop application dominance is threatened by Web-based apps.
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