The 2009 football season has arrived, and with it the need for somebody in the office to collect everyone's picks in the weekly football pool. Google Docs' forms function makes recording the pigskin prognostications as easy as siding with whoever's playing the Detroit Lions this week.
On the Google Docs main page, click New > Spreadsheet to open a blank worksheet. Click Form > Create a form to open the Edit form dialog. Give the form a name in the top text box. Type "Name" in the Question Title text box, choose Text in the Question Type drop-down menu, check "Make this a required question," and click Done. Now you'll know who's responsible for each set of picks.
Create a text box for football-pool members to enter their names.
(Credit: Google)Next, create a two-item multiple-choice "question" for each game in the pool. Click "Add item" in the top left and choose "Multiple choice." The Question Title field is required, so enter some identifying text, such as "Game 1." Choose "Multiple choice" in the Question Type drop-down menu. Enter the away team in the first option box and the home team in the second. Check "Make this a required question" and click Done.
Now click the Duplicate button in the top right (the double-sheet icon between the pencil and the trashcan) once for each game in the pool. Double-click the copied multiple-choice questions in succession, enter the away and home teams as options 1 and 2, respectively, over the copied teams, and click Done (the "Make this a required question" option should be checked automatically).
Copy a game "question" and change the title and multiple-choice options to complete the football pool.
(Credit: Google)Once you've entered the teams for each week's games, click the link at the bottom of the "Edit form" dialog to preview your game form.
Preview your finished game form by clicking the link at the bottom of the Edit form dialog
(Credit: Google)When you finish creating a "question" for each game, open the resulting spreadsheet and click the Share button. Choose "Invite people" to open a dialog that lets you enter participants' e-mail addresses, add a message, and allow them to edit or merely view the worksheet. The "People with access" and "Advanced permissions" tabs give you even more sharing options.
Click "Get the link to share" to open a dialog from which you can copy the URL to send to pool members via e-mail or IM. Other share options let you e-mail the sheet as an attachment, publish it as a Web page, and change your notification settings.
If you don't like the form's plain-vanilla look, you can choose one of Google's canned themes for your form. You can also view the picks in a spreadsheet or summarized as pie charts, embed the form in a blog or Web site, and change the confirmation message.
By the way, you can try out the game questionnaire I created for this week's NFL games. Just make sure you make your picks before the Titans and Steelers kick off.
It's that time of year again: days are getting longer, the weather's warming up (a bit), and 65 college basketball teams are hoping to be the last ones standing when the buzzer sounds, ending the last of the NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament's 64 games.
For last year's March Madness, I created a version of the tournament brackets on Google Docs and Spreadsheets, and invited readers to download it to make and share their picks. This year's version of the brackets spreadsheet includes a form you can use to make your picks and post them to the public version of the spreadsheets.
Use the "Choose from a list" option to create simple drop-down menus for making your NCAA basketball picks.
(Credit: Google Docs and Spreadsheets)(Note that a bug in the form moves the 1 vs. 16 and 3 vs. 14 games of the South region's first round to the finals and regional sections, respectively. I couldn't figure out why those two games kept jumping to the end of the queue, so I left them there for now. I'll try to get them back in line prior to Thursday's tip-off.)
You won't win a major prize, if your selections are the most accurate; I'm just a poor blogger, after all, not a multimillion-dollar sports network. If it's fame and fortune you're after, you'll find no shortage of sites that let you compete with thousands or millions of other b-ball prognosticators.
The online files I created are just for fun, as you'll probably discern after you get a load of my off-the-wall selections. The form that accompanies the brackets uses simple two-item drop-down menus for recording your winners in the first round and text boxes for entering your selections in subsequent rounds.
You may notice that in my picks, I stuck with the chalk most of the time. Last year, I was picking upsets left and right, only to have the four No. 1 seeds make it to the the Final Four. I don't see all the top seeds making it to Detroit this year, though I did pick two No. 1s and two No. 2s.
And who do I think is going to win it all this year? None other than Oklahoma over Connecticut in the final. You heard it here first.
My laptop's wireless 3G connection has been crapping out for over a week now. It works for a while, and then it quits. I don't know why. I don't know when it will be fixed, if ever.
I only know that when I'm on the road, I've got no way to get work done. While I wrestle with AT&T's alleged support services, I'm stuck in the breakdown lane of the old info highway.
I need access to Gmail and a half-dozen other sites, but for now I'll have to settle for stale Google Reader news feeds and my Google Docs files, plus a handful of other Web apps. These are the only sites I can access offline via Google Gears, a technology that lets Gears-enabled Web sites store information on your hard drive. That way, you can use the services even when your Internet link has gone south. Or at least that's the idea. In reality, you're still out of touch.
At present, Gears works with with Google Docs but not Spreadsheets or Presentations. You can view your Google Reader feeds offline, but you can't get to your Gmail in-box or Google Calendar. Other sites that are said to support Gears are the WordPress blogging system, ZohoWriter word processor, and Remember the Milk info manager.
I tried Gears with both Google Docs and Google Reader. The first time you visit Google Docs after you install Gears, you see a link labeled Offline in the top-right corner of the screen. Click it to open the Gears warning. After you allow the service to store information on your PC, the sync begins.
The first time you activate Google Reader's offline mode, you're asked to give the service permission to store files on your PC.
(Credit: Google)The initial sync can take a few minutes, but the process is faster subsequently. The green check mark in the top-right of the Google Docs window indicates that you're online. Click it and then click Settings to view your offline options.
The top button in the resulting dialog box simply puts a shortcut on your desktop. The second button lets you disable the offline feature. There are also two links in the dialog: the top link opens a simple information page, while the bottom link displays technical information about the sync, including the files you've downloaded.
Google Docs lets you access online files without a network link via the Google Gears technology.
(Credit: Google)You'll find more information about using Gears for offline access at the Google Docs help site. Note that even though Google Spreadsheets is said not to work with Gears, my online spreadsheets were downloaded just the same.
Google Reader's offline feature works a little differently. After you install Gears, you'll see a green arrow icon in the top-right corner of the Reader window. The downward arrow indicates that you're online. Click it to see a pop-up asking for permission to download data.
After you click Allow, the items in your feeds will be downloaded to your PC. The green downward arrow becomes a blue upward arrow, which means you're in Reader's offline mode. Click the arrow icon again to return to online mode.
It's nice to be able to access online files and news feeds without an Internet link, but what I really need is ubiquitous network access, which is what I thought I was getting with my 3G data link. Wireless data services simply aren't reliable, and offline browsing is no substitute for real-time access to e-mail and Web sites.
Maybe someday Google's new patent will be able to improve the situation. Or maybe WiMax will finally be ready for prime time.
All I know is, what we have now just won't do.
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.
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.
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