Tag: google docs

March 16, 2011

Google Doc Discussions: Google Wave lite?

I among many others, mourned the loss of Wave. While it had many fantastic features, I think it was exactly this broad feature-set that caused it’s early demise. One of the features in Wave that I thought was a killer app was the ability to easily hold group discussions while collaborating on documents.

Well today, Google Docs announced their new Discussion feature that will go a long way towards resolving this issue. Watch the video for more details and see me after the break…

July 23, 2010

How to Receive Email from Google Forms

The forms built into Google Docs are handy devices. We’ve talked before about how easy it is to create a form and have the resultant data stored in a Google Docs spreadsheet for later use but many people are looking for more immediate gratification.

It is a little buried, but Google does make it fairy easy to do this Anyone who has access to view the spreadsheet behind the form can go the Tools menu and select Notification Rules.

January 29, 2010

Google Puts Nail in Coffin of IE6

Google announced today that many of the elements of Google apps will no longer support older browers; most notably Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 6.

They are determined to not let lack of support for faster Javascript processing or support HTML5 get in the way of providing a great interface for their customers. As such, after March 1, 2010, Google Docs suite and Google Sites editor will not work with IE earlier than 7.0, Firefox below v3.0, Chrome below 4.0 and Safari below 3.0. Starting next week they will present messages to users to the this effect and recommending that they update.

More importantly, they intend to roll out Google Mail (Gmail) and Google Calendar later in the year. Given that Microsoft has already put out a cry to people to STOP USING IE6, I think that Docs and Sites will not be the death knell but I’m certain that when Gmail stops supporting it, Google will have effectively put the last nail in the coffin of this antiquated web browser.

I say, ABOUT TIME!

What do you think?

November 18, 2009

Using Google Forms? Get Notified Of Submissions!

If your Google Sites or custom website is using Google Forms for data collection, you’re probably quite familiar with going to the spreadsheet to collect information submitted by your site visitors. However, many times you want to know RIGHT AWAY that a customer is reaching out to you because they are a hot lead that you’ll want to contact immediately.

October 26, 2009

Backup Your Google Apps Data

One of the concerns we hear from people is "How do we backup our data when it lives in the cloud?" Well, if you are using Google Apps, or even just plain old Google Docs, the option is there to do this.

The first thing you’ll need to do is to select all of your documents. Because Google uses an "infiinite scrolling" technique to display your documents, you may need to select "All Items" in the left menu and then scroll all the way to the bottom of your list of items; ensuring that Google has loaded all the documents on the screen. Then you can pull down checkbox selector and choose "Select all visible". This will put a checkbox next to each item on the list.

Next you’ll either right click on the listed items and select "Export" or pull down the "More Actions" menu item and select "Export".

September 10, 2009

Using Google Spreadsheets to Collect Form Data

Google Spreadsheets recently offered the ability to create a form that will collect customer information into the spreadsheet. This is great for people that don’t have access to storing data in a traditional database (which is our preferred solution). They offer you the code to either link to for this form, email the code (great for emailed surveys) as well as code to embed (via IFrame) the form in your existing web page.

If you’d prefer to have FULL control over the display of the form and control the formatting and manipulation of data with your server-side code here is a handy little guide on how to do this using PHP.

Create Google Doc form with all the fields your form needs
Save the form
Email yourself a copy of the form
Pull the necessary fields out of the email to generate the form
URL for curl to post to

Names of the various input fields
Insert code below into PHP page
Test solution

//In order to post to Google Spreadsheet Form
//http://spreadsheets.google.com/formResponse?formkey=dFdYSTlzUVJsSomeReallyLongKeyGoesHereqemU2YUE6MA..
//Name "entry.0.single" 
//Email is "entry.1.single"
//Phone is "entry.2.single"
//Comment is "entry.3.single"
//IP address is "entry.4.single"
$url = 'http://spreadsheets.google.com/formResponse?formkey=dFdYSTlzUVJsSomeReallyLongKeyGoesHereqemU2YUE6MA..';
// Create post array to send results to Google Spreadsheets
$fields = array(
                        'entry.0.single'=>urlencode($name),
                        'entry.1.single'=>urlencode($email),
                        'entry.2.single'=>urlencode($phone),
                        'entry.3.single'=>urlencode($comments),
                        'entry.4.single'=>getRealIpAddr(),
                        'submit'=>'submit'
                );
  
// Begining of code for posting to Google Spreadsheet
$fields_string = '';
//url-ify the data for the POST
foreach($fields as $key=>$value) { $fields_string .= $key.'='.$value.'&'; }
//rtrim($fields_string,"& ");
$fields_string = substr($fields_string, 0, strlen($fields_string)-1); 
$result = "Fields_String: [" . $fields_string . "]<br />";
  
//set POST variables for Google Spreadsheets
//open connection
$ch = curl_init();
  
//set the url, number of POST vars, POST data
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_URL,$url);
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_POST,count($fields));
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS,$fields_string);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_USERAGENT,'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.13) Gecko/20080311 Firefox/2.0.0.13');
  
//execute post
$result .= "Curl Results: [" . curl_exec($ch) . "]<br />";
  
//close connection
curl_close($ch);

Things to note about the above PHP code (gasp!) are that you need to define the proper URL to the spreadsheet and the correct number and names of fields (see step 4 above) . The only one that might be a little odd is getRealIpAddr() method. This is defined elsewhere in the page’s code as follows:

// Function to get real IP address in case visitor is behind a proxy server
function getRealIpAddr()
{
    if (!empty($_SERVER['HTTP_CLIENT_IP'])) // Check IP from shared internet
    {
        $ip = $_SERVER['HTTP_CLIENT_IP'];
    }
    elseif (!empty($_SERVER['HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR'])) // to check if ip is passed from proxy
    {
        $ip = $_SERVER['HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR'];
    }
    else
    {
        $ip = $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'];
    }
    return $ip;
}

Have fun folks! If you want to rip into my code and/or have suggestions on better PHP coding styles, please use the comment section below…

July 20, 2008

New Features Added to Google Apps

For those of you using Google Apps, you might be interested in the following new features:

Templates have now been added to various Google Docs types. The fine folks at Google are now including starter templates for Documents, Spreadsheets and presentations.
Speaking of Google Spreadsheets, not only can gadgets and charts go full-screen but new number formats and functions have been added as well as handy date shortcuts for today’s date (ctrl+;) and time (ctrl+shift+;)
Custom URLs added to Google Sites! You can now use the administrative control panel to map public sites that are hosted on Google Sites to your own domain names. If you are looking for assistance in getting this set up, please contact us as we’ll do this as an extension of our Google Apps Setup Service.
New rules for adding people you to your contact list have been implemented. Gmail will add people that you exchange several emails with rather than doing it on the first exchange. This will help keep your contact list from swelling out of control from one-off correspondences. It also creates a "Suggested Contacts" list that you can easily move their suggestions into your normal contact list.
Looking for better language support in Google Calendar? 8 new languages added include: Latvian, Romanian, Filipino/Tagalog, Serbian, Ukranian, Bulgarian, Hindi and Indonesian.
iPhone users rejoice: Google Talk now available for your platform! For those of you fortunate enough to have an iPhone, you can now communicate via IM with other Google Talk users.

Not using Google Apps yet? Let us help you take fullest advantage of all this Googley goodness with our Google Apps Setup Service.

June 17, 2008

Add PDFs to Your Google Docs under Google Apps

Looking to extend the Docs portion of Google Apps to act as a repository? Google has heard your cries!

You can now upload and share PDF files into your docs repository. While you can’t search the PDFs (I’ve got to believe they are going to fix this given that they are a SEARCH company) you can at least cut and paste from these PDF files.

You’ll find more about this on the Google Docs blog posting here: http://googledocs.blogspot.com/2008/06/upload-your-pdfs.html