Google Drive Blog
The latest news and updates from the Google Drive team.
Get started with Google Sites templates
Monday, November 16, 2009
Google Sites makes creating and sharing a website easy. It is powerful enough for a company intranet, yet simple enough for a family website. Today, we’re happy to simplify the site creation process even further with the introduction of the Google Sites template gallery. When you select a template from the new Sites template gallery, your new site will come setup with custom page layouts, links for navigating to each page, embedded gadgets, themes and much more.
The public template gallery is open for anyone to contribute templates, and we look forward to seeing what you create and submit. Do you have a great wedding site that you think other couples would use or have you built a club website that everyone loves? Follow these steps to submit your template to the gallery:
Open up the site you want to add to the gallery.
Note
: the site must be published and you must be an owner to submit the site.
Select ‘More actions’, ‘Manage site,’ ‘General’, and chose ‘Publish this site as a template.’
Choose a template name, a category, enter a description and click ‘Submit template.’
Your site template will appear in the gallery for everyone to see within hours.
We started the gallery with some initial templates, which cover a variety of uses. For example, if you're building a site for your club or association, you can get started with this template:
Or, if you're a teacher, try out the classroom template:
If you're a restaurant looking to create a website, there are restaurant templates available:
You can also use Google Sites at work to manage projects internally. Take a look at our project wiki template:
There are also pre-built templates designed specifically for families, weddings, schools, internal profiles, churches, and much more. To see all the available templates, choose "Browse the gallery for more" when creating a new Google Site. For an overview of Google Sites templates, check out this video:
If you're using Google Apps, read more about
how businesses are working more efficiently with Google Sites
. If you have any feedback on site templates, please let us know on the
forums
.
Posted by: Scott Johnston, Senior Product Manager, Google Sites
New additions to the settings page
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Earlier today we made two additions to the Google Docs settings page. The first, "Where items open," lets you pick if you want items to open in a new window (how it works today) or in the same window.
A couple weeks ago, we launched "New!" and "Viewed/unviewed" indicators in the docs list which allow you to easily spot brand new and updated items. Since not everyone loves these -- shocking, I know :-) - we also added an "Update indicators" setting, which lets you turn these indicators off.
Posted by: Vijay Bangaru, Product Manager, Google Docs
Building your business around Google Docs
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
How do you turn Google Docs and a passion for music into a business? Ask Taylor McKnight, co-founder of SCHED*, who used Google Docs spreadsheets to help attendees of more than 80 conferences and festivals more easily organize their event schedules and not miss a thing. It all started at SXSW when Taylor wanted an easy way to share his band recommendations to friends. His solution - an easy to update and customize scheduling application built on Google Docs spreadsheets that spread like wildfire. It helped him organize information on the 4,000 panels, films, and parties happening at SXSW 2008 and now powers interactive scheduling for other events like
Lollapalooza
,
The Next Web
, and
theUK Labour Conference
. Here's an example from another event:
Taylor credits Google Apps' easy learning, freedom from server overhead, and reliability with enabling his app to support rapid growth. He also made use of the Google Docs API and built-in chat, which let him provide real-time suggestions as clients entered and formatted new information. Read more on the
Google Enterprise blog
about how Taylor created an elegant solution to a problem "rabid music fans" like Taylor might appreciate.
Posted by: Serena Satyasai, The Google Apps Team
With Google Sites and Docs planning Thanksgiving is easy
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
Every year families come together from all over to celebrate the Thanksgiving holiday. To some people, Thanksgiving brings to mind images of family gathering around a turkey dinner and catching up over heaping servings of pumpkin pie. Others, especially the hosts and hostesses out there, worry about the stress of cooking for 20 people, getting stuck in traffic, picking up relatives from the airport and figuring out where everyone will sleep. If you fall into the second group, why not use Google Docs and Sites to help organize your Thanksgiving chaos this year?
A
Google Site
is a great way to let everyone know what to bring, provide directions, organize flight arrival times and even plan some post-Thanksgiving events, like football marathons or a little exercise to burn off those pumpkin pie calories.
Use a list page to split up the cooking and show your family what meals they need to prepare.
You can also embed a Google spreadsheet to keep track of everyone's arrival times and get volunteers to pick people up from the airport. You can even insert a flight arrival time gadget so you can avoid circling the airport by making sure flights aren't delayed. To find this gadget, choose 'More gadgets' from the 'Insert' menu and then search for "flight."
Adding announcements to your site will help family members get up to date information. You can display the announcements on the front page of your site, or your family can subscribe to RSS feeds so they get updates whenever there is a new announcement.
Hopefully Sites and Docs make planning your Thanksgiving a little easier this year. Happy Thanksgiving from everyone on the Google Docs and Sites teams.
Posted by: Ashley Chandler, Sites and Docs User Operations
Taking charge of your document sharing
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
We designed Google Docs to make it easier for users to collaborate with one another — students working on assignments, colleagues designing projects and presentations, and friends and families sharing ideas and planning events together. We think collaboration inspires innovation and learning. That being said, we also recognize that sometimes you may want to share your documents and collaborate with a more limited group. In the spirit of National Cyber Security Awareness Month, we recommend you keep the following document sharing tips in mind.
Share your documents wisely
You can share your Google documents with just about anyone, but if your information is sensitive or confidential, make sure you are only sharing it with people you trust. Avoid inviting an entire mailing list or group if you aren't sure who is in that group or who may be added in the future. Instead, you can individually invite the specific people with whom you'd like to share your document.
By default, if you give other users edit rights to your document, they are able to invite others to view or edit the document, too. We designed the sharing feature this way because we assume that the people with whom you're sharing your documents are people you trust. If it's important to you that your document is only accessed by the people you specifically invite, go to the 'Advanced permissions' tab in your sharing settings and un-check the boxes next to 'Allow editors to invite others to edit or view' and 'Allow invitations to be forwarded.' Un-checking these boxes will make you the only one who can invite people to your document.
Editors and Viewers can also make a copy of your document
Anyone with edit or view access to your document, presentation or spreadsheet can make a copy of that doc. Remember that copying would be possible simply by copying/pasting the contents of a document into another program — even without this specific copy feature. When someone uses the "Make a copy" function (from the File menu) in Google Docs, that person becomes the owner of the new document and can choose to carry over all the collaborators of the copied document or remove them. They can then change the content and publish or share the document with whomever they want. Again, be sure to only share your docs with people you trust.
Removing a viewer or editor from your document
If you would no longer like one or more of your collaborators to have access to your documents, you can remove them. To remove a viewer or editor from a document, go to the 'People with access' tab in your sharing settings and choose 'None' from the drop-down list next to their name. Make sure you also go to the 'Advanced permissions' tab and un-check the box next to 'Allow invitations to be forwarded.' This will disable the invitation that you had originally sent and prevent that person from accessing your doc using that invitation.
These are just some of the options you have available for sharing your documents. For more information about sharing options, visit our
Help Center
.
Posted by: Ashley Chandler, Online Operations, Google Docs
Google Docs now more consistent
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
You have given us clear (and sometimes colorful!) feedback that we should improve consistency across our products. In fact, the highest-ranked idea on the recently launched
Google Docs product ideas page
today asks us for a "uniform interface."
Today, we're happy to let you know we've standardized the look and feel of the Google Docs editors. Check this out:
The links, title area, menus, menu terminology, and toolbar are now nearly uniform across documents, spreadsheets and presentations.
We're going to continue to converge on smooth, consistent appearance and behavior across all aspects of Google Docs, so stay tuned, and if you have suggestions, let us know on our
forum
and
ideas page
.
Posted by: Garry Boyer, Software Engineer and Joseph Wain, User Experience Designer
Data Liberation, "Mark as viewed", and New!
Monday, October 26, 2009
A couple weeks ago, we launched a
multi-file uploader
to make it much easier for you to put files into the cloud. Today we're launching a new feature to make it much easier to get your content out.
That's right, it's our first major offensive on the
Data Liberation Front
: "Convert, Zip and Download."
Select one or more files and then click on "Export" from the "More Actions" menu. Next, pick the format (e.g. PDF, Microsoft Word, etc) you want for your exported files. Finally, click "Continue" and we'll give you a nice zip file to download that has all your content.
For now, you can "export" up to 500 MB of content in a single zip file, which is over 20,000 typical files. Sometimes it takes us a few minutes to export really large amounts of files, so instead of making you wait, we added an "Email when ready" option. We'll send you a link when the zip file is ready.
We've made some other improvements to Docs as well. We've added indicators on whether you've "viewed" an item or not. "Unviewed" files are in bold, while "viewed" files are not. You can toggle this setting by selecting the item and clicking on "Mark as (Un)Viewed" in the "More Actions" menu.
We rounded out this feature with a "New!" indicator that is displayed when items are initially shared to you. So when an item is first shared to you, it will be bold ("Unviewed") and marked as "New!". Once you view this item, the item is listed normally. And, of course, when the item is updated by someone else, we mark it as "Unviewed" again.
Give the features a whirl and
let us know what you think
.
Posted by: Vijay Bangaru, Product Manager, Google Docs
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