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Google Docs have recently started working with offline functions through the use of Google Gears. Gears is their engine that allows for you to perform some functions while not connected to the Internet and then synchronises when you get a connection again.
I’ve been waiting for this for Gmail for a while. I love the interface for Gmail, but get a little frustrated when I don’t have a connection, an offline version would be great.
Have just been playing with a tool called TimeBridge, it’s a meeting planner type application that integrates into Outlook and allows you to setup of a meeting. Sounds simple, but as soon as you add people from multiple companies in multiple time zones it get complex and a down-right waste of time.
Timebridge solves the typical back and forth issue by allowing you to suggest up to 5 time slots from your own outlook calendar and then sending invitations off to the attendees. The attendees then choose the best time slot for them (no registration required) and then once a consensus is agreed the meeting is booked and everyone notified.
It’s a nice solution to a complex problem, and just seems to work. The only thin I’m a little unhappy about is the upsell that happens. “Did you want to book a web conference?” but hey? What did you expect for free?
I plan on writing a few posts over the next couple of weeks around Google docs, Google’s online document system, but to get started wanted to talk briefly about what the application is attempting to do.
If you think about the average document what normally springs to mind is something like a letter or a proposal and typically you would use a word processor to write it up. Something like Microsoft Word, OpenOffice Writer are the normal tools you think of too. If you think a little harder though about the actual process you use for assembling a document you may be in a position where you need to move the document around your organisation/friends/family to finalise it… everybody needs to put their 2c in. The problem this presents is that you need to manage this process, you need to send it to each person and then get their responses back into the document. If your organisation is anything like ours then everyone does it in their own way too, some people just change the document, other’s might ‘mark up’ the changes for approval. Some people might add comments inside the document and finally others might just respond in an email with the changes they want made, ahhhhhhhh!
Google docs is designed to make this process of collaboration easier. When you are in a situation where more than one person is building the document then you can open up or share your document with other people and all work on it at the same time. Thankfully Google takes care of knowing who changed what and allowing you to track back through the changes.
It does by providing a web based interface to these tools, so using only a web browser you can open up a document, make changes, save and close.
Right now Google offer three different document types:
So your basics are covered.
Now some people talk about this being a replacement for Microsoft Office, I just don’t think that’s the case. The functionality in these applications is just not rich enough yet to compete with the offline tools. You get the ability to do a lot of what you can do in things like Word, but not enough to through away Word altogether. I think it’s a matter of the right tool for the right job.
If you don’t already have a Google account, you can get one right now and it’s free, and then you can start working online and sharing your documents.
Great article that shows how to use some simple techniques to do in-cell graphing in Excel. I find this a really simple way to align data with a graphical presentation of such, sometime it’s just too hard to get the data to align with the information you are graphing when using a true Excel chart. This appears to be a great little work around.
It uses a REPT function in Excel that I didn’t even know existed. The purpose of this function is to repeat a string a certain number of times. The function accepts 2 parameters…
=REPT(string to repeat, time to repeat it)
As is typical in Excel, a string in a function or formula needs to be wrapped in double quotes…
=REPT(”-”,17)
The above would repeat the hyphen 17 times. Not so useful however replace the hyphen with a bar (or pipe character, it’s the one on the backslash key) and the 17 with a reference to a cell containing the information you want to graph, and you’re all done!
I played with the font sizes a little to get something reasonable. Let me know how you go if you use it.
Here is a nice document which popped up in my reader today about Facebook, a social network. If the whole social network concept is new then here are a few steps you can follow to get up and running. Facebook appears to have some of the largest growth in this environment right now, so if you had to pick one, I would pick this.
There is a side to this story I haven’t seen much about, and that is “why can’t microsoft lock down their own search”?
The way I see it is that search really is an integral part of the operating system, in the same way that file management (like being able to save a document) is part of the file system. By saving a file on my computer I am using the functionality of the OS to manage the location and indexing of the file on the disk. Similarly when I go to open that file the OS allows me to find it by navigating, or by searching for it. So why should Google even have the right to ask for this to be optional or reconfigured to use their own search tool.
I think part of this might relate to the fact that the Vista search functionality is good! It far exceeds what Google have to offer in this arena and granted, Microsoft’s search in the past has been less than average and at that time if you wanted good search you went to something like Google desktop search or LookOut. Now that Microsoft DOES have a good search function, Google are potentially loosing market share in this area.
I must admit, i love the new Vista search. Fast, easy, really quite powerful. I especially like the ability to filter to email and then by send or ‘has attachment’.
Today I had a task of taking a bunch of data supplied to me in tab delimited format and plugging this into a SQL database. There are of course a few ways to handle this sort of data, however one of things I do regularly is use string concatenation in Excel to build the insert statements required for a task like this.
So next time you are given a list of some sort and need to insert it into a database, try this:
The only tricky part is that excel expects the string literals (the textual part) of your formula to be enclosed in double quotes, and as you probably know SQL expects them to be in single quotes. So when it comes to joining this stuff together you get some odd looking statements. Once you get it right though, just copy and paste to do it over and over.
Of course, once you’ve done this bit you can then just auto fill down your spreadsheet for all your data then copy and paste across to query analyzer and execute.
