google docs and spreadsheets

The U.S. will likely experience a slight dip in productivity over the next three weeks as the attention of many workers turns to the climax of the college basketball season: the NCAA Basketball Tournament. For many people, the annual NCAA basketball pool is as much an office tradition as the summer picnic and holiday party.

Google Docs makes it simple to create a tournament-bracket spreadsheet with a form that uses drop-down lists and text boxes to record people's game picks. (You can also print the spreadsheet for making your game selections the old-fashioned way.) All picks are displayed … Read more

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 … Read more

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 … Read more

Google Docs has a new validation option that spreadsheet jockeys are going to appreciate. You can now give cells prerequisites, so that you or other users must fill them in with a certain type of data. It can also be set up to provide instructions that pop up as soon as someone starts entering data--similar to what's available in Google Docs' form tool and in Microsoft Excel. Both options can be set inside of the data validator that shows up once you've selected a cell or range of cells.

The Google Docs blog has suggested this as a … Read more

Google's Documents and Spreadsheets service went down for approximately 45 minutes earlier this morning.

The service, Google's online productivity suite, went from having some features not working, like the log-out button and the document creation drop-down menu, to coming up with a 404 page.

The downtime calls into question the importance that online Web applications play in business use, as well as how Google's free document services have come to replace software solutions such as Microsoft Office for some users or teams that use Google's real-time collaboration features.

As a reminder, outages for Google Results should … Read more

Remember gDocsBar (download), that handy Firefox extension we checked out a few months back? It got a pretty neat update today that lets you do things that might not have been originally intended for Google's Documents and Spreadsheets service. The first is called Webclips, which is a fancy way of saying automatic copy and paste. If you find a big chunk of content you like, you can simple copy it, then drag it into the toolbar. gDocsBar will create a new document out of whatever you've highlighted, and preserve, as much as possible, the formatting and links.

The … Read more

Box.net added a really cool, and useful collaboration feature to its online storage service yesterday. Any user can right click a folder and choose a new collaboration option that lets them invite anyone to gain access to those files, either as an editor or viewer. Box.net has always had the option of linking to the file, or sharing a grouping of files with everyone, or a just a small group of people via its premium service and snazzy widgets; however, this new addition is more advanced.

Once a user becomes a collaborator, the shared folder will show up … Read more

The spreadsheet in Google Docs now supports independent form entry. That means that if someone wants to use a Google spreadsheet as a database, they can ask others to fill in data by putting information into a nice, compact form, instead of into the spreadsheet itself.

As is typical in Google Docs, this feature is simple, easy to use, but somewhat underpowered. For example, the form cannot be easily embedded in a Web page, and there's no data validation on form entries. I still recommend WuFoo for online data collection, and there are other good online databases allow embed … Read more

For most everyone working in the U.S. corporate world, Microsoft Office is a must: Outlook for e-mail/calendar; Word for word processing; Excel for spreadsheets; and PowerPoint for presentations. The 2007 release has been covered extensively on CNET Reviews.

However, a recent rise in free office suites has given end users much more choice in productivity software than they've had in many years. Just two weeks ago, IBM announced a free version of Lotus Symphony. Though it's still in beta release, the freeware includes serviceable word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation software, all of which support Microsoft Office … Read more