I used to have a problem. People would ask me questions, over chat or email, and I’d have to leave Gmail to search Google for an answer. Then I’d have to select the answer, copy it, go back to Gmail and paste the answer into the chat window or my reply. Sometimes I’d get distracted and forget to go back to Gmail, and I’d have to go through it all again when I remembered what I’d been doing.
With the new Google Search experiment in Gmail Labs, my problem is solved. When you turn this feature on from the Labs tab under Settings, you’ll see a new search box on the left side of your inbox, like this:
Type your search in, and a window (like a chat window, but a bit bigger) appears at the bottom of your screen with the first few search results.
You can click on a search result and it’ll open up in another window (or another tab) so you can make sure it’s what you’re looking for. Once you’re sure it’s a result you need, moving your mouse over the result back in Gmail reveals a pull-down menu that lets you do stuff with the search result.
What’s in the menu depends on what you’re doing in Gmail:
If you’re reading a message, you can start a reply to the message with the search result as the first thing in your reply.
If you’re writing a message, you can paste the result, or just the URL into your message.
If you’re chatting with someone, you can send the result via chat.
You can also always compose a new message to send the search result.
If you have keyboard shortcuts turned on, typing g and then / will take you to the search box when you’re not composing, and Ctrl + g will do it when you’re composing (that’s ⌘ + g for Mac users).
Like all things in Gmail Labs, we’re going to be tinkering with it, so let us know what you think.
Oh, and one other thing: with all the stuff we’ve been adding to Gmail Labs lately, the left side of your account might be getting crowded. A lot of the people who’ve been playing with this new feature have found it useful to turn on “Navbar drag and drop” in Labs so they can move the web search box up to the top where it’s easy to get to.
We’ve just launched 70 themes for forms so you can add a little (or a lot of) color to your surveys and questionnaires. Some themes are basic colors schemes (like Blue, Espresso, or Rose) and others are fancier designs (like Picnic, Zen Spring, and Dusk).
How do you choose a theme? When you’re editing a form, click the Theme button to find the right theme and apply it to your form. One caveat: These themes will be visible to your respondents when they fill out the form online, not within email (like Gmail).
For a short period of time after launching emoticons for mail, we believed we had successfully captured the entirety of human expression in 19 faces (we’re still debating whether the robot face counts), important representatives of the animal kingdom such as and , emoticons for both love () and heartbreak (), and, well, a pile of .
But soon a growing feeling of dread overcame the group . How could we have included a but not a cat? What if I want wine rather than ?
And thus was born a new Labs feature: extra emoji, the colorfully animated brainchild of our team in Japan. Simply go to the Labs tab under Settings, enable “Extra Emoji,” and have that glass of you’ve been dreaming about. Ask your in-laws about the fluffiness factor of their pet . Become a meteorologist and start predicting . Dance like you mean it . Then let us know what you think.
(If you’re wondering how we had time to create another couple hundred emoticons when we’re busy doing important stuff like rewriting Gmail for mobile and making Gmail work offline, the answer is: we didn’t. All of these extra emoticons are straight from the secret underground labs of some of the top Japanese mobile carriers, used with permission. Thanks guys!)
For those of us who live and work on the web, the browser is an unsung hero. It’s become the most important piece of software on our computer, but rarely is it given proper recognition, let alone fêted.
We invited some creative friends to make short movies about our own browser, Google Chrome, and then watched as they came back with dozens of interesting ways to portray the browser. After finishing his video, artist and illustrator Christoph Niemann wrote to us about his approach:
“Instead of thinking of what I wanted to show, I tried to think about what I did NOT want to show. I realized that when I use a computer or browse the web these days, the one thing I do NOT think about is… a computer.
There was a time when I knew the meaning of every single item in my system folder and had to wisely allocate RAM to an application before burdening it with a complex task. Dealing with a computer has become much simpler these days (if everything works), but much more difficult and complex (especially if it doesn’t behave) — almost like dealing with a living creature.
I wanted to find a simple metaphor that explains what a browser does, without showing a screen, a keyboard, the letters WWW, pixels, zeroes or ones.
Initially I thought of my mom (the browser) who brings me (the user) a plate of spaghetti bolognese (the Internet). But since spaghetti bolognese is not a rewarding thing to draw, let alone animate, I went for the next best metaphor, which can be seen in the animation.”
When working on a spreadsheet together with others, sometimes it’s handy to allow some people to modify specific sheets but restrict them from modifying other sheets.
Today we’ve added sheet protection – an additional layer of control over who can edit individual sheets, using the list of people invited as collaborators. Just go to the sheet, bring up the menu, and choose Protect sheet.
Say I’m throwing a party (a wild one, of course) and I’ve invited my friends Frank, Ian, Kev and Veronica to a spreadsheet to help with planning. I know for sure Ian and Kev have good taste in music so I’ll let them select some choice tunes… but Frank should probably just stick to bringing chips and salsa. Here’s how I set up protection for the sheet titled Music playlist:
Easy as that. Ian and Kev will be able to modify the sheet all they like, while Frank and Veronica will see the sheet but won’t be able to make changes. (Later, if Veronica promises to leave her enormous ABBA collection at home, maybe I’ll let her edit it too.)
Sheet protection is a great way to add a little fine control over the contents of your spreadsheets. We hope you find it as useful as we have.
If you’re an active Gmail user, you probably know that you can open Microsoft Word and Excel attachments from within Gmail and import them to Google Docs. Gmail also provided a basic View as slideshowoption for PowerPoint attachments.
Today we’re improving this feature by making it easier for you to upload presentations from Gmail and edit them in Google Docs. When you receive a PowerPoint attachment, simply click the View option to open and preview the presentation in a new online viewer, powered by Google Docs. If you’d like to save the presentation to Google Docs, just click Edit Online and it’ll be imported into Google Docs.
A few months ago, we added fast online viewing of PDFs in your browser. As of today, that same viewer now supports TIFF and Microsoft PowerPoint document formats too: you can now view TIFF and PPT files online, directly in your browser, without having to save the files to your computer and without needing to buy, install, or wait for any special software to start up.
We’ve had a “View as slideshow” option for PowerPoint files for a while; now we’ve integrated this conversion technology into the same viewer that we use for PDFs and TIFFs.
This viewer provides a richer set of features than the old “View as slideshow” version: you can zoom in and out, select text to copy and paste, and “print” the presentation to a PDF document. And, unlike the old version, we no longer require you to have a Flash plugin installed on your browser.
I don’t know about you, but the TIFF files I receive are almost always multiple-page faxes — and the default TIFF viewer on my computer only shows me the first page. It’s quite frustrating. On the other hand, our online viewer, powered by Google Docs, will show you every page and give you the option to “print” the TIFF by opening it as a ready-to-print PDF.
My friend Chrystina is an Operations Coordinator at a small software company in Sunnyvale, CA. A few days ago, she told me that she just started using Google Docs. As a beginner, she was trying to figure out how to collaborate with her coworkers and access her docs from both home and work. She’s very busy, so she asked me if we had some guides that would give her the basics of how to get started using Google Docs.
The timing of our conversation couldn’t have been more perfect. We recently finished Getting Started Guides for spreadsheets, documents, and presentations — because using a product for the first time can sometimes be challenging.
These three guides cover the basics about Google Docs and have tidbits of information on features you may not know too much about. If you already use Google Docs spreadsheets, but aren’t so familiar with presentations, you can read this guide to learn, for example, how to embed an online presentation in your blog.
Don’t forget to send these links along to your family, friends, and coworkers who may want to get started with Google Docs.
After you’re finished reviewing the guides, check our Help Center for more information. And if you have questions or want to share your suggestions and comments, visit our Help Forum.
Over the years we’ve learned that some of the best insight into Blogger comes from you guys, the millions of users who use it every day. So we thought it’d be a great idea to open up the floor for feedback, and provide an easy way to let us know what you’d like to see.
With the help of Product Ideas, we’ve created a forum which allows you to submit and vote on new feature suggestions, gadget recommendations, and even Blogs of Note! The more feedback we get the better, so please take a moment to check it out, and then tell your friends.
We’ll be keeping a close eye on all of the responses, so please stay tuned! We’ll keep the forum open until Friday, May 14th.
The fine print: All support issues should still be directed to the help group. Off-topic submissions may be removed by the team. And Blogs of Note is for Blogger blogs only
A few weeks ago, we joked about creating a special version of Google Chrome that made the web 3D. Well today, all joking aside, a team at Google is actually taking a step in that direction by introducing O3D: a shader-based API for 3D graphics in the browser.
This API allows for the development of sophisticated 3D applications that rival experiences one would expect in native applications. Technology like this will eventually make launching high quality games as easy as clicking a link in your browser.
