Posted: 04 Jun 2010 08:00 AM PDT This is part of a regular series of Google Apps updates that we post every couple of weeks. Look for the label "Google Apps highlights" and subscribe to the series. - Ed. Over the last couple of weeks we continued to improve the new versions of Google documents and spreadsheets, introduced some features to Gmail and made it easier for businesses and schools to switch to Google Apps. Advanced sorting in Google spreadsheets We added some powerful data sorting controls to the new version of Google spreadsheets. Rather than sorting an entire worksheet by values in a single column, you can now sort any range of cells and sort by the contents of multiple columns.  Formula highlighting in Google spreadsheets We also made it easier to write formulas in the new version of Google spreadsheets by adding visual indicators to show which cells a particular formula references. These color-coded highlights will help you keep track of your formulas at a glance. This feature works with Google Chrome, Safari and Internet Explorer; Firefox support is coming soon.  Improvements to Google documents The new version of Google documents also got a few upgrades last week, including improvements to make finding content in your documents, applying text styles and linking to sections within your documents with bookmarks faster and easier.  "Move Icon Column" now in Gmail Labs Our set of experimental Gmail features has a new addition: the "Move Icon Column" Lab. This Labs feature moves the icons for messages with attachments, chats and calendar invitations from the right side of your inbox to the left, keeping those icons next to your stars. You can enable this feature and many others from the Labs tab under Gmail Settings.  "Reshare" in Google Buzz As of last week, Google Buzz lets you reshare posts that you find interesting without having to copy and paste the original content. Just click the new "Reshare" link beneath public buzz posts, type up anything you want to add and click "Post." You can choose to reshare publicly on the web or privately to a select group.  Google Apps Migration for Microsoft Outlook® We offer an array of migration tools to help businesses and schools move email, calendar and contacts data from their old systems to Google's cloud. Customers have used these utilities to migrate more than 2 billion email messages to Google's cloud, and last week we introduced the new Google Apps Migration tool for Microsoft Outlook®. This is a new end-user tool that moves email, calendar and contact data from Outlook® profiles, PST files and Exchange accounts to Google Apps.  Who's gone Google? In the spirit of National Small Business Week, we recently profiled a few small businesses doing big things with Google Apps. Revenue Spark is using Google Apps to build up a global presence to help bring green technology products to market. Yola counts on Google Apps to help their business grow fluidly as they bring on more software developers and business employees around the world. Smart Furniture turned to Google Apps to free up precious resources, improve productivity and remove barriers to growth. These are just a few of the millions of businesses that have gone Google. If your company has a story to share, add yourself to the map! We continue to see more and more schools beginning to use Google Apps as well. A warm welcome to Georgetown University McDonough School of Business, SUNY Oswego, Elon University, Anderson University and Oxford Brookes University.      |
Friday, June 4, 2010
Advanced sorting in Google spreadsheets
Thursday, June 3, 2010
Google and Youtube Moblie
- Inform, engage and mobilize voters with YouTube and Google Campaign Toolkits
- Announcing our European Scholarship for Students with Disabilities awardees
- Searching for the 2010 Stanley Cup
- Freeze frame!
(Cross-posted from the YouTube Blog) It's no secret that any successful 21st century political campaign must have a robust online strategy to succeed. But elected officials and candidates need more than just a website and a YouTube channel to engage voters: from President Obama's YouTube interview to Senator Scott Brown's campaign team's use of Google Docs to Congressman Scott Murphy's "Google blast" ad strategy, we're seeing politicians use more and more of our products and platforms to interact with voters, share information and keep their campaigns organized. We want to do our part to make sure candidates and campaigns have the tools to stay close to voters, who now expect to hear and see much more from their elected officials than ever before. So today, we're launching YouTube's You Choose 2010 Campaign Toolkit and a new and improved Google Campaign Toolkit. Both help candidates make their organizations more effective and deliver their messages more directly. On YouTube, campaigns will have access to features like a Politician channel (which allows campaigns to brand their channel and upload longer videos), Google Moderator, our free analytics tool YouTube Insight, and information about running paid advertising campaigns—using formats like in-stream ads and Promoted Videos—to reach viewers with political ads, just like on TV. And our Google toolkit demonstrates how Google Apps can keep staff and volunteers connected, how search ads can grow your email list and provides other helpful tools. We hope campaigns in both national and local contests will use these toolkits to engage and inform voters on important issues in 2010. As access to information online is increasingly important in elections, we're pleased to continue developing useful tools for voters and candidates.     |
Creating products, applications and services which benefit millions of users means looking at the world from a variety of perspectives. Envisioning and realizing the next generation of technology requires a diverse pool of creative and motivated engineers from all backgrounds. To that end, we're very pleased to announce the winners of our first annual European Scholarship for Students with Disabilities. This scholarship recognizes outstanding scientific contributions from students with disabilities who are pursuing university degrees in the field of computer science at a university in the European Union, Switzerland or Israel. Scholarships will be granted for the 2010–2011 academic year, and recipients will be invited to attend an all-expenses-paid retreat at the Googleplex in Zurich in June 2010. Congratulations to our scholars! Andrei George Petraru, Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iaşi, Romania Conrad Hochberg, Technische Universität München, Germany Dave Todd, University of Ulster, Northern Ireland Fabio De Dominicis, University of Naples Federico II, Italy Igor Gonopolskiy, Ben Gurion University, Israel Jordi Sanchez-Riera, INRIA Grenoble Rhône-Alpes, France Wanda Diaz-Merced, University of Glasgow, Scotland For complete details, see www.google.com/studentswithdisabilities-europe. To learn more about scholarships, grants and other opportunities for students in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, visit www.google.com/university/emea.     |
Although it feels like summer in many parts of the world, this week much of the North American sports community is focused squarely on ice hockey. That's because the Stanley Cup Finals between the Chicago Blackhawks and Philadelphia Flyers kicked off over the weekend. Today, the series shifts to Philadelphia, and the Flyers look to even the series. We've always shared the world's interest in ice hockey, and have expressed that through our 2010 Olympic Ice Hockey doodle, NHL scores in search results and our content partnership with the NHL on YouTube. And this year a few Googlers in Chicago tried to grow their own playoff beards to get in the spirit of the games. We see a surge of search queries related to the Stanley Cup every May, and this year is no exception. As each of the two teams get closer to hoisting Lord Stanley's cup, we're taking a look at what people from Chicago and Philadelphia as well as around the world are searching for related to the Cup. Globally, searches for [blackhawks] trump searches for [flyers] in the sports category although both are experiencing an unprecedented spike compared to past years.  In both Philadelphia and Chicago, the [blackhawks] and [flyers] were top of mind last week:  Top sports searches in Philadelphia  Top sports searches in Chicago Searches for [patrick kane] of the Chicago Blackhawks lead the way among searches for players involved in the Stanley Cup Finals.  After each goal scored in Chicago, the Blackhawks play the song "Chelsea Dagger" by the Fratellis. Accordingly, searches for [chelsea dagger] are surging, with Google users in Illinois topping the list and sparking a resurgence of the song across America.  With Googlers in our offices in both Illinois and Pennsylvania, we'll be watching like the rest of the world to see who wins the greatest trophy in sports. Just make sure you don't touch the Cup until you actually win it!      |
Posted: 02 Jun 2010 12:24 PM PDT From iGoogle's debut in 2005 to our more recent launch of stars in search in March, we've enjoyed making your search experience more relevant, useful and fun through personalization. Today, we're introducing a new feature that brings a whole new level of personalization to Google by letting you add a favorite photo or image to the background of the Google homepage. You can choose a photo from your computer, your own Picasa Web Album or a public gallery hosted by Picasa which includes a selection of beautiful photos.  An example homepage featuring artwork by Jeff Koons, photographed by Sandy Volz  A second example page, featuring artwork by Tom Otterness, photographed by Cesar Perez We are beginning to roll out this new feature to users in the U.S. over the next few days, so if you don't see a link in the lower left-hand corner of Google.com now, check back soon. For those of you outside of the U.S., you can expect to see this new feature in the coming days as we roll it out internationally to offer similar, consistent experiences globally. And if you've customized your look with a fun personal photo we'd love to see what your new homepage looks like. Tweet a picture of your page with the hashtag #myGooglepage and share it with us! We hope you enjoy this fun new feature and that it makes Google search more your own.     |
Friday, May 28, 2010
Watch efforts to stop the oil spill live and submit your ideas
As millions of gallons of oil pour into the Gulf of Mexico from the BP oil leak, ideas for stopping the leak and cleaning up the aftermath are needed. Today BP began their "top kill" procedure, which will attempt to send mud and cement into the well to block the flowing oil. You can watch what's happening through a live stream of the leak on PBS NewsHour's YouTube channel, the Google Oil Spill crisis response page or below. You can submit your ideas on the best way to stop and clean up the oil spill via Google     |
Tswana is a Bantu language spoken by the largest ethnic group in what landlocked country? The production of yerbe maté, a tea made from an evergreen plant, is important to the economy of Misiones. This province is located in which country that borders Paraguay? The Øresund Bridge, opened in 2000, connects Copenhagen, Denmark with what Swedish city? The largest city in northern Haiti was renamed following Haiti's independence from France. What is the present-day name of this city? Aadith Moorthy tackled these and other questions to win this year's National Geographic Bee held today in Washington, D.C. While he missed his first question of the day, he didn't let that get get in his way. His win is the culmination of many months of preparation and local competitions that began last fall at schools across the country. Aadith is a 13-year-old 8th grader from Palm Harbor, Florida and attends the Palm Land Middle School. When not studying geography, he is a South Indian classical (Carnatic) music concert singer. At the beginning of the final round, he gave the audience a taste of his talent when Alex Trebek, the host of the Bee, asked him to sing on the spot. We're proud that Google is this year's sponsor of the National Geographic Bee. This contest exemplifies the importance of being geographically literate and showcases just how well these students understand the world around them. This skill-set will be a vital asset as they continue their education and careers. As you can tell from the questions above, it's not just a matter of memorizing state and country capitals! I had the great opportunity to speak at both the preliminary and championship rounds of the Bee and was impressed by the dedication of the teachers who made special efforts to train their school finalists and the depth of knowledge of the students. This is contest with important implications for their future lives and careers. We're excited to follow all of the 54 finalists to see where in the world they land.  Answers: Botswana, Argentina, Malmö, Cap-Haïtien     |
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