Google Docs Liberated:You can now Download All your Google Docs in a Single Click using Export option

When Google Launched DataLiberation ,Brian Fitzpatrick, Data Liberation engineering manager said in a blog post:

We've already liberated over half of all Google products, from our popular blogging platform Blogger, to our email service Gmail, and Google developer tools including App Engine. In the upcoming months, we also plan to liberate Google Sites and Google Docs (batch-export).

Google has done exactly as per the above statement.You can now download or back up All your documents inside Google Docs.Select the Documents You want to Export inside your Google Docs.Click Export under More actions.Now you are ready to download the files compressed as a zip file.Choose the Export format from the drop down and click continue.

If you have more docs, the system might take some time to zip all the files.You can Click on "Email when ready" and It will send you a mail as soon as the zip file is ready for downloading.Note:The zip file will be available for three days only and will be removed after that.
If you are using Bookmark sync in Chrome then it will even download the Bookmarks as a single HTML file.I think the Export option is a great feature coming from google.This will kill a lot of third party applications around batch download.

How to Share a Folder in Google Docs

You can now share a folder inside Google Docs.This will be helpful in cases where you want to share multiple files with some one.Instead of sharing files one by one ,you can put all the files in one folder and share the whole folder.

To Share a Folder follow the steps as given below.
1.Create a new folder through Create new->Folder.
2.Select the folder on the left navigation panel under my folders.
3.Click the Share this folder Drop down and select Invite people.
4.Enter the mail id of people you want to invite and click send to send them an email with a link to your folder.
According to Google:
when you share a folder, the new permissions are pushed to all sub-folders and docs within the folder. Normally this happens quickly, but occasionally, it could take a couple of minutes.

You can find more details about folder sharing here.

Translate and Detect Languages inside Google Spreadsheet cells with Translation function

Google recently added two new functions to the Google Spreadsheets that will help in translation and language detection.What are those two functions and how do they work?

=GoogleTranslate("Statement to be translated","from language","to language").
=DetectLanguage("Statement from which you want to know the language").

Let us look at the first function GoogleTranslate.
1.It takes 3 arguments.
2.The first parameter contains the statement that needs to be translated.It can even refer to a cell.
3.The second parameter is the two letter language code for the text in first parameter.In other words it is the "source language" code.
4.The third parameter represents the language you want your text to be translated.In other words it is the "destination language" code.
5.The third parameter is optional and if you leave this out ,it will translate the text into the spreadsheet language.
6.You can get the full list of two letter language codes here.

If you want to translate "I Love you" in Simplified Chinese then you will do this as shown below.The first parameter can even refer to a cell containing the text.
The translated text will be shown as displayed below.When you hover your mouse over the translated text, it displays the original text that was translated.
Now let us detect the language of the text in D3.To detect the language use the function DetectLanguage as shown below.
It shows "zh" as the detected language .If I use Traditional Chinese and then use the DetectLanguage function it displays zh-Hant.
You can even use the DetectLanguage function as the 2nd and 3rd parameter inside the function GoogleTranslate as shown below.
The syntax I have used to translate C3 is =GoogleTranslate(C3,DetectLanguage(C3),"zh-TW").The advantage is that instead of hard coding the source language you can use detectLanguage to determine the source language.

Use Google Docs to view PDF and PPT from inside your Broser

Google Docs recently added a new functionality where you can embed PDF ,PowerPoint or Tiff in a web page.This does not require any downloading of the file.This is particularly helpful for the blog owners and webmasters .They can now embed the pdf instead of just showing a link to download the file.

So how do you build your own urls if you want to embed a PDF or a PPT?

You will use a format as shown below to embed the documents.
<iframe src="http://docs.google.com/viewer?url=<your Encoded URL here>&embedded=true" width="600" height="780"></iframe>

The above format accepts two parameters "url" and "embeded".The parameter url contains the encoded version of the actual url.

To display the documents directly in browser using google docs viewer ,you will use a format as given below.
http://docs.google.com/viewer?url=

If you upload a PDF to Google Docs it takes the form as given below.
http://docs.google.com/fileview?id=0Bx1JSIWei_LIMWNiMzFhZWEtZjkzYS00MzI4LWIxMWMtZDgzMzIyNDg5Y2M5&hl=en

So if you use the above URL to embed the document in Google Docs Viewer it wont work because the Google Docs Viewer cant recognize the format as the URL does not have ".pdf". I have found a way to overcome this.The below embeded document was uploaded to Google Docs directly.






The format I have used to embed the uploaded Google Docs is given below.
<iframe frameborder="0" width="100%" height="500" id="gview" src="http://docs.google.com/gview?a=v&amp;pid=explorer&amp;chrome=false&amp;api=true&amp;srcid=0Bx1JSIWei_LIMWNiMzFhZWEtZjkzYS00MzI4LWIxMWMtZDgzMzIyNDg5Y2M5"></iframe>

Replace the scrid with your Google Docs id.

Zoho and Scribd also offer similar functionality along with more features.The problem with Scribd is that it uses Flash to render documents and some of the Mobile Phones still do not support Flash.In Zoho you are forced to upload the document before seeing it.

We will certainly see more features getting added to Google Docs viewer in coming weeks.One feature I would like to see is an API where people can send search parameters also.Now get started with the Google Docs Viewer.

How to create a grid survey using Google Docs

Google Docs introduced a new feature in Forms on 3rd Sep which will help the users to quickly get answers for a group of similar questions in a grid format.The new Grid item allows to have a maximum of 5 columns and as many rows as users want.

So how to create a survey in grid format?
This particular survey shows all the new features that have been introduced along with Grid item.


1.Login to Google Docs and Click New->Form.
2.Select the Question Type as Grid from the drop down.
3.Fill in the field Question Title ,Help Text and Column labels (Select the appropriate No Of columns).
4.Fill in the Row labels.Crate as many rows as you want.
5.Select Make this a required question if you want to make it mandatory.
6.Click Done and now you are ready with the survey.

The next question:How do you show the survey results to the respondents ?
To do this Select More Actions->Edit confirmation.In the Confirmation window select the check box "Let everyone see response summary" and then save.your survey results can now be seen by others.

You can submit the survey details as displayed above in this post and see the responses immediately after submitting.

As displayed in the survey Google Docs has also introduced some other interesting features such as
Improved results summary charts.
Bi-directional language support (support for Right-to-Left(RTL) text support).
Sign-in to view form (if enabled user is required to sign-in to view a form).
Pre-populate a form with parameters (developers can pre-populate a form with data).

You can find more details about the features from the Google Docs blog post.

Acrobat.com Vs Google Docs

On 15Th June Adobe has announced that it has moved Acrobat.com out of beta.


Those of you who do not know what Acrobat.com is ,it is an online collaboration tool to create and share documents ,communicate in real time and simplify working with others.It was first launched in June 2008 which included a collaborative word processing application called Buzzword.Recently it has added two new products namely Presentations and Tables to Acrobat.com .It offers two new paid subscription services that add capacity and capabilities for intensive business use .


Google provides all the above features plus many more free of cost as part of google docs . Acrobat.com table provides basic table functionalities where as Google spread sheet provides all the functionalities of a spreadsheet .I tried creating a large table on Acrobat.com table and compared the same with Google spread sheet and found that the performance in Acrobat.com table was really poor .You might go for Acrobat.com tables if your data size is very less .While Adobe might provide a better look and feel with its rich user interface google docs delivers more in feature and performance.

Recently google labs launched another product called Fusion Tables for managing large collections of tabular data in the cloud.Using Fusion Tables you can upload tables up to 100 MB and work with them.You can even visualise it on maps and other charts and can use it for collaboration with several levels of granularity.

While Adobe plans to extend the functionality of Acrobat.com over the next year to provide simple ,anywhere access to an open and comprehensive online workspace ,Google docs still remains my favourite.

Also Adobe will have to compete with several other competitors in the online document collaboration market such as Zoho and TextFlow.