Google Data

(Cross-posted on the Original Google Blog and the Google Drive Blog.)

Whether you’re crunching big data or tracking your team’s budget, you don’t want to waste time waiting for files to load or re-doing edits that were lost because your Internet connection dropped. You can now get more done by switching to the new version of Google Sheets. It’s faster, supports larger spreadsheets, has a number of new features, and works offline.

Bigger, faster spreadsheets

The new Sheets supports millions of cells and kicks many of the old size and complexity limits to the curb. Scrolling, loading and calculation are all snappier, even in more complex spreadsheets.

New features based on your feedback and requests 

Filter views is a new feature unique to Google Sheets that lets you quickly name, save and share different views of your data. This comes in handy when you’re collaborating so you can sort a spreadsheet without affecting how others see it.

Whether you’re new to formulas or a whiz at running complex functions, it’s now easier to set up and perform calculations. New function help and examples guide you as you type, and error highlighting and coloring make it easy to spot and fix mistakes.

As another time-saving improvement, text now automatically flows into empty adjacent cells—no manual merge needed.

With the improved conditional formatting, you can add rules to change the colors and styles of cells in your spreadsheet based on custom formulas.

No internet connection? Work offline with Chrome 

You shouldn’t have to think about whether you have a WiFi connection when you want to work. So just like Google Docs and Slides, you can now make edits to Sheets offline. When you reconnect to the Internet, your edits will automatically sync. If you’ve edited Docs or Slides offline in the past, then you’re already set up to edit Sheets offline. If not, follow these one-time instructions for setting up offline in Chrome.

Ready to try it out? 

Turn on the new Sheets by checking the “Try the new Google Sheets” box in Google Drive settings. From then on, all new spreadsheets you create will work offline and include these new features. We’ll be adding a small list of missing features in the coming months, so if you rely on any of them, you may want to wait a little longer before opting in.

We hope you enjoy these and the many other updates that come along with the new Google Sheets, including colored sheet tabs, custom number formatting, paste transpose and more. 

Dell has a long history of serving schools’ education technology needs. Today, they join the Google for Education family, announcing the new Dell Chromebook 11.

The new Dell Chromebook 11

The Dell Chromebook 11 was designed with schools in mind. The battery lasts up to 10 hours — enough for a full school day plus homework — and boots up in 8.4 seconds. It is light and highly portable, making it ideal for student use at home or on the go. And like all Chromebooks, it includes the cutting edge in security features, keeping schools protected from online threats. The device will be available in two versions – 4GB in January 2014 and 2GB in Q1 2014 – both for under $300.

“Dell asked for and listened to feedback about what our district needs in a laptop so we can ensure the best teaching and learning experiences across our schools. Simplicity in rolling out and managing the Chromebooks was really important to us because we only have a crew of six IT team members to manage 13,000 students. We also know that students can be tough on the technology, so we really appreciate the durable screen and robust power supply the Dell Chromebook 11 offers.”

–Bryan Phillips, Chief Technology Officer, Hoover City School District, Alabama

Verified for 2014 Assessments
The new Dell Chromebook 11 joins a family of 5 other Chromebooks that are verified for the latest education assessments. Both Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (Smarter Balanced) and the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) verified that all Chromebooks meet their requirements for standardized assessments in the 2014-2015 school year. With the shift toward online assessments and the Common Core State Standards, Chromebooks are helping schools achieve their goals.

To learn more about Chromebooks for Education, please visit our website and fill out our contact form to speak with a member of our team.

Editor’s note: Today’s guest blogger is Gregg Rosann, President, Co-Founder, and Chief Technology Officer of Graduation Alliance, based in Salt Lake City. Graduation Alliance works with school districts around the country to help students facing challenging life circumstances to graduate. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

High school can be a tough time for any student. But the students we work with face challenges that many of their peers couldn’t even imagine. They may work to support family members who are ill or unemployed, be homeless or have been bullied in school. Or they may have young children. Many of our students haven’t been in a classroom in years.

Since 2007, we’ve been giving students like this the flexibility, academic interventions and social support they need to get back on track and moving forward toward graduation. Working in partnership with local public school districts, we provide a complete suite of online learning courses that are free to students and allow them to earn credits toward graduation at their own pace. We also offer several layers of human support, which is essential to helping students make education a priority.

Because few of these students are in a position to attend a brick-and-mortar school, we provide laptops and internet access to our students as part of the program. We deployed Chromebooks to about 600 students this school year. We determined that moving to Chromebooks from the PCs and tablets we were providing could help us reduce our cost of ownership by significantly reducing the need for technical support. We also like that Chromebooks are essentially “log on and go.” Students don’t have to worry about a multistep process just to get on the web. Also, the speed and simplicity of the Chrome browser helps our students access our online learning program and get to work faster, so they can be more productive.

We manage students’ Internet access through a proxy server that we control though the Chromebook management console. The ability to limit Internet access (which we do when students fall behind in their coursework), turn off machines, and control policies from a central console is very helpful. It allows us to make sure students are taking full advantage of the program. Also, there’s no need to send a Chromebook back to the home office to be reset before it’s issued to another student, as user information is siloed, encrypted and easily wiped remotely. That’s a huge plus for an organization like ours with a nationally distributed student base.

The most important thing about Chromebooks is that they just make sense for our students, because they’ve grown up with the web. Asking them to use a desktop app to access their coursework is a foreign concept. But, if you give them instructions to go straight to a website, they understand. That’s their mindset.

Chromebooks help us focus on our students, and allow our students to focus on moving forward toward graduation. And when a student who once saw nothing but obstacles instead sees their name on a diploma, it’s an amazing thing.

Editor’s note: Our guest blogger is James Griffiths, General Manager of WaterTrax, a Vancouver-based software provider that helps agencies and utilities companies manage operational data for their water and wastewater systems. View our webinar series to learn more about Google solutions for the utilities industry.

To provide clean water to millions of people every day, utilities must analyze petabytes of data to spot and correct potentially dangerous incidents in water treatment and distribution networks. As a provider of operations management software, WaterTrax is always looking for ways to make data monitoring and management easier and more effective for our utility customers.

Mapping of Sampling Points

We integrated Google Maps into our platform to allow WaterTrax users to quickly visualize system data on a map. We created a Google Maps-based tool that provides a spatial display of water system structures combined with real-time water quality data. Quite literally, our product allows utility managers to see how water quality is being affected as water flows throughout the entire system.

By displaying complex data in a visually appealing way, Google Maps helps our customers spot issues and identify trends instantaneously. Utility managers get a visual view of recent test results, compliance history, alerts, complaints and sampling schedules — all mapped to specific locations. Instead of poring over spreadsheets and structured tables to spot trends in sampling data, now they see this data right on a map. We’ve observed that customers like plotting sampling locations on maps using street view, satellite view and terrain view. They also appreciate being able to quickly export map data into their Geographic Information System (GIS) databases.

Mapping of most recent free chlorine results in the distribution system

Going forward, we’ll continue to add enhancements to our Google Maps offering. Already, we’ve added features based on customer feedback. California-based Golden State Water Company wanted to see a glimpse of their chlorine results to know if sampling was up to date and contaminant levels were within acceptable ranges. So we created a search feature in Google Maps to display only the most recent test results. During a recent high chlorate incident, Golden State Water used the WaterTrax mapping interface to track real-time data across their system. The searchable map showed the most recent lab results, so the team could visualize in real-time where chlorate levels were increasing or decreasing to take immediate action.

At WaterTrax, our goal is to make real-time data monitoring easier for utilities. Google Maps allow our customers to spot potential problems quickly, so they can ensure public water safety and quality for millions of consumers every day.

Mapping of most recent free chlorine results in the distribution system

Editor’s note: Today we hear from Cee Chan, IT Manager at the environmentally conscious handmade cosmetics company LUSH. Headquartered in England, LUSH has multiple manufacturing sites and several head office locations in Poole and London. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

At LUSH, we believe in making products that are quality from start to finish and take care to only buy ingredients that have a positive impact on the community from which they are sourced. We send our Ethical Buying Team to visit suppliers, trace the ingredients and meet the growers to ensure care for the environment and fair worker conditions. We take pride in what we do and make an effort to provide our team with the tools they need to create the best products and deliver exceptional service. Yet, as we started to grow, our Scalix email system began crashing regularly, causing our productivity to plummet.

We started looking for a new email solution with three key things in mind. First, we wanted a cloud-based solution that could scale as we grew without causing any service outages. Second, we wanted a solution that would enable seamless, real-time collaboration. We’re a team-oriented company and wanted to employ tools like Google Docs and Hangouts that made collaboration simple, whether it was between two employees in our Poole office or five teams spread across the globe. Third, we wanted a flexible solution that would support our BYOD policy and allow employees to work on any device, from anywhere, at any time. We considered a few different options, but when Ancoris introduced us to Google Apps we found that it was the only solution that fulfilled all of our needs.

Google’s cloud-based solution helps us scale seamlessly without any interruptions to our coverage. Before moving onto Google Apps, we spent at least eight hours a week dealing with IT issues. Now, we can lean on Google to deal with the technology side of our business and we no longer have to worry about things like disk space or email outages—everything just works. The switch to Google Apps is a huge boost to productivity and time savings, which in turn saves us a lot of money. As an environmentally conscious company, it also feels good knowing we are decreasing our footprint by getting rid of our on-site infrastructure and becoming more energy efficient.

Through tools like Docs and Hangouts, Google Apps enables a collaborative and flexible work environment that keeps us all on the same page, no matter where we are located. For example, we use Docs across the company to manage employee schedules and timesheets so that everyone can be on the same page. The fact that any employee can open the shared document and know they’re viewing the most up-to-date version, instead of having to sift through old email attachments, has vastly improved efficiency. The best part is that we can access our documents from anywhere and on any device, helping us maintain a flexible work environment. Tools like Hangouts have also improved collaboration at LUSH, because connecting with colleagues is now so simple and seamless.

Moving to Google Apps was critical to help our business scale, innovate and keep our commitment to producing ethically-sourced products that are good for our customers and good for our suppliers. With Google taking care of the technology side of our business, we can now focus on the things that matter most–making products that are quality from start to finish.

The Mobile management page can still be reached through the old navigation path by clicking Google Apps > Mobile.

Editions included:
Google Apps for Business, Education, and Government

For more information:
http://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/1289314

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Editions included: 
Google Apps for Business, Education, and Government

Release track:
Rapid release

For more information:
http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2013/12/know-where-to-go-stay-up-to-date-and.html
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Editor’s note: Today’s guest blogger is Nigel Bailey, General Manager – Fairfax Production Services for Fairfax Media New Zealand. The company is headquartered in Auckland, New Zealand, and has two national, nine daily and more than 60 community newspapers in addition to more than 25 magazines and websites. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

Fairfax Media NZ was established in 2003 and currently employs approximately 1,800 people. Since its founding, the company has grown its reach to nearly three million New Zealanders across its 90+ publications. We are headquartered in Auckland with additional teams in Wellington and Christchurch. When I joined eight years ago, our IT environment was incredibly fragmented. Every newspaper had its own IT department, systems and ways of doing things.

As the company grew, we began to view our business differently and started looking into how we could restructure the organization. We wanted to consolidate and standardize the different systems we used so we embarked on a systems centralization program.

Four years ago, one of our major challenges was email. Employees in different cities used different email systems—primarily Microsoft Exchange—but we wanted everyone on one central system. We needed a system that would allow teams to work and collaborate virtually. At that time, there wasn’t a comparable solution on the market. Since then, however, Google has made immense progress. In 2012, we began our migration onto Google Apps and by November, the entire company had made the move. Now, for the first time in the company’s history, we have a single view of IT across the organization.

We saw three immediate benefits after moving to Google Apps: real-time collaboration, increased productivity and the ability to work anytime, anywhere. For us, being able to collaborate in real-time is crucial. Google’s cloud-based solution means that we can do anything from anywhere. For a media organisation, this is absolute gold. Having news teams and sales teams be able to collaborate and share information wherever they are is a completely new way of thinking and it has spread to other parts of our business.

At a recent internal event, I was impressed by how efficiently everything ran. Before Google Apps, we shared agendas via email and everyone added their comments in separate documents and one person would cobble all the revisions together. This involved countless back-and-forth emails and a hope that by the end, everyone’s comments were properly captured. The agenda would have to be finalised well before the event because making any updates involved the same cumbersome process. Various versions of notes recapping the event would also be assembled from several different documents.

Now that we’re on Google Apps, we’re all on the same page—literally! Being able to share one document, where everyone can collaborate at the same time, has been a huge time saver and a boost to efficiency. The speed at which we can now turn things around is profoundly faster.The switch to Google Apps increased our productivity by allowing us to work anytime, anywhere.

One of the best parts of the migration was the team excitement about the move to Google Apps. When we announced we were rolling out Google Apps, some staff came up to us and said, “We’ve actually been using Google Apps on the side but hadn’t told the IT department because we didn’t want to get into trouble. Can we now move what we’ve already set up into the Fairfax Media Google environment?” People are using this sort of technology at home already. By moving to Google Apps we’re actually catching up to our employees.

(Cross-posted on the Google Cloud Platform Blog)

Editor’s note: Today’s guest blog comes from Dan Mesh, Vice President of Technology at Evite, the pioneer in online invitations and social planning. Evite has over 30 million registered users and sends more than 250 million party invitations annually.

In the past year, we’ve introduced a couple of exciting new products at Evite: our Postmark service offers premium online invitations and announcements for milestone events like weddings and births, and Evite Ink lets our users design custom paper invitations that we print and mail for a small fee. We couldn’t have launched these products without Google Compute Engine and Google App Engine, which gave us the infrastructure needed to scale our services to high demands and analyze large volumes of data they generate.

Evite has been around since 1998, but behind this well-known online brand is a small and lean team. Migrating to the cloud has allowed us to focus our time, energy and financial resources on development of new products and services, free from worries of server management, capacity planning and hardware costs.

We chose Google Cloud Platform because the combination of App Engine and Compute Engine truly delivers on the cloud’s promise of scalable and elastic computing. App Engine’s autoscaling means that as long as our applications are developed in line with the platform API’s and architecture guidelines, scalability comes for free. This is a huge benefit since we no longer worry about scaling our services to meet heavy demands and are also free from the difficulties and risks inherent in capacity planning.

Most online businesses have very consistent daily, weekly and seasonal traffic patterns, and in Evite’s case, these patterns are even more pronounced. In the past, we used to provision resources to meet peak demand allowing for a healthy margin of error and future growth. Naturally, this resulted in a lot of wasted capital and engineering resources. Now that most of our systems are running on Google Cloud Platform, we see significant savings as application servers expand and shrink elastically in accordance with our web traffic.

For example, in the past Evite was hesitant to roll out major application releases in Q4, typically the busiest time of the year for us. During this time, we reach our peak traffic, and operational focus was on making sure nothing went wrong. Any significant releases represented unwanted risk. Cloud Platform greatly simplifies the release process and provides built-in traffic splitting. This has made it possible for Evite product teams to test new features and release products more frequently and with reduced risks, even during the busiest times of year.

As we add new products and services, Compute Engine plays a key role in our application infrastructure. We use it to closely monitor and analyze the performance of our products and services. All application data and log files generated by applications running on App Engine flow through a cluster of Compute Engine instances running extract, transform, load (ETL) processes, which feed this data into the data warehouse. There we analyze the collected data to detect errors and usage patterns helping us improve the design of our products and maintain performance levels.

Compute Engine gets high marks for interoperability with App Engine and other cloud vendors. We use AWS Redshift as our data warehouse so interoperability is very important. Equally impressive are predictable, high I/O performance and fast instance startup times. For our data processing workloads these two metrics are critical to success.

With App Engine powering all of our customer-facing services and Compute Engine helping us monitor and understand application performance, Evite is in great shape to create and release new products. We look forward to many new releases in 2014 knowing we can count on Cloud Platform to make these launches trouble-free.

Why did you choose Google Apps?
We moved our entire company onto Google Apps five years ago to cut costs and align closely with the tools our customers and employees wanted to use. The benefits we’re experiencing, however, go beyond that and have led to improved efficiency, increased mobility, and better collaboration across our company. We also knew that using Google Apps and other technologies would help us innovate and differentiate ourselves from other real estate companies.

How is Google Apps increasing collaboration across Redfin?
We have offices across the U.S., which could pose obstacles for a team-oriented work environment, but tools like Docs and Spreadsheets help keep our team collaborative. We use Docs to share any work that needs to be viewed or edited by multiple people or parties, like marketing lists or specs for new Redfin.com features. Our staff uses Docs to create and share planning documents and task checklists with 20 or more team members across multiple offices and time zones. The fact that we can all review and comment simultaneously has improved collaboration company-wide.

As a real estate business, your team is often on location. What tools help employees remain efficient while working remotely?
Our real estate agents are frequently out of the office helping clients buy or sell homes, so we really benefit from having remote access to all of our files through Google Drive. Our real estate agents work in teams, with a coordinator helping them throughout the escrow process. By using Google Drive, both team members can access and update the most current version of a contract, ensuring timely and accurate access to critical details about each real estate transaction. It’s also a huge boost to efficiency knowing that anytime we open a document in Drive, it’s the correct version and changes are saved automatically. This eliminates the need to sift through emails on our mobile device to try to find the most recent copy.

Is there a particular tool that helps keep the team organized?
Our intranet is powered by Google Sites. We store and share everything from company announcements and events to many internal resources like HR documents. The entire team knows that there’s a single, centralized place to find all of the basic information they need.

How is Google Apps helping Redfin achieve its goals?
Our primary goal is to use technology to transform the way people buy and sell homes–making it easier and more enjoyable for our clients. Any tools that can help our teams collaborate more efficiently, thus serving our clients more effectively, is a win for Redfin and our customer. Google Apps is helping us deliver that result.

Release track:
Scheduled release

Editions included:
Google Apps for Business, Education, and Government

For more information:
http://googledrive.blogspot.com/2013/11/attachments-in-gmail-now-with-power-of.html

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