Google Data » Peter Harbison

Our response to your Google Docs Product Ideas

Peter Harbison — Tue, 12 Jul 2011 16:00:00 +0000

Posted by Teresa Wu, Community Manager

(Cross posted to the Docs Blog)

Recently we opened our Product Ideas page to gather your feedback about what you’d like to see next in Google Docs. Over a two-week period, nearly 4,000 of you participated, submitting close to 2,000 ideas and casting over 50,000 votes.

Our request for feedback was designed to help us better prioritize the features you want most in Google Docs. We'll be sure to let you know as we roll out new features based on your valuable input. Here are just a few of the top ideas that we’re prioritizing:

Add better header and footer functionality
Make Google Docs available offline
Create vertical merge in spreadsheets

There were many other great ideas - from making Google Docs available as attachments in Gmail to allowing the use of Google Fonts across all Google Docs tools. While we can’t get started on these requests just yet, we’ll be sure to keep them in mind for future improvements.

Thanks to all who participated in our Product Ideas page! We enjoyed reading your product suggestions and look forward to sharing our progress as we move forward with the your ideas.

Share your docs on the go with the improved Google Docs for mobile

Peter Harbison — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 16:01:00 +0000

Posted by: Hossein Attar, Software Engineer

(Cross-posted to the Mobile blog and Docs Blog)

Google Docs is about collaboration, but as many of us know, others often rely on us even when we’re nowhere near a computer. That’s why we’re excited to bring the features you need to your tablet and mobile device’s browser. Today, we've updated the look of Google Docs for mobile browsers and added the ability to sort, narrow, and share multiple docs in your mobile docs list.

To get started, go to docs.google.com from your supported device’s browser. Press Sort to organize the list of docs visible in the mobile browser, or press Narrow by to specify the subset of docs you’d like to see.

To share from your mobile docs list, select one or more documents, press the Share button, and select Share, Get the link to share for public or unlisted docs, or Email as attachment. Sharing a doc in your mobile browser works the same way as it does on the desktop.

We’re committed to improving the experience of accessing your docs from your mobile device. We’d love to hear what you think is working and what isn’t in our support forums as well as in the comments of this post.

A few improvements to discussions in Google Docs

Peter Harbison — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 16:30:00 +0000

(Cross-posted to the Enterprise blog)

In March, we launched discussions in Google Docs, replacing comments with discussion threads, @mentions, email notifications, and much more. This week, we’re launching a handful of improvements based on your feedback.

Improvements to the discussion pane

The discussion pane now shows the selected text for each comment thread, making it easy to figure out which part of the document each discussion pertained to. We’ve also given the pane a visual tuneup.

Document statistics
Ever wonder if people are actually looking at the document you’ve shared? Wonder no longer. By clicking the Discussions button and then the Document stats link, you can now see the 7-day activity of your doc.

Collapse discussions

Sometimes, discussions can get a little long and start to clutter your workspace, particularly if guy-who-always-replies takes the discussion on a tangent. Now, long discussions are automatically collapsed and expanded on click.

Email notifications

Email notifications have also undergone a facelift. Instead of sending the entire discussion in reverse chronological order, we now show you the selected text and most recent comment, with the full thread in chronological order below.

We’re looking forward to hearing your feedback about these improvements. Let us know what else you’d like to see in discussions on our Product Ideas page.

Posted by: Joseph Scarr, Software Engineering Intern

A Google Docs documents list refresh

Peter Harbison — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 18:00:00 +0000

Files stored 100% on the web can be accessed from any computer or device and shared with co-workers with ease. Over the past year, many of you have been taking advantage of the ability to upload any file to Google Docs. With more files and a variety of file types in one place, organizing and quickly being able to find what you need becomes even more important. As a result, we’re happy to announce that, over the next couple of days, we’ll be rolling out a refresh to the documents list, aimed to make it easier to find, explore and share all your files. We’re also rolling out big improvements to our back-end systems to make your experience in the documents list faster and smoother.

Google Apps for Business customers who have the “Enable pre-release features” option selected in the control panel, and customers of all other editions will start seeing the new interface within a few days. Google Apps for Business customers without the “pre-release features” option selected won’t see this improvement for a few more weeks. More details can be found on the Google Docs blog.

Posted by Vijay Bangaru, Product Manager, Google Docs

Improving team collaboration and productivity with Google Sites

Peter Harbison — Tue, 30 Nov 2010 18:51:00 +0000

Effective collaboration has become a key driver to improve team productivity. Project teams, often located across disparate locations and time zones, produce and distribute content in different formats and platforms. Teams need to consolidate relevant information in one place that’s easy to navigate and retrieve. Contributors and reviewers have specific needs to manage the creative process, maintain the project plan and keep all stakeholders informed.

With Google Sites, you can easily manage projects and create, share, find, and publish content across your organization. Easy to use features such as site and page templates and embedded documents make it easy for any user to create useful sites. Google Sites can be used for company intranets, portals, team project and more. Furthermore, the Google Sites API gives third-party developers a way to access, integrate with, and extend the platform. The To-Do gadget is an example of extending a Google Site with a tool that can enable teams to track and manage tasks.

Join Scott Johnston, Group Product Manager of Google Sites, and me for a live webinar on Tuesday, December 7th to learn more about improving collaboration and team productivity. I’ll start with an overview of Google Sites and highlight features that can help teams be more productive. We will be featuring a live demo.

Register to attend the live webinar on 12/7 @ 10am PST / 1pm EST / 6 pm GMT.

We hope to see you there.

Posted by Lisa Ding, Google Sites Team

Drawing out ideas in documents

Peter Harbison — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 16:07:00 +0000

Have you recently toiled over instructions to assemble furniture? Now imagine the agony if you had no illustrations to fall back on. What’s the best way to teach kids about nutrition without a food pyramid?

Sometimes when working with text you realize that words can only articulate so much. And that’s why we have drawings in Google documents. Drawings can be useful for things like diagramming processes in a flowchart or clearly articulating the relationship between a groups of ideas.

To get started, select the Drawing option from the Insert menu:

Now, you’ll see the drawing editor.

When creating a drawing for a document, the shapes menu can be particularly helpful. From thought bubbles to arrows to a smiley-face, this menu can help you whip up something playful or professional in no time.

As with images, you can resize a drawing and even mark it as inline or fixed within your document.
You can also copy an existing Google drawing into a document. To do that, first select the relevant shapes in your original drawing, and then copy them using the Web clipboard.

In your document, open the Web clipboard and paste the drawing into your document.

Give it a test drive and let us know what you think in the comments.

Posted by: Henry Lau, Software Engineer

Preview the faster, more feature rich Google spreadsheets

Peter Harbison — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 17:11:00 +0000

On Monday we launched a preview version of the new Google spreadsheets. We completely rebuilt the user interface to be faster, stabler, and more feature-rich, while maintaining the real-time collaboration that has made Google spreadsheets a powerful tool for the past four years.

In this new version you will find a host of highly requested new features, as well as performance and usability improvements. The new UI also gives us engineers a better platform to build on in the coming months, so stay tuned for more exciting developments.

You can now edit cells using the formula bar, which is ideal for working with complicated formulas.

Cell auto fill makes duplicating an entry as easy as pressing Enter. Just type the first few characters and the rest will show up as you type.

You can now move columns by dragging them with your mouse. You can also sort a column with the drop-down menu on the column header.

Our changes even made it down to the bottom of the spreadsheet, where we’ve re-designed the links to sheets so they're clearer and easier to use. Sheet titles are bigger and easier to click. And for those of you with a lot of sheets in one doc, we added a quick way to view a list of all your sheets.

At Google, we believe every millisecond counts and we’re happy the new technological foundation allows for faster loading and a smoother scrolling experience. Initial loading, cell freezing, scrolling, and edits from collaborators are all improved. And getting where you want in a spreadsheet is faster too: you can provide direct links to any sheet in a spreadsheet.

To give the new spreadsheets a try, click the New version link in the top right corner of every spreadsheet. And let us know what you think on the forums.

Posted by: Zach Loyd, Staff Software Engineer

Live in India

Peter Harbison — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 03:34:00 +0000

Posted by Jason Cooper, Developer Programs

Last month's prelaunch testing of the orkut developer platform brought a small set of third-party applications to less than 1% of orkut users. After implementing various improvements, tweaks, and fixes, we are moving into the first stage of the official rollout process by announcing the platform's availability in India, which represents about 10% of the orkut user base.

To commemorate the launch, five new applications are being added to the directory alongside the 15 from the prelaunch testing period. Early next week, after we have had an opportunity to assess the platform for several days, we will begin adding more applications to the directory. As noted previously, apps originally submitted on or before 2/15 will get first priority for review. All others are being reviewed on a first-come, first-serve basis, so submit yours soon!

Several members from the OpenSocial developer support team will be available in the official OpenSocial IRC channel (irc.freenode.com#opensocial) next week to chat about the orkut platform and development in general. Stay tuned to this blog for an official date and time, which we'll make available soon.

Launching to 10% of users in about a week

Peter Harbison — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 17:22:00 +0000

Posted by Amar Gandhi, Group Product Manager

We're now about a week away from making OpenSocial apps available to millions of users in India, corresponding to 10% of all orkut users. With this update we also want to increase the number of apps included in the directory. As we mentioned last week, we've created a new app submission page.

Please note that all apps must be submitted through this page to be included in the directory. Even if you have submitted your app previously, you still need to resubmit your app through this new page and agree to the Developer Terms of Service for orkut.

As we mentioned before, developers who submitted their app on or before 2/15 will get first priority for review. Other than these early birds, we'll be reviewing apps on a first come, first serve basis. Right now we're expecting it to take 1-2 weeks after submission for an app to show up in the directory, but this will depend on the volume of apps we receive. If your app is not approved for some reason, you will be notified by email.

Thank you for your patience as we finalized the UI, API and user experience during the pre-launch testing period. Please write to us if you have additional questions or concerns.

Update on the launch rollout plan

Peter Harbison — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 17:09:00 +0000

Posted by Amar Gandhi, Group Product Manager

We've discovered and fixed numerous bugs during prelaunch testing and have been working on a number of UI improvements based on developer and user feedback. You will be able to see these changes on the sandbox soon.

The launch rollout will occur in two stages. We will first make apps available to 10% of users. Once we have determined that the platform is working well, we will make an update to the directory and continue rolling out to the rest of orkut users.

Before the first stage of the rollout, we'll contact developers who submitted their apps by 2/15 so we can include their apps in the first stage and will make available a new submission page where anyone can submit his/her app. We will add these submitted apps to the directory on a first come, first serve basis before and during the first stage.

Stay tuned for new developer guidelines and the new submission page. One week before we begin the first stage of the rollout, we will announce it here and link to the new submission page so everyone has time to prepare.

Getting to know the orkut users: Browser Usage

Peter Harbison — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 19:36:00 +0000

Posted by Lane LiaBraaten, Developer Programs

The orkut user base is an expressive and lively bunch. Knowing how users interact with orkut (and each other) will help you improve the reliability and user experience of your apps. In this first installment of the "Getting to know orkut users" series, let's take a look at what browsers people are using to access orkut.

The overwhelming majority of orkut users are using Internet Explorer. About 85% of visits come from IE. Of those visits, roughly two-thirds of users are using IE6, and the other third is using IE7. The Firefox users, which account for 14% of visits, are almost all using Firefox 2, with about 1% of them using version 1.5 and 1% using version 3. Safari, Opera and Mozilla account for 1% of orkut visits combined.

The orkut team ensures that all features work great on IE6, IE7 and FF2. Testing your apps in these browsers will help ensure that the vast majority of orkut users will be able to use your apps.

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* URL for pie chart: http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=p3&chd=t:55.0,28.0,15.0,2.0&chs=400x125&chl=Internet%20Explorer%206|Internet%20Explorer%207|Firefox%202|Other

The orkut developer guide: better, faster, stronger

Peter Harbison — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 21:42:00 +0000

Posted by Arne Roomann-Kurrik, Developer Programs

Like Oscar Goldman says, "We can rebuild it. We have the technology." The orkut developer's guide has just undergone a major revision to match the current state of the orkut sandbox. We've made the following changes:

All samples have been updated for version 0.7 of the OpenSocial API.
The images have been updated to reflect the new application user interface.
Additional sections about orkut's policies on activity streams and profile data have been added.

If you've been looking for orkut-specific code samples, or information about how orkut will handle activity streams and profile fields, then check out the updated guide. The Six Million Dollar Man would be proud!

Launch plan update

Peter Harbison — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 19:04:00 +0000

Posted by Amar Gandhi, Group Product Manager

We've made a couple of modifications to the launch plan detailed in this post. We've decided to have a pre-launch testing period in which we'll push just a few apps to production -- this will likely happen next week. We are notifying the apps that will be in the directory for this initial testing period today (Feb. 26th). If you submitted an app, but are not selected for the pre-launch testing phase, hang tight...we'll contact you before the launch.

After the pre-launch testing is complete and we are confident that the platform is ready, we will launch the platform to developers. We expect the pre-launch testing to take around four weeks. When we launch, we will be whitelisting apps on a daily basis assuming they meet the criteria (not malware or spammy, no 404 errors, etc).

As we and our users get comfortable with apps on orkut, we will remove the whitelisting process and you will be able to add apps to the directory yourself.

We apologize for delaying the launch a few weeks. We feel that this pre-launch testing period will ensure that users are introduced to apps in the best way possible.

If you have any questions about this new launch plan, let us know in the orkut developer forum.