The chance is however relatively good that some developers have already created extensions for popular web services. This article will look at five Google Chrome extensions for popular Google web services including Gmail and Google Reader.

Gmail Checker

Gmail Checker is a simple extension that displays a button in the Google Chrome menu bar. This button displays the number of unread email messages in the Gmail account which makes the extension useful as the user will be notified about new Gmail messages without having to visit the Gmail website first. [link]

Google Reader Checker

This is from the same developer who developed the Gmail Checker extension for the Chrome web browser. It is therefor not surprising that it works exactly like that extension. It will display a new button in the Chrome menubar that shows the count of the unread news items in Google Reader. [link]

Google Tasks

The Google Tasks add-on integrates Google Tasks into the web browser by allowing the user to access the tasks directly from within the web browser without having to open the Google Tasks website. [link]

gPDF

This extension allows the user to open pdf documents directly in Google Docs. There are two advantages of this method. First, no pdf reader needs to be installed on the computer system to read pdf documents and second, it will reduce the chance that the document exploits security vulnerabilities in the installed desktop pdf reader. [link]

Google Wave Checker

A basic extension that will display the unread Google Wave messages in the Google Chrome statusbar. [link]

Verdict:

Extensions are finally beginning to appear in greater numbers for the Google Chrome web browser but are hardly a match for the incredible amount of extensions for the Firefox web browser. It is likely that this is not going to change in the near future. The first step to make extensions more popular to both developers and end users would be to add extension capabilities to the public version of the Google browser.

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Google’s document hosting service Google Docs was recently upgraded with an option to export all selected documents in the compressed zip format. This document backup solution can be used to backup all documents that are hosted at Google Docs regularly to be prepared if data gets damaged, deleted or inaccessible there.

The easiest way to backup all Google Docs documents is to switch to the All Items view in the left sidebar. This will display all documents hosted at Google Docs. A click in the checkmark button and the selection of “select all visible” from the sub-menu will mark all documents that are currently displayed. Another click on More Actions and the selection of Export will open a new window that looks similar to the one above.

Google Docs users can now convert, zip and download all the selected documents at once. The window will list the number of selected documents and display the conversion option for the different document types. Spreadsheets can for instance be converted to Microsoft Excel, Open Office or Adobe PDF formats before they are downloaded. It seems that the selection of a default document type is mandatory. Documents are then zipped and a download dialog window is displayed in the end. Users with many large documents can make use of the email notification option to be informed when the files are available for download.

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All that it takes now is to move all documents of a project into one folder and share that folder with all project members. The share functionality is added to Google Docs accounts gradually. Notifications appear on screen on the next login if the feature has been enabled.

There are several options to share a folder. It is possible to right-click a folder and select the share option or to use the Share this folder option when the folder has been selected.

Another new feature is the possibility to upload multiple documents at once to Google Docs. The usual controls to upload multiple files (holding shift or ctrl while selecting files) are available to add multiple documents to the upload queue.

These two new features should come in handy for a lot of Google Docs users.

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• Files must be fairly high-resolution — rule of thumb is 10 pixel character height.
• Maximum file size: 10MB, maximum resolution: 25 mega pixel
• The larger the file, the longer the OCR operation will take (500K: ~15s, 2MB: ~40s, 10MB: forever)

Supported image formats that are uploaded on the demonstration page will be turned into text documents and displayed in Google Docs once the process has been completed. The quality depends largely on the quality of the image. It is usually necessary to look over the text and correct errors that have been made during character recognition. Google Docs helps in the error correction by underlining unknown words in red in its interface. It still takes some time to correct the errors.

The OCR demonstration is linked to a Google Docs account but not integrated into Google Docs yet. It is very likely that Google will integrated OCR capabilities to Google Docs in the near future. You can use the demonstration page for now to test the OCR service.

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There are two options on how to use Google Docs Viewer:

The first option is to visit the Google Docs Viewer website. All it takes to view a document online is to paste its url into the web form at the page.

This will then display three links that can be pasted and embedded into websites. Probably the most interesting option is to view the document directly online.

This will open the document on a new page.

The second option is even simpler than that. All it takes is to append the url of the document to the basic Google Docs Viewer url:

http://docs.google.com/gview?url=

This will only display the document on a new page. The links to embed the document are not displayed with this method. Google Docs Viewer offers an interesting option to uses who want to quickly view a document without having to download it. It can also be helpful if no viewer for the document type is available on the local computer system.

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Google plans to index all published documents from Google Docs users if the documents are linked from a public (that means crawled by Google Bot) website. What this means is that Google Docs users might find their documents in the Google index even if they never had the intention for this.

The main problem with the procedure is the following: Google Docs users cannot explicitly block their documents from being indexed. Even worse is the fact that there is not an option to see if their documents have been publicly linked.

Only documents that have been explicitly published by selecting the ‘Publish as web page’ or ‘Publish/embed’ option and are linked from a public accessible website will be indexed by Google Search. The only option at this point in time is to undo this from the same menu.

A click on the Stop Publishing button will prevent that the document will be indexed in Google Search. It will also mean on the other hand that the document will no longer be accessible if it has been linked from a website.

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The free Java application Google Docs Upload solves this for some by offering a command line driven option to upload as many documents as needed in one go to the Google documents website. The only requirement is that the Java Runtime Environment is installed on the computer system that is being used to upload the documents to Google Docs.

Usage itself is pretty straightforward. The command

java -jar google-docs-upload-1.0.jar --username --password

for example will upload all documents to Google Docs that are located in the specified path. Several parameters are available like the recursive command that will include documents that are located in subfolders in the upload to the Google documents website. One advantage of a command line driven tool is the ability to use it in scripts or programs to automate the uploading process to Google Docs. It is probably not a tool for the average Google Docs user but could be very handy for businesses who use the service. via Google Operating System

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The new option to translate a document becomes available after clicking on Tools > Translate Document in the header menu while viewing a single document in Google Docs.

Available is the usual assortment of languages that is offered by the Google Translate service. Selecting one of the languages in the menu will open a new window that displays the translated text after a short time. It is then possible to create a new document based on the translated document or replace the existing document with the translation.

The document cannot be edited in this window though. This option becomes available after selecting one of the two options described above. It would have been nice if Google Docs offered at least some form of export and editing capabilities right away so that users who want a quick translation of a document can process it further without having to save it first before they can do so.

Another option that is currently missing are partial translations of documents. It’s currently either all or nothing.

source official Google Docs Blog

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A new feature was introduced in the Google browser in the last dev release versions. Users who have been working with developer releases of Google Chrome before know that most new features can only be accessed by launching the web browser with startup parameters.

It is not different with this new feature. The Google Chrome development team has added bookmark syncing to the web browser. Users who want to use the feature need to launch the Google browser with the parameter –enable-sync.

A new option in the Tools menu becomes available that is named Sync My Bookmarks. The feature requires a Google account which will be used to store the bookmarks online. To be precise, the bookmarks are stored in the Google Docs account of the Google user.

This makes it possible to use the same set of bookmarks in various installations of the Google Chrome browser, e.g. at work, home and on a laptop. It does feel strange to Google Bookmarks users that this services was not used for the bookmarks syncing.

Interested users can download the latest dev build of Google Chrome at the developer’s website.

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Gbutts displays a huge list of Google services after installation which can be used to select the Google services that should be displayed in Firefox. The services that have been selected are then available as a toolbar that has to be dragged and dropped to a Firefox toolbar. It can for example be placed next to the address field in the Firefox web browser to provide one click access to the selected Google services.

The selected services can either be displayed as buttons in the toolbar so that they can be clicked on instantly or as a dropdown menu which would save some space in the toolbar if more than a handful of services are selected. The dropdown menu would increase the click count to access one of the Google services to two however.

GButts (that means Google Buttons actually) could be an interesting add-on for users who work with multiple Google services throughout the day and want to access these services as comfortably as possible. Everyone else is probably better of using bookmarks or creating keyboard shortcuts to access the Google services.

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The reason for this is that many users believe that the data is safe on Internet servers. A lot can happen that can put the data on those servers at risk. This ranges from hacking attempts, hardware failures that cause data loss or bankruptcy. It is therefor essential to make sure that data that is stored online is backed up regularly.

We have already mentioned how to backup Gmail before should be essential for every Gmail user. While it is unlikely that Gmail will be discontinued there have been times where the service was not accessible. Having a backup of the data would make it possible to access the emails anyway.

Google Docs Backup is another Windows backup software that can be used to backup one of the popular Google services. Users can use it to backup all documents on their local computer system that they have uploaded to Google Docs. Usage of the backup software has been simplified. All that needs to be done is to enter the username and password of the Google Docs account and to select a directory on the local computer where the data should be downloaded to.

A few optional settings are available. It is for example possible to select the output format for each document type and to route the traffic through a proxy server. A click on the Exec button will initiate the data backup which can take some time depending on the size of the data stored at Google Docs and the connection speed.

Gdoc Backup (via To The PC) is a free software program for the Windows operating system.

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All ways of opening Microsoft Excel spreadsheets can be divided into an online and offline category. The online category usually requires an account at some website before the spreadsheets can be worked with.

Computer Software Programs:

Excel Viewer [link]

Microsoft’s own Excel Viewer can be used to view Excel 2007 (xlsx) and earlier Excel spreadsheets. It has a download size of 74 Megabytes and uses the same core that Microsoft Excel uses which ensures a good compatibility with all Microsoft Excel spreadsheets.

Open Office [link]

Open Office is considered to be the Microsoft Office alternative. It is a free Open Source office suite that can be used to open Microsoft Office document formats. The module needed to open Excel spreadsheets is called Calc and supports the new Excel 2007 xlsx format but also older Microsoft Excel documents.

Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack [link]

Users who have a previous version of Microsoft Office or Microsoft Excel installed (that is pre-Excel 2007) can use the Microsoft Office compatibility pack to add support for the Excel xlsx format so that these spreadsheets can also be worked with in previous versions of Excel.

XLS Viewer 2.30 [link]

The XLS Viewer has a tiny size of just 1 Megabyte. It can open, display and print xls, xlsx and ods documents that have been created with Microsoft Office or Open Office. The computer program seems to have slight problems displaying complex spreadsheets correctly.

Online Tools

Google Docs [link]

Google Docs has only recently added support for the Excel 2007 xlsx format. The online service was able to work with standard xls documents before but the new feature makes it possible to open and work with all Excel documents in Google Docs.

Thinkfree [link]

Can be used to quickly view spreadsheets online.Supports both old and new Excel spreadsheets and various other formats.

Zoho Sheets [link]

Zoho Sheets is an online product that enables users to view and edit spreadsheets online.

Do you know of other online or offline tools that can be used to view spreadsheets? Let us know in the comments.

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OffiSync as been created to integrate Google Docs naturally into Microsoft Office. The benefits are that Microsoft Office users can now save Office files to Google Docs without loosing any of the functionality provided by Microsoft Office as the documents can be accessed like any other locally saved documents. The documents do become accessible in Google Docs as well which means it is still possible to work with them directly from within a web browser.

The add-in makes it furthermore possible to manage the complete Google Docs library from within Microsoft Office. Another interesting feature is the option to add and manage collaborators in Microsoft Office. Changes that have been made to documents will also be applied to the corresponding Google Docs document.

The Office add-in provides access to search and communication features as well. It is for example possible to communicate with collaborators right from within a shared document or to send automated messages and notifications to collaborators.

The Office add-in is compatible with Microsoft Office 2003 or 2007 and requires a computer system running Windows XP, Windows Vista or Windows 7 plus the Microsoft .net Framework 3.5. The latter will be installed if it is not present on the target system. OffiSync is currently in beta. It can be downloaded for free from the developer’s homepage. It is likely that the product will become commercial once it leaves beta stage.

The Verdict:

OffiSync is an excellent solution for users who work with Microsoft Office and Google Docs. It might also be interesting for users who only use Microsoft Office to use Google Docs to backup their documents on the Internet. The developers have announced that they plan to add more Google services to their add-in.

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Each can then be accessed like any other folder in the Windows operating system. Integrating Google Docs would for example display all documents that are stored in that service on the local computer desktop. Gladinet will automatically synchronize the folders whenever data is edited, added or removed from one of the installed data storage services.

New online storage services and applications are added by providing authentication information in a simple form, usually the username and password to access the service online. Some, like WebDav servers require an url, IP or additional information besides the basic authentication data.

Gladinet runs in the Windows system tray on the local computer system from where it can be accessed and configured. It only takes a few clicks to add a new online storage service in the software. The professional and premium editions of the service add new features to the software including:

• Advanced Task Scheduler/Manager (Run Once or Recurring with Pause, Resume and Reschedule Support)
• Incremental Backup to Mounted Cloud Storage (with File Type Filtering*)
• Advanced Download/Upload Acceleration Technology (Compression, Chunking, Parallel Uploads/Downloads, Bandwidth Throttling)
• Encrypted Local Profile and In-Memory-Only Profile for Better Security
• IIS/Apache Support (Avoid Port 80)

Users who regularly work with the previously mentioned cloud storage providers might want to give Gladinet a try.

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Not all pages have been updated in Google Docs with the information about the added Excel 2007 xlsx support. The upload page for example is not listing the new format as supported. The two other Microsoft Office 2007 file formats, that is Word 2007 with docx and PowerPoint 2007 with pptx, are not yet supported but it is very likely that the Google Docs team will add support for those file formats eventually.

The data transfer of the xlsx files produces good but not excellent results. The color highlighting of a test Excel 2007 file was for example not displayed on the Google Docs page of the document. The main information on the other hand were all displayed the way they looked in the real Office Excel document.

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A letter that has been send out by the Google Docs team seems to have made the worst case scenario true for some users of the online service. According to Techcrunch who received a copy of a letter that has been send out the following happened: The Google Docs team identified a bug in their online service that may have caused the sharing of documents without the knowledge or permission of the user.

“This inadvertent sharing was limited to people with whom you, or a collaborator with sharing rights, had previously shared a document. The issue only occurred if you, or a collaborator with sharing rights, selected multiple documents and presentations from the documents list and changed the sharing permissions. This issue affected documents and presentations, but not spreadsheets.”

While it is unclear as to how many users have actually been affected by the bug it does outline the problems of storing documents, files and information on the Internet. There is always a chance that the documents will fall into hands that they are not intended for.

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Installation of the Google Docs Open Office extension could not be easier. A double-click on the program’s icon after downloading it should open the Extension Manager of Open Office automatically with a prompt to install the extension. The selection of yes will install it.

The extension will display five new icons that can be placed in a Open Office toolbar. Here is what they do from left to right: Export to Google Docs, Import from Google Docs, Export to Zoho, Import from Zoho, Export to WebDAV server.

A click on an icon will open a new dialog. It is usually required to provide account information of the service or server before performing the action. To export a document to Google Docs one would have to supply the Google username and password which can be saved locally to avoid the hassle of having to fill out the information every time that feature is being used.

Importing documents works pretty much the same way with the difference that all supported documents that are available online will be displayed giving the user the choice to load them locally or in the browser.

The document import is limited. It is possible to import text documents or presentations from Google Docs. Zoho is supporting the import of spreadsheets in addition to that. Virtually any document can be exported to both services though.

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Anyway I don’t actually mean to right off Google Docs, I use it myself all the time, however for very different purposes then what I use MS Office for.

Google rolls out new features every few months or so, and the latest is a welcome addition to the online office suite… templates.

I’ve actually wanted this feature for quite some time and although there has been the ability to style documents with CSS, I can’t be bothered with that, I wanted some templates like Office.

Now when you click New in the Docs menu you can select “From Template” and choose from hundreds of spreadsheet, presentations and document templates.

The document selection is actually very good and there is a lot of great professional looking templates as well as the usual letter/resume style personal documents. The Presentation templates are a bit simpler then what you could find in Powerpoint, but good enough. Lastly the spreadsheet templates are very useful and there are a whole lot of invoice/financial ones.

It will be interesting to see what Google rolls out next. Office Live, Microsoft’s answer, is just too slow for me to use at the moment, but Google Docs is not good enough to use all the time.

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The add-on can currently load most Office file types including doc, xls, ppt but also sxw, csv, rtd and several image formats. Don’t worry, it does not install an Office suite as a Firefox add-on. It makes use of various online services that can display and edit the aforementioned file types.

The add-on displays a configuration dialog after installation that allows the user to pick one out of four services for each file type. The default service for every file type is the Zoho Viewer which can be changed to Zoho Writer, Google Docs and Thinkfree Viewer.

The add-on is basically redirecting the file download to one of the online services so that it can be viewed and edited there. That’s definitely a clever concept.

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All you need to do is enter your email address, your password and off you go, you can even get it to place a menu entry into the right-click menu, so you can upload things on the fly. Ok-ok, so why is it more than meets the eye?

The reason I think this is so awesome is that this app is just a sample of what you can do with the Google Api. You can find this app in the articles and tutorials section in the Google Code FAQ, and they have a very extensive and helpful article on the subject. Apart from letting you get to know the uploader, it shows you how to modify the code, how to create balloon tooltips, system tray apps, and a whole host of features.

Google is earning more and more respect in my eyes (it already has a lot) with these new steps they are taking. A few years back we would never have dreamed about this, can you imagine Microsoft creating a public api for anything? Well perhaps in time they will, all thanks to Google, Cheers!

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