Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with googledocs

Calling the powers of the Doc Google collective

tilde — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 21:40:32 -0800

Here a doc there a doc, everywhere a doc doc but how do I define a frimping printable area on a Google Doc spreadsheet? & page breaks. So tired of selecting content & printing one page at a time.

How to get google drive access to invites sent to a linked email account

mercredi — Thu, 17 Jan 2013 13:46:07 -0800

I get google drive document invites sent to my work email, and I can't access them through my gmail account, even though I've successfully linked the two addresses in my primary google account. Any ideas? But I have been so accepting of our benevolent google overlords . . .

So I have a personal gmail account (firstname.lastname@gmail.com) to which I have also linked my work email address (flast@work.org). However, when google drive file invites get sent to my work address, I am told I don't have permission to access them.

This page makes me think it should work, but I'm stumped as to why it won't.

I can even sign in to my primary (firstname.lastname@gmail.com) email by entering (flast@work.org), so the link is clearly successful.

It's super frustrating, because if I do give people my gmail address for invites like this, then I start getting work email there when they don't check carefully. Any thoughts?

- I can't create a new google account with the work email without unlinking it, if I try, I get the error that the email address is already in use.

Mail Merge using Google Docs?

joannemerriam — Fri, 21 Dec 2012 11:24:38 -0800

How can I do mail merge in Gmail? All the online "how to" things (e.g.) I am finding are telling me there's mail merge functionality in Google Docs, but I can't even find Google Docs from my gmail account. Do I need to install something? Help. This is to email about 150 people their rewards from a Kickstarter campaign - I am not spamming people! But I'd like to personalize the emails and it would be a pain to have to send them one by one.

Chromebook questions

Artw — Tue, 27 Nov 2012 12:20:14 -0800

Would the Chromebook be right for me as a writing device? I'm looking to replace my old netbook I use for writing with something more swish and it looks to fit the bill, however I'm not a Google Docs user - how easy is it to transition to from using OpenOffice/Word? How well does the local storage/offline working option work? How easy is it to export Word files and how well does formatting carry over? Is there anything else i need to know?

Can't stand new Google Drive - where do I go?

ryanshepard — Fri, 09 Nov 2012 09:59:25 -0800

I hate the new 'look' of Google Drive and need an alternative. I don't want to have to burrow down through my entire file structure to get to documents I'm working with every time I log in - what are some alternative services to look at?

Some concerns: Security and redundancy / ability to easily download and backup files / clean, UX-minded interface.

The option to tag documents from w/in the tool would be a bonus.

Spammy RSVPs?

Tehhund — Fri, 09 Nov 2012 08:39:37 -0800

Using a Google Form for wedding RSVPs - are we going to get spammy submissions? We're using a Google Form for our wedding RSVPs. And thanks to a previous question, I'm making it dead simple - 1 page with name, yes/no, guest name if you're bringing one. (Please no responses about whether an online form is good etiquette, or suggestions about how to design the form - those decisions have been made. Comments about how to design the form to prevent spam are welcome if that's possible.)

My one concern is spam. The form will be accessible from our publicly-available wedding website (bridenamegroomname.ourwedding.com). Are we likely to end up getting spammed? i.e., are we likely to have troublemakers or some kind of bots submitting bogus entries? If yes, how many - a couple, or hundreds? Is that a problem that's common with publicly-available Google Forms?

We don't want to password-protect the Form because a) I don't know how to do that b) I don't want to deal with inevitable confusing and lost passwords c) I'm totally on-board with URLs on an invitation, but I have an irrational aversion to putting a password on the invitation. We'd have to find another RSVP site instead, which is not ideal (though if you think spam is an inevitable problem, suggestions for which site to use are welcome). And restricting it to certain people/accounts is not really an option, because not everyone has a Google account and we're not asking our aunts to create Google accounts just to fill in this form.

So given that we won't be password-protecting the form, are we running a significant risk for spammy responses?

One step solution to for a new google doc?

letstrythis — Fri, 14 Sep 2012 17:16:13 -0800

I like to write using google docs. I used to have a functioning bookmark that was a one-step to new doc solution, which I loved, because it was simple, and efficient. Some time ago that bookmark stopped working, and now it's a matter of several mouse clicks. This is a very small matter, but if someone has a one step solution they care to share, well, that would be delightful.

Google Apps for small biz

WizKid — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 08:45:02 -0800

I'm helping someone setup google apps for a small biz. Already signed up for google apps and bought the domain name through google (enom.com). Need help building a document repo out of GDocs and redirecting the main domain (example.com and www.example.com) to a website hosted on an outside hosting server. 1. How to use docs(drive) as a shared document repository. Right now settings are set as visible to anyone in the organization. But unless they get the link (or shared explicitly with them) they won't see the docs in their account. What I would want to any document from anyone to show up in everyone elses account.

2. I would like to host the main web site for the biz with another outside hosting company. This is a screenshot of the enom dashboard. How do I point example.com (and www.example.com) to a outside hosting server and still not mess up rest of the google apps, like mail.example.com, docs.example.com, calendar.example.com and all the email accounts (@example.com)?
Thanks.

Analyzing data using surveys in Google Docs

stellaluna — Thu, 17 May 2012 12:50:33 -0800

We conducted a survey using Google Docs Spreadsheets. Unfortunately. Now we would like an easy way to analyze the data. How? I am part of a team that recently conducted a survey using Google Docs. The responses to the survey were dumped into what looks like Google Docs' version of Excel. Is there an easy hack so that we can make Google Docs do something similar to SurveyMonkey's Analyze Results feature? Or do I just need to suck it up and finally learn Excel and pivot tables? If the latter, any recommendations about resources for learning about pivot tables?

Help me find a Google Desktop replacement

Susan PG — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 15:05:03 -0800

Please recommend for me a new search tool to replace Google Desktop. Ideally I want something that searches the full text of all files, that covers everything on my hard drive plus Google Docs. I want it to be fast, offer results in context, and have a simple interface that offers 'sort by relevance' and 'sort by date.' I use Ubuntu. When Google Desktop came out in 2004, it made my life immeasurably better. Previously, I'd been trying to manually organize all my files, which I was pretty bad at and hated doing. Google Desktop made it possible for me to search everything on my hard drive, fast, without needing to spend any time maintaining a structured system of files. Later I started using Google Docs, which kind of broke my system a bit, because Google Docs was the only thing I used that Google Desktop didn't index. Now Google Desktop's been discontinued, which means I am going to need to find something else.

Currently I'm using Google Desktop plus experimenting with Recoll. Recoll would superficially seem to meet my needs, but it doesn't index Google Docs or GMail, I'm not sure it's fully indexing all the files of the types it claims to encompass, and the ordering of results thus far seems bizarre.

A slightly broader question: what the heck are people using to search the cloud, and are they succeeding in keeping on top of everything?? I feel like my stuff is increasingly fragmented all over the place: it's making me crazy :-(

Step 1: fill out Google Apps form. Step 2: ??? Step 3: Profit!

Tehhund — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 06:29:05 -0800

How can I use Google Apps to create a weekly report form, and then display the answers to that form in a nice format to outside parties? I would like to use Google Apps to support the following workflow. I’m a Google Apps newbie, so I’m reaching out for a little help. If Google Apps isn’t the right solution, let me know, but my colleagues and I thought we should give it a try. It would be nice if this resulted in a central place where all of our work plans are stored so we avoid sending tons of work plans as e-mail attachments.

We want to have some of our employees fill out a work report once per week. Just a quick thing with three free-text sections: “Tasks worked on this week,” “Tasks for next week,” “Ongoing projects." We would like to display this in a useful format to people outside of our network. So the people who end up reviewing the information entered will not have a Google account in our apps domain, they'll just have a link.

I figured out how to create a form that submits the free text data to a Google spreadsheet. But I'm stuck on creating a nice weekly view of the data for our end-users who are not in our apps domain. Is there a way to create a webpage or a script that will grab the data for a certain week from the spreadsheet and displayed to the end-user and a nice format? The "Summary" view doesn't do what I want, because it crams all of the answers together instead of breaking them out by user and by week. I need to create a view that displays each user's answer for that week individually. So if they wanted to see responses for March 26, the user would see four separate reports for the week of March 26: one for each employee who filled out the form. Or if we just put the most recent submissions at the top of the page, that would work too. I imagine the workflow would go: 1) End user clicks link 2)Chooses week to view 3) Sees form responses broken out by user. Or it could go 1) End user receives link for this week 2) Link takes them directly to the form responses., though I'll try any workflow that you can suggest too.

A bonus question: it would be nice if the form were e-mailed to the employees to fill out every week at the same time, and the link with the responses were emailed to the end users automatically too. Is there a way to automate sending a Google form to a list of recipients?

When uploading my files to the cloud, are they automatically encrypted before they leave my computer?

paleyellowwithorange — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 18:46:17 -0800

When uploading my files to major cloud services (Microsoft SkyDrive, Google Docs and Google Picasaweb), are they automatically encrypted before they leave my computer? Today I was listening to an episode of the Tech Talker (An Introduction to the Cloud), and he said:

Most online backup solutions, services, and programs will encrypt your data on your home computer before sending it to a data center. What this means is that your data is already scrambled, encrypted, and locked before it ever leaves your home computer. So even if someone were to break into a data center and steal every shred of data, all they would have really stolen is a bunch of random zeros and ones that would take millions of years to crack.

Is this true of Microsoft SkyDrive, Google Docs and Google Picasaweb?

If this is correct, does this mean that even these service providers, while hosting my files, are unable to access the contents of those files?

Reference management for web-based collaboration

Blazecock Pileon — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 15:05:05 -0800

What reference management options exist for Google Docs? Failing that, what other web-based collaboration tools offer reference management, either built-in or by extension via plug-in?

Help me narrow my timeline down.

doyouknowwhoIam? — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 08:32:16 -0800

How do I track when an item was uploaded, not modified, in GoogleDocs?

Creating Quizes on Google Docs

robverb — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 19:47:55 -0800

Is it possible to create a quiz using Forms on Google Docs that will give a score to the person taking the quiz? I am looking for a way to have my students do their homework online. Ideally, they will get a response after each question so they know if it was correct and they'll get a total score at the end. Ideally I'd like to use forms on Google Docs to do this for a number of reasons. I know that by using "go to based on answer" they can know immediately if they were correct, but I can't think of any way of giving them final tally. Because their responses are all in a spreadsheet, I can see their final tally. In theory I could give them all access to that sheet, but I don't want them to be able to see one anothers grades. I could solve that by assigning them random codes so they wouldn't know who was who, but they are elementary students and I don't want to make things complicated.

I also know that, at least in theory, if I created enough pages and enough paths I could have the pages show the number correct, but for a 20 question assignment that would be huge number of pages.

I hope I've made it clear what I'm looking for. I don't actually know if what I want to do is possible, but I'm hoping someone out there knows something I don't.

How can we see shared time better?

history is a weapon — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 06:18:23 -0800

I regularly need to schedule complex parallel tasks with my co-workers. Is there a visual (like with circles for each hour with time divided into pie slices) google template that could be filled out easily that would help people see what has to happen when? Ideally it'd be cleanly designed like the muji chronotebook, but as a google doc so we could share it with multiple people easily. My perfect version would have one page that you fill out, and another page that's clean that you would print with simple circles and lines coming out with times and necessary information.

If there isn't a google docs option, is there something else that would work.

Help me monitor students as they write in my online writing class

jander03 — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 07:54:02 -0800

Help me monitor students as they write in my online writing class I'm teaching an online writing class tonight. I want to watch as individuals (who I may or may not have e-mail addresses for) work on individual documents. What are some options that are easy on the writers and free to me?

MY ATTEMPT ON GOOGLE DOCS
I set up a public "collection" in Google docs and created a couple of documents there. But when I access the collection via it's public link, I can't edit any of the documents. I confirmed that the documents to have public share settings, and I can access them through their own links.

EXAMPLE OF WHAT I WANT
I am teaching Kim and Jeff. Kim is able to easily access and edit a document intended for her. Jeff is able to easily access and edit a document intended for him. I can access and edit both. It's ok if Kim accesses Jeff's document and vice versa.

Google Doc Gurus, your help is needed!

momochan — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 20:22:21 -0800

Please tell me(a spreadsheet noob) if I can convert rows from a google spread sheet into individual google docs. I have a reading survey I want to give to all the students at our school. We have done these in the past, but the survey was photocopied and students filled out the survey by hand. The survey was then photocopied again and handed out to relevant staff (librarian, tutors etc) I want to take the survey and make a google form- I like the idea of a spread sheet for data collection over many years and the idea that the information can be accessed by anyone(who is given permission) at anytime. However we also want to be able to look at each kid's survey individually and also print out individual surveys. So tl:dr is there a way to take each individual row from the spreadsheet that is populated by the google form and make individual documents? Is there an easy ways to accomplish this task?

But I already shared it with you!

ottereroticist — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 19:34:48 -0800

Why are people sending me requests to share my Google doc, when it's already public on the Web? I set up a Google doc as "Public on the web - Anyone on the Internet can find and view." I then included the link in an email. Most of the recipients seem to be reading the document just fine, but I've gotten a few "request to share" messages from people who have Gmail accounts. What's going on, and how can I fix it?

Turning in my spreadsheet wizard badge.

Salvor Hardin — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 10:33:38 -0800

Spreadsheet question: I want a column containing all the names in THAT column EXCEPT all the names in THOSE columns. Ok, here's the deal.

I have a spreadsheet. It's a google docs spreadsheet, but I'd be open to using another kind of spreadsheet if what I want just isn't possible on a google docs spreadsheet.

Cells A2:A93 contain a bunch of unique names.

Cells C2:N15 contain a bunch of names as well as blank cells. Not all names in A2:A93 are in C2:N15, but all names in C2:N15 are in A2:A93.

I would like a formula that magically makes column B contain all the names that ARE in A2:A93 but NOT in C2:N15.

Is this possible? How do I do it? Thank you!

Calculating durations and times in Excel

dg — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 19:15:12 -0800

Excel help needed in calculating times. I need to calculate and predict times based on fixed distances and a known average speed. I'm completing in an endurance event in a few weeks that requires co-ordination with a support team, who will meet us at pre-determined points. I'd like to develop a spreadsheet that, firstly, predicts the time we will arrive at each location based on an average speed (from training sessions) and, secondly, will allow us to update the spreadsheet through the event to refine the predicted arrival times.

I've put up a basic spreadsheet here that shows what we are trying to do. The issue is that I can't figure out how to get Excel to calculate the times as times, rather than as numbers. There is plenty of help available for calculating the elapsed time between two defined times (such as in developing timesheets), but I can't find anything that will calculate the anticipated duration and then calculate a time based on that. From what I can gather, this is further complicated by the event running over more than one day?

The green cells are where I am trying to do the calculations.

Row F should calculate the duration of each stage based on the stage distance and the average speed.

Row G should calculate the cumulative duration based on the cumulative distance and the average speed.

Row H should calculate the time we will arrive at each checkpoint based on the duration of each stage being added to the time of arrival at the previous checkpoint.

Thanks in advance for any assistance.

How to move rows in a table in google docs?

mercredi — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 08:49:54 -0800

Any way to move rows within a table in a google docs document? Using the current version of google docs, in a regular document (not a spreadsheet or a presentation) I can't find any way to rearrange rows in a table. Is there something I'm missing? If I cut and paste, the entire contents of the "cut" row end up in the destination cell, rather than as a normal row. Any suggestions or workarounds please!

(We're using google docs tables as a task tracker because other solutions have been rejected, so the ability to move rows to re-prioritize is essential.)

Spread 'Em!

magstheaxe — Sat, 02 Apr 2011 08:02:51 -0800

Idiotic Google spreadsheet question: how do I shrink the column size? I'm not an experienced spreadsheet user in the slightest, so bear with me.

I have a spreadsheet located on Google Docs (it's here, if you want to look at it) and the columns have inexplicably gotten too wide. I'm sure I clicked something by accident.

Normally, I would just put my cursor to the top of the header, and would drag it back to size. But the problem is, the columns are so wide that I can't get to the appropriate header--when I try to scroll, it just takes me to the next column, with no header visible.

I looked here on Google Doc's Help page. I can select all the columns in my spreadsheet, but when I right-clcik on the selection I can't seem to get the menu they refer to (and I am using Google Chrome).

Help me, MeFites!

Making a dumb spreadsheet smart

downing street memo — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 13:55:12 -0800

I'm having trouble solving a problem in Google Spreadsheet. Check out this screenshot.

Basically, this is a calorie counter. In column A, I put the date, in column B, a list of all the things I ate, in column C, their caloric values.

Column D and E are formulas based off C. Column D adds up all the calories for the day, while column E takes the total from column D and calculates caloric deficit.

As of now, I manually enter in formulas into D and E to get the daily sum and deficit. I'd prefer this to be automatic. How can I make the spreadsheet understand when I've entered a new date, and begin calculating the sum from the first row of the new date?

Can excel save me money?

cubedweller — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 15:55:32 -0800

In Excel (or Google Docs) is there away to divide the value in a cell by the number of cells selected? So if I have a value of x and I then highlight 10 cells, each of the 10 cells would show x divided by 10. As I select less cells, the value in each cell increases because x is being divided by less. The main reason I want to do this is to show how much I'd need to save per month to reach a specific total.