From New York Times - Gadgetwise It’s been a year since Google formally released Google Docs, a free Web-based competitor to Microsoft Office with parallel applications to Microsoft’s Word (text editing), Excel (spreadsheets) and PowerPoint (presentations). (It had been in beta-test status.) Microsoft has since launched its own in-your-browser version of Office 2010, which I’m currently testing, [...]

Today, we added in-cell dropdown and validation to spreadsheets. This makes it easy to constrain the values of an individual cell to a specific range or list. For example, if you are building a trip planning spreadsheet, you can now limit the options in the travel destination column to a select set of cities via [...]

Collaborating with colleagues from various teams in different offices is a daily facet of my work. I am based in Zurich, Switzerland, and many of the people I interact with are in California, USA, which is nine hours behind. Oftentimes I find myself invited to attend meetings that happen late in my evening, which proves [...]

In the next day or so, you’ll start to see some changes to the event page in Google Calendar which should make scheduling events easier. We’ve made the style more consistent with other Google apps, put information that’s most commonly used at the top of the screen, simplified the layout, and added some functionality. A [...]

Finding cells that include formulas in them can sometimes be a bit like looking for something in the dark. To help you illuminate your spreadsheet surroundings, we’re introducing the ability to reveal all formulas with one click. When you’re comparing formulas with one another or trying to figure out where your formulas aren’t working, showing [...]

Over the last few weeks, we made it easier to find more kinds of information in Gmail as well as use multiple Gmail accounts at once. Google Docs and Google Sites both added new features, and we released improved tools to move existing data to Google Apps. Find docs and sites quickly from Gmail On [...]

If you’ve been wanting to use voice and video chat on Linux (our top video chat request), then we have good news for you: it’s now available! Visit gmail.com/videochat to download the plugin and get started. Voice and video chat for Linux supports Ubuntu and other Debian-based Linux distributions, and RPM support will be coming soon.

Unified communications and collaboration vendors should be anxiously looking back over their shoulders, because Google is on the move, according to research released by analysts at Frost & Sullivan today. “Although Google has not officially announced this strategy it is evident that by continually adding new UCC applications to its portfolio and focusing on integrating them, [...]

Gmail makes it easy to find emails really fast with Google-powered search for your inbox. This works well when you know you’re looking for an email, but if you have information in documents and sites too, you may have to search several places with the same query to find what you’re looking for. Today we’re [...]

Typing links just got a little faster in Google documents. Now when you type something that documents recognizes as a link, it will become a link automatically. Try typing “docs.google.com”, “www.google.com,” or an email address to try it out. If you don’t want your text to be a link, you can undo the auto-linking by [...]