Google Spreadsheets - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Google Docs is a free, Web-based office suite, and data storage service offered by Google

Google

Google Inc. is an American multinational public corporation invested in Internet search, cloud computing, and advertising technologies. Google hosts and develops a number of Internet-based services and products, and generates profit primarily from advertising through its AdWords program...

. It allows users to create and edit documents online while collaborating in real-time with other users. Google Docs combines the features of Writely and Spreadsheets with a presentation program

Presentation program

A presentation program is a computer software package used to display information, normally in the form of a slide show...

incorporating technology designed by Tonic Systems. Data storage of files up to 1 GB total in size was introduced on January 13, 2011, documents created inside Google Docs do not count towards this quota.

History

Google Docs originated from two separate products, Writely and Google Spreadsheets. Writely was a web

World Wide Web

The World Wide Web is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet...

-based word processor

Word processor

A word processor is a computer application used for the production of any sort of printable material....

created by the software company Upstartle and launched in August 2005. Spreadsheets, launched as Google Labs Spreadsheets on June 6, 2006, originated from the acquisition of the XL2Web product by 2Web Technologies

2Web Technologies

2Web Technologies was a New York City based software company which was acquired by Google in mid-2005 as the base technology behind the spreadsheets application in Google Docs. The original product created by 2Web Technologies, XL2Web, was further developed at Google to become the first launched...

. Writely's original features included a collaborative

Collaborative software

Collaborative software is computer software designed to help people involved in a common task achieve goals...

text editing suite and access control

Access control

Access control refers to exerting control over who can interact with a resource. Often but not always, this involves an authority, who does the controlling. The resource can be a given building, group of buildings, or computer-based information system...

s. Menus, keyboard shortcuts, and dialog boxes are similar to what users may expect in a desktop word processor such as Microsoft Word

Microsoft Word

Microsoft Word is a word processor designed by Microsoft. It was first released in 1983 under the name Multi-Tool Word for Xenix systems. Subsequent versions were later written for several other platforms including IBM PCs running DOS , the Apple Macintosh , the AT&T Unix PC , Atari ST , SCO UNIX,...

or OpenOffice.org Writer

OpenOffice.org Writer

OpenOffice.org Writer is the word processor component of the OpenOffice.org software package. Writer is a word processor similar to Microsoft Word and Corel's WordPerfect, with some of their features....

.

On March 9, 2006, Google announced that it had acquired Upstartle. At the time of acquisition, Upstartle had four employees. Writely closed registration to its service until the move to Google servers was complete. In August 2006, Writely sent account invitations to everyone who had requested to be placed on a waiting list, and then became publicly available on August 23. Writely continued to maintain its own user system until September 19, 2006, when it was integrated with Google Accounts.

Meanwhile, Google developed Google Spreadsheets using the technology it had acquired from 2Web Technologies in 2005 and launched Google Labs Spreadsheets on June 6, 2006 as the first public component of what would eventually become Google Docs. It was initially made available to only a limited number of users, on a first-come, first-served basis. The limited test was later replaced with a beta version available to all Google Account holders, around the same time as a press release was issued.

In February 2007, Google Docs was made available to Google Apps

Google Apps

Google Apps is a service from Google providing independently customizable versions of several Google products under a custom domain name. It features several Web applications with similar functionality to traditional office suites, including: Gmail, Google Groups, Google Calendar, Talk, Docs and...

users.

In June 2007, Google changed the front page to include folders instead of labels, organized in a side bar.

On September 17, 2007, Google released their presentation program

Presentation program

A presentation program is a computer software package used to display information, normally in the form of a slide show...

product for Google Docs.

On July 6, 2009, Google announced on their official blog that Google Docs along with other Google Apps would be taken out of beta.

On January 13, 2010, Google announced on their official blog that Google Docs would allow any file type, including 1GB of free space and $0.25/GB for additional storage.

On March 7, 2010, DocVerse, an online document collaboration

Collaborative software

Collaborative software is computer software designed to help people involved in a common task achieve goals...

company, was acquired by Google

Google

. It allows multiple user online collaboration on Microsoft Office

Microsoft Office

Microsoft Office is a non-free commercial office suite of inter-related desktop applications, servers and services for the Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X operating systems, introduced by Microsoft in August 1, 1989. Initially a marketing term for a bundled set of applications, the first version of...

compatible document formats such as Word

Microsoft Word

, Excel

Microsoft Excel

Microsoft Excel is a proprietary commercial spreadsheet application written and distributed by Microsoft for Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X. It features calculation, graphing tools, pivot tables, and a macro programming language called Visual Basic for Applications...

, and PowerPoint

Microsoft PowerPoint

Microsoft PowerPoint, usually just called PowerPoint, is a non-free commercial presentation program developed by Microsoft. It is part of the Microsoft Office suite, and runs on Microsoft Windows and Apple's Mac OS X operating system...

. Improvements based on DocVerse were announced and deployed in April 2010.

In June 2010, it was reported that access to Google Docs had been blocked in Turkey

Turkey

Turkey , known officially as the Republic of Turkey , is a Eurasian country located in Western Asia and in East Thrace in Southeastern Europe...

. A Google employee confirmed the problem saying that it "appear[ed] to be linked to the ongoing ban on YouTube

YouTube

YouTube is a video-sharing website, created by three former PayPal employees in February 2005, on which users can upload, view and share videos....

."

As of September 29, 2011, Google Docs supports offline viewing through an opt-in beta HTML 5

HTML 5

HTML5 is a language for structuring and presenting content for the World Wide Web, and is a core technology of the Internet originally proposed by Opera Software. It is the fifth revision of the HTML standard and is still under development...

web app.

Features

Google Docs is Google's "software as a service

Software as a Service

Software as a service , sometimes referred to as "on-demand software," is a software delivery model in which software and its associated data are hosted centrally and are typically accessed by users using a thin client, normally using a web browser over the Internet.SaaS has become a common...

" office suite. Documents, spreadsheets, presentations can be created with Google Docs, imported through the web interface, or sent via email. Documents can be saved to a user's local computer in a variety of formats (ODF

OpenDocument

The Open Document Format for Office Applications is an XML-based file format for representing electronic documents such as spreadsheets, charts, presentations and word processing documents....

, HTML

HTML

HyperText Markup Language is the predominant markup language for web pages. HTML elements are the basic building-blocks of webpages....

, PDF

Portable Document Format

Portable Document Format is an open standard for document exchange. This file format, created by Adobe Systems in 1993, is used for representing documents in a manner independent of application software, hardware, and operating systems....

, RTF

Rich Text Format

The Rich Text Format is a proprietary document file format with published specification developed by Microsoft Corporation since 1987 for Microsoft products and for cross-platform document interchange....

, Text

Formatted text

Formatted text, styled text or rich text, as opposed to plain text, has styling information beyond the minimum of semantic elements: colours, styles , sizes and special features .-Terminology:...

, Microsoft Office

Microsoft Office

). Documents are automatically saved to Google's servers to prevent data loss, and a revision history is automatically kept so past edits may be viewed (although this only works for adjacent revisions, and there is currently no way to find and isolate changes in long documents.). Documents can be tagged and archived for organizational purposes. The service is officially supported on recent versions of the Firefox

Mozilla Firefox

Mozilla Firefox is a free and open source web browser descended from the Mozilla Application Suite and managed by Mozilla Corporation. , Firefox is the second most widely used browser, with approximately 25% of worldwide usage share of web browsers...

, Internet Explorer, Safari

Safari (web browser)

Safari is a web browser developed by Apple Inc. and included with the Mac OS X and iOS operating systems. First released as a public beta on January 7, 2003 on the company's Mac OS X operating system, it became Apple's default browser beginning with Mac OS X v10.3 "Panther". Safari is also the...

and Chrome

Google Chrome

Google Chrome is a web browser developed by Google that uses the WebKit layout engine. It was first released as a beta version for Microsoft Windows on September 2, 2008, and the public stable release was on December 11, 2008. The name is derived from the graphical user interface frame, or...

browsers running on Microsoft Windows, Apple OS X, and Linux operating systems.

1 GB of storage is included for free. Currently additional storage costs per year are: 20 GB-$5, 80 GB-$20, etc. up to 16 TB. Individual documents may not exceed 1 GB , embedded images must not exceed 2 MB each, and spreadsheets are limited to 256 columns, 200,000 rows, and 99 sheets. In September 2009, an equation editor was added which allows rendering in LaTeX

LaTeX

LaTeX is a document markup language and document preparation system for the TeX typesetting program. Within the typesetting system, its name is styled as . The term LaTeX refers only to the language in which documents are written, not to the editor used to write those documents. In order to...

format. However, Google Docs lacks an equation numbering feature. Find and Replace is available and in the original release, there was no ability to do the search in a reverse direction; the newest version of Google Docs allows reverse search and reverse replace.

Google Docs serves as a collaborative tool for editing amongst in real time. Documents can be shared, opened, and edited by multiple users at the same time. Users cannot be notified of changes, but the application can notify users when a comment or discussion is made or replied to, facilitating collaboration. There is no way to highlight changes made by a particular editor in real time during a writing session, nor a way to jump to the changes made. However, users can usually see where in the document or file a particular editor is currently writing, since in most of the suite's products, an editor's current position is represented with an editor-specific color/cursor. Also, the revision history included in the service allows users to see the changes made to a document, distinguished by editor, using their specific color. The application supports two ISO standard document formats: OpenDocument

OpenDocument

The Open Document Format for Office Applications is an XML-based file format for representing electronic documents such as spreadsheets, charts, presentations and word processing documents....

(for both opening and exporting) and Office Open XML (for opening only). It also includes support for proprietary formats such as .doc

DOC (computing)

In computing, DOC or doc is a filename extension for word processing documents; most commonly for Microsoft Word. Historically, the extension was used for documentation in plain-text format, particularly of programs or computer hardware, on a wide range of operating systems...

and .xls.

Google Docs is one of many cloud computing

Cloud computing

Cloud computing is the delivery of computing as a service rather than a product, whereby shared resources, software, and information are provided to computers and other devices as a utility over a network ....

document-sharing services. The majority of document-sharing services require user fees, whereas Google Docs is free. Its popularity amongst businesses is growing due to enhanced sharing features and accessibility. In addition, Google Docs has enjoyed a rapid rise in popularity among students and educational institutions.

Google Cloud Connect

Google Cloud Connect

Google Cloud Connect is a free cloud computing plug-in for Windows Microsoft Office 2003, 2007 and 2010 that can automatically store and synchronize any Microsoft Word document, PowerPoint presentation, or Excel spreadsheet to Google Docs in Google Docs or Microsoft Office formats. The Google Doc...

is a plug-in for Windows Microsoft Office

Microsoft Office

2003, 2007 and 2010 that can automatically store and synchronize any for Microsoft Word

Microsoft Word

document, PowerPoint presentation, or Excel

Excel

Excel may refer to:* Microsoft Excel, a spreadsheet application by Microsoft Corporation* Excel , a brand of chewing gum produced by Wrigley's* Excel , a crossover thrash/punk band from Venice, California...

spreadsheet to Google Docs in Google Docs or Microsoft Office formats. The Google Doc copy is automatically updated each time the Microsoft Office document is saved. Microsoft Office documents can be edited offline and synchronized later when online. Google Cloud Sync maintains previous Microsoft Office document versions and allows multiple users to collaborate by working on the same document at the same time.

Google Spreadsheets

Google Spreadsheets

Google Docs is a free, Web-based office suite, and data storage service offered by Google. It allows users to create and edit documents online while collaborating in real-time with other users. Google Docs combines the features of Writely and Spreadsheets with a presentation program incorporating...

and Google Sites

Google Sites

Google Sites is a structured wiki- and web page-creation tool offered by Google as part of the Google Apps Productivity suite.- History :Google Sites started out as JotSpot, the name and sole product of a software company that offered enterprise social software. It was targeted mainly at...

also incorporate Google Apps Script

Google Apps Script

Google Apps Script is a cloud based scripting language for light-weight application development in the Google Apps platform. It is based on JavaScript, however instead of running on the client, it gets executed in the Google Cloud...

to write code within documents in a similar way to VBA

Visual Basic for Applications

Visual Basic for Applications is an implementation of Microsoft's event-driven programming language Visual Basic 6 and its associated integrated development environment , which are built into most Microsoft Office applications...

in Microsoft Office

Microsoft Office

. The scripts can be activated either by user action or by a trigger in response to an event

Offline viewing is available as an opt-in beta HTML 5

HTML 5

web app.

Supported file formats

Google Docs supports 15 file formats:

Microsoft Word (.DOC and .DOCX)
Microsoft Excel (.XLS and .XLSX)
Microsoft PowerPoint (.PPT and .PPTX)
OpenDocument Format (.ODT and .ODS)
Adobe Portable Document Format (.PDF)
Apple Pages (.PAGES)
Adobe Illustrator (.AI)
Adobe Photoshop (.PSD)
Tagged Image File Format (.TIFF)
Autodesk AutoCad (.DXF)
Scalable Vector Graphics (.SVG)
PostScript (.EPS, .PS)
TrueType (.TTF)
XML Paper Specification (.XPS)
Archive file types (.ZIP and .RAR)

Data safety and privacy

Data security

Data security is the means of ensuring that data is kept safe from corruption and that access to it is suitably controlled. Thus data security helps to ensure privacy. It also helps in protecting personal data. Data security is part of the larger practice of Information security.- Disk Encryption...

issues and national interests mean that on-line document storage, and processing can be unsuitable for use by governments or commercial organisations. Especially so where sensitive or confidential data is being stored, edited or shared, etc. on systems and infrastructure that are outsourced and shared with many other organisations, individuals, users.

On March 10, 2009, Google reported, for example, that a bug in Google Docs had allowed unintended access to some private documents. It was believed that 0.05% of all documents stored via the service were affected by the bug. Google claims the bug has now been fixed.

Mobile access

The Android Google Docs app, which is available for free on the android market, allows users to view, edit, and create Google Docs documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. The Android Google Docs app can also take a photo of a document, sign, or other text and use Optical Character Recognition

Optical character recognition

Optical character recognition, usually abbreviated to OCR, is the mechanical or electronic translation of scanned images of handwritten, typewritten or printed text into machine-encoded text. It is widely used to convert books and documents into electronic files, to computerize a record-keeping...

to convert to text that can be edited. (Help, Overview) The iPhone

IPhone

The iPhone is a line of Internet and multimedia-enabled smartphones marketed by Apple Inc. The first iPhone was unveiled by Steve Jobs, then CEO of Apple, on January 9, 2007, and released on June 29, 2007...

and iPad

IPad

The iPad is a line of tablet computers designed, developed and marketed by Apple Inc., primarily as a platform for audio-visual media including books, periodicals, movies, music, games, and web content. The iPad was introduced on January 27, 2010 by Apple's then-CEO Steve Jobs. Its size and...

Safari Browser

Safari (web browser)

also allows users to view documents, spreadsheets, and presentation and to edit and create Google Docs documents and spreadsheets. Furthermore, the Google App for iPhone and iPad allows users to view and edit Google Docs. Most other mobile devices can also view and edit Google Docs documents and spreadsheets using a mobile browser. PDF files can be viewed but not edited.

External links

Google Docs
Official Google Docs Blog on Blogger
Blogger (service)
Blogger is a blog-publishing service that allows private or multi-user blogs with time-stamped entries. It was created by Pyra Labs, which was bought by Google in 2003. Generally, the blogs are hosted by Google at a subdomain of blogspot.com. Up until May 1, 2010 Blogger allowed users to publish...
Tonic Systems web page (with a few details on Google acquisition)
Some examples of how Google Docs is used
Video: Collaboration in Google Docs
Google Docs Pros and Cons
Free Google Docs Press Release Template With Company Logo and PDF Output

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.

History

Features

Supported file formats

Data safety and privacy

Mobile access

See also

External links