Product Description
Can Google applications really become an alternative to the venerable Microsoft Office suite? Conventional wisdom may say no, but practical wisdom says otherwise. Right now, 100,000 small businesses are currently running trials of Google office applications. So are large corporations such as General Electric and Proctor & Gamble. Google Apps Hacks gets you in on the action with several ingenious ways to push Google's web, mobile, and desktop apps to the limit.
The scores of clever hacks and workarounds in this book help you get more than the obvious out of a whole host of Google's web-based applications for word processing, spreadsheets, PowerPoint-style presentations, email, calendar, and more by giving you ways to exploit the suite's unique network functionality. You get plenty of ways to tinker with:
- Google Documents -- Share and edit documents with others in real time, view them on the run with Google Docs mobile service, and use Google Notebook for web research
- Google Spreadsheets -- Add real-time data to spreadsheets, and generate charts and tables you can embed in web pages
- Google Presentations -- View them on a mobile phone and save them as video
- Gmail -- Send email to and from a mobile phone, adjust Gmail's layout with a style sheet, and a lot more
- iGoogle -- Create your own gadgets, program a screenscraper, add Flash games, and more
- Google Calendar -- Add web content events, public calendars, and your Outlook Calendar to this application
- Google Reader, Google Maps, Google Earth, and Google SketchUp: the new 3D modeling software tool
- Picasa, YouTube, and Google Video -- discover new ways to customize and use these media management apps
In addition, Google Apps Hacks outlines ways you can create a simple web site with nothing but Google tools, including Page Creator, Blogger, Google Analytics, and content from other Google apps. This amazing collection just might convince you that Microsoft Office is not the last word in business applications. The price is certainly right.
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 Opened my eyes to quite a few new Google tricks I haven't tried... ( never_stop_reading )
I happily take advantage of a number of Google applications such as Gmail, iGoogle, Google Calendar, and a few other things. But there's more to the Google Apps family than that, and I know I'm not getting all I can out of the offerings. After going through Google Apps Hacks by Philipp Lenssen, I have a number of new tricks to try out both on stuff I already use as well as a few other apps. Fun stuff!
Contents:
Meet The Google Docs Family; The Google Docs Family - Google Documents; The Google Docs Family - Google Spreadsheets; The Google Docs Family - Google Presentation; Become a Gmail Power User; Customize Your Google Home Page; Manage Your Events With Google Calendar; Keep Up On News With Google Reader; Manage Your Photos And Videos With Picasa and YouTube; Create Your Own Home Page, Blog, or Group; Dive Into Google Maps, Google Earth, and Sketchup 3D; Google Analytics And Beyond - Market Your Site, Track Visitors
Credits; Index
This book follows the same format as other O'Reilly Hack titles. For each of the chapters, you get a number of tricks, or "hacks", that show you how to do things that may not be intuitively obvious. There's a difficulty meter after each hack title that gives you a clue as to whether its something that is easy to pull off or something that takes a degree of technical skill. The first couple of hacks in each chapter tend to be introductory in nature. They explain the package and get you started. For instance, the first hack in the first chapter is "How to Get Your Google Account". Likewise, the first hack in the iGoogle chapter has you adding Google tools to your iGoogle home page. The hacks get more in-depth after that, such as "Backing Up Your Email" or "Create Google Maps Overlays On the Fly". I personally was intrigued by some of the possibilities in the Google Spreadsheets area. "Add Live Data to Your Spreadsheet" was interesting, as was "Automatically Complete Lists of Related Items". That one is completely unexpected, and shows the power of integration with the Google search engine results. There's also a way to import data from web sites into a Google spreadsheet. That has some particular interest for a project I'd like to do. Finally, there was a *really* cool hack to show how to track packages via RSS using Google Reader. That one will be getting some significant use with my next Amazon order...
As with all Hacks titles, some items will be absolute gems for you, while others will hold no interest. That's OK, and it's to be expected. All it takes is one or two hacks to make a radical change in the way you do things. In terms of usefulness, Google Apps Hacks ranks up there with the best of the Hacks titles.
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Things that you never knew could be done
This book has proven quite useful to me as I'm trying to more and more take advantage of the free offerings that Google has. Google Apps, as they're currently known, are still in their development stage, but have a lot promise for moving your digital life on-line. This book has excellent tips on how to make the most of these apps. It is well organized (by app) and rates the "hacks" by difficulty/involvement. They're not hacks really, but rather unique ways to take advantage of using Google Documents, Spreadsheets, Presentations, Gmail and more. It is appropriate for the beginner to the moderate user, introducing CSS techniques and Greasemonkey (in some of the more useful tips.
All in all, well worth the money if you want all the information about using Google apps at your fingertips.
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Got more than I bargained for...
The title "Google Apps Hacks" is slightly misleading because this book covers so much more than the so-titled Google Apps suite: Google Docs, Gmail, Google Sites, Google Calendar, and Google Talk.
Phillip Lennssen covers a TON of Google applications: from Picasa, to Sketchup, to Maps, to Analytics.
I've been reading his blog for awhile: blogoscoped.com and always appreciated his insights into the industry.
The hacks covered in the book range from beginner to advanced, and one of my favorites is unicode characters in your email signature. It adds an extra flair and is delightfully.
If you use Gmail, or any other Google applications, this book is for you.
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Life in the Age of Google Web Apps ( bwmerkey )
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Sometimes I wonder how Microsoft can presume to compete with Google in the Web world. So much depends on search nowadays -- the Internet is one big store of valuable information. Yet I have to use an unsupported freeware utility to search my little Windows XP hard drive because the search feature that comes with the operating system is so slow and inflexible.
**Google Apps Hacks** introduced me to a Google universe that was even bigger than I had expected. I expected --and got-- lots of material on plugging into Google maps (lots of people are taking advantage of the possibilities here) and lots of tips on using GMail, gadgets, calendars and news feeds.
The biggest surprises for me were contained in the chapters on Google Docs. Part of the material was basic "how-to" and "did you know that..." information to help get acquainted with the features of Google word processing, spreadsheet and presentation software. In fact, it appears that this book itself was collaboratively composed by Philipp Lenssen along with O'Reilly staff with Google Docs.
I was most impressed by how easy and flexible the spreadsheet application is to use. The author provides a pile of tricks and tips useful for both the ordinary user and the programmer.
This book should attract programmers (and other Web citizens) who want to investigate and test drive the latest cool things that many people are having fun with -- and a bunch more are making money from.
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