Tag Archives: Google Sheets

Page setup and ODF and EPUB support in the Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides Android apps

New versions of the Docs, Sheets, and Slides apps for Android are now available on Google Play, including the following new features to help you get more done on the move:

Page setup in Google Docs and image support improvements in Sheets
You can now change the orientation, paper size, and page color Docs on Android. In Sheets, you can use the IMAGE function to view images inside of cells.





EPUB and ODF support on Android
Docs now supports exporting your files in the EPUB (.epub) and OpenDocument Text (.odt) file formats. Additionally, you can now import OpenDocument Text (.odt) files from the Android app. Similarly, you will now be able to import and export OpenDocument Spreadsheets (.ods) in Sheets and OpenDocument Presentations (.odp) in Slides.

Please note: these features are only available when the device is online. When the device is offline, an error dialog will show saying "Data connection needed to open this file type".


Launch Details
Release track:
Launching to both Rapid release and Scheduled release

Editions:
Available to all G Suite editions

Rollout pace:
Full rollout (1-3 days for feature visibility)

Impact:
All end users

Action:
Change management suggested/FYI


More Information
Help Center: Page setup
How to use Google Slides
How to use Google Docs
How to use Google Sheets


New iterative calculation settings and more in Google Sheets

To prevent the errors that sometimes plague complex calculations, today we’re launching a new setting in Sheets on the web (File > Spreadsheet settings > Calculation > Iterative calculation) that allows you to set the maximum number of times a calculation with a circular reference can take place. In addition, you can specify a “convergence threshold,” and when results from successive calculations differ by less than that threshold value, the calculations will stop (even if the maximum number of calculations has yet to be reached).


Over the course of the week, we’ll make additional improvements to your Sheets experience on the web and Android devices. First, we’ll update the Sheets Android app UI to make it easier for users with right-to-left language settings to read and navigate. Second, we’ll make it possible to search the menus in Sheets on the web, much like you can in Google Docs and Slides.

Search the menus from the Help menu

Search the menus while in Compact Controls mode


For more details on these features, please visit the Help Center.

Launch Details
Release track:
  • Launching to Rapid release, with Scheduled release coming on January 9th, 2017
    • Iterative calculation setting
  • Launching to both Rapid release and Scheduled release
    • Right-to-left language improvements
    • Menu search
Editions:
Available to all G Suite editions

Rollout pace:
Gradual rollout (potentially longer than 3 days for feature visibility)

Impact:
All end users

Action:
Change management suggested/FYI

More Information
Help Center: Change a spreadsheet's locale, time zone, calculation settings, and language


Launch release calendar
Launch detail categories
Get these product update alerts by email
Subscribe to the RSS feed of these updates

Generating slides from spreadsheet data

Posted by Wesley Chun (@wescpy), Developer Advocate, G Suite

The G Suite team recently launched the very first Google Slides API, opening up a whole new set of possibilities, including leveraging data already sitting in a spreadsheet or database, and programmatically generating slide decks or slide content based on that data. Why is this a big deal? One of the key advantages of slide decks is that they can take database or spreadsheet data and make it more presentable for human consumption. This is useful when the need arises to communicate the information reflected by that data to management or potential customers.

Walking developers through a short application demonstrating both the Sheets and Slides APIs to make this happen is the topic of today's DevByte video. The sample app starts by reading all the necessary data from the spreadsheet using the Sheets API. The Slides API takes over from there, creating new slides for the data, then populating those slides with the Sheets data.

Developers interact with Slides by sending API requests. Similar to the Google Sheets API, these requests come in the form of JSON payloads. You create an array like in the JavaScript pseudocode below featuring requests to create a cell table on a slide and import a chart from a Sheet:


var requests = [
   {"createTable": {
       "elementProperties":
           {"pageObjectId": slideID},
       "rows": 8,
       "columns": 4
   }},
   {"createSheetsChart": {
       "spreadsheetId": sheetID,
       "chartId": chartID,
       "linkingMode": "LINKED",
       "elementProperties": {
           "pageObjectId": slideID,
           "size": {
               "height": { ... },
               "width": { ... }
           },
           "transform": { ... }
       }
   }}
];
If you've got at least one request, say in a variable named requests (as above), including the Sheet's sheetID and chartID plus the presentation page's slideID. You'd then pass it to the API with just one call to the presentations().batchUpdate() command, which in Python looks like the below if SLIDES is your API service endpoint:
SLIDES.presentations().batchUpdate(presentationId=slideID,
       body=requests).execute()

Creating tables is fairly straightforward. Creating charts has some magical features, one of those being the linkingMode. A value of "LINKED" means that if the Sheet data changes (altering the chart in the Sheet), the same chart in a slide presentation can be refreshed to match the latest image, either by the API or in the Slides user interface! You can also request a plain old static image that doesn't change with the data by selecting a value of "NOT_LINKED_IMAGE" for linkingMode. More on this can be found in the documentationon creating charts, and check out the video where you'll see both those API requests in action.

For a detailed look at the complete code sample featured in the video, check out the deep dive post. We look forward to seeing the interesting integrations you build with the power of both APIs!

Trash view and more in the Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides mobile apps

Check out the following new features in the latest versions of the Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides mobile apps:

  • Trash view in the Docs, Sheets, and Slides iOS apps - You can now view and restore previously deleted files in the Docs, Sheets, and Slides iOS apps. Just select “Trash” from the menu on the left side of the screen.
  • GIF insertion in the Docs Android app - Using the Google Keyboard in the Docs Android app, you can now search for and insert GIFs into documents.


Download the latest versions of the Docs, Sheets, and Slides mobile apps from the Google Play Store and the App Store today.

Launch Details
Release track: 
Launching to both Rapid release and Scheduled release

Editions:
Available to all G Suite editions

Rollout pace:
Gradual rollout (potentially longer than 3 days for feature visibility)

Impact:
All end users

Action:
Change management suggested/FYI

More Information
Help Center: Delete a document, spreadsheet, or presentation


Launch release calendar
Launch detail categories
Get these product update alerts by email
Subscribe to the RSS feed of these updates

Formatting cells with the Google Sheets API

Originally posted on G Suite Developers Blog
Posted by Wesley Chun (@wescpy), Developer Advocate, G Suite
At Google I/O earlier this year, we launched a new Google Sheets API (click here to watch the entire announcement). The updated API includes many new features that weren't available in previous versions, including access to more functionality found in the Sheets desktop and mobile user interfaces. Formatting cells in Sheets is one example of something that wasn't possible with previous versions of the API and is the subject of today's DevByte video.
In our previous Sheets API video, we demonstrated how to get data into and out of a Google Sheet programmatically, walking through a simple script that reads rows out of a relational database and transferring the data to a new Google Sheet. The Sheet created using the code from that video is where we pick up today.

Formatting spreadsheets is accomplished by creating a set of request commands in the form of JSON payloads, and sending them to the API. Here is a sample JavaScript Object made up of an array of requests (only one this time) to bold the first row of the default Sheet automatically created for you (whose ID is 0): 

{"requests": [
    {"repeatCell": {
        "range": {
            "sheetId": 0,
            "startRowIndex": 0,
            "endRowIndex": 1
        },
        "cell": {
            "userEnteredFormat": {
                "textFormat": {
                    "bold": true
                }
            }
        },
        "fields": "userEnteredFormat.textFormat.bold"
    }}
]}
With at least one request, say in a variable named requests and the ID of the sheet as SHEET_ID, you send them to the API via an HTTP POST to https://sheets.googleapis.com/v4/spreadsheets/{SHEET_ID}:batchUpdate, which in Python, would be a single call that looks like this: 
SHEETS.spreadsheets().batchUpdate(spreadsheetId=SHEET_ID,
        body=requests).execute()

For more details on the code in the video, check out the deepdive blog post. As you can probably guess, the key challenge is in constructing the JSON payload to send to API calls—the common operations samples can really help you with this. You can also check out our JavaScript codelab where we guide you through writing a Node.js app that manages customer orders for a toy company, featuring the toy orders data we looked at today but in a relational database. While the resulting equivalent Sheet is featured prominently in today's video, we will revisit it again in an upcoming episode showing you how to generate slides with spreadsheet data using the new Google Slides API, so stay tuned for that!

We hope all these resources help developers enhance their next app using G Suite APIs! Please subscribe to our channel and tell us what topics you would like to see in other episodes of the G Suite Dev Show!

Formatting cells with the Google Sheets API

Posted by Wesley Chun (@wescpy), Developer Advocate, G Suite
At Google I/O earlier this year, we launched a new Google Sheets API (click here to watch the entire announcement). The updated API includes many new features that weren't available in previous versions, including access to more functionality found in the Sheets desktop and mobile user interfaces. Formatting cells in Sheets is one example of something that wasn't possible with previous versions of the API and is the subject of today's DevByte video.
In our previous Sheets API video, we demonstrated how to get data into and out of a Google Sheet programmatically, walking through a simple script that reads rows out of a relational database and transferring the data to a new Google Sheet. The Sheet created using the code from that video is where we pick up today.

Formatting spreadsheets is accomplished by creating a set of request commands in the form of JSON payloads, and sending them to the API. Here is a sample JavaScript Object made up of an array of requests (only one this time) to bold the first row of the default Sheet automatically created for you (whose ID is 0): 

{"requests": [
    {"repeatCell": {
        "range": {
            "sheetId": 0,
            "startRowIndex": 0,
            "endRowIndex": 1
        },
        "cell": {
            "userEnteredFormat": {
                "textFormat": {
                    "bold": true
                }
            }
        },
        "fields": "userEnteredFormat.textFormat.bold"
    }}
]}
With at least one request, say in a variable named requests and the ID of the sheet as SHEET_ID, you send them to the API via an HTTP POST to https://sheets.googleapis.com/v4/spreadsheets/{SHEET_ID}:batchUpdate, which in Python, would be a single call that looks like this: 
SHEETS.spreadsheets().batchUpdate(spreadsheetId=SHEET_ID,
        body=requests).execute()

For more details on the code in the video, check out the deepdive blog post. As you can probably guess, the key challenge is in constructing the JSON payload to send to API calls—the common operations samples can really help you with this. You can also check out our JavaScript codelab where we guide you through writing a Node.js app that manages customer orders for a toy company, featuring the toy orders data we looked at today but in a relational database. While the resulting equivalent Sheet is featured prominently in today's video, we will revisit it again in an upcoming episode showing you how to generate slides with spreadsheet data using the new Google Slides API, so stay tuned for that!

We hope all these resources help developers enhance their next app using G Suite APIs! Please subscribe to our channel and tell us what topics you would like to see in other episodes of the G Suite Dev Show!

Save time with new custom templates in Docs, Sheets, Slides and Forms

We recently launched new tools in G Suite like Explore, Action items, and other features to help your teams save time and focus on what’s important: creating impactful work, quicker. We know time spent re-creating files in the workplace takes away from the time your team can spend collaborating and achieving results.

That’s why, today, we’re introducing custom templates in G Suite for the Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Forms files your teams use the most.

Simply submit files to shared template galleries in the Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Forms home screens for your co-workers to adapt and use as needed. With these customizable templates, your teams can focus less on formatting and more on driving impact and sharing success.


Note that if you disabled template submissions to the old Google Drive templates gallery in the Admin console, users in your organization will not be able to see and use the new galleries when they launch. You can enable the new galleries for your users in the Admin console (Apps > G Suite > Drive and Docs > Templates). You can also configure the categories available for your organization’s templates from that same section in the Admin console.


In addition, G Suite for Business and Education customers can require templates be approved before they appear in the galleries, or prevent end users from submitting new templates altogether. These features are not enabled by default, so you’ll need to update your settings if you want to moderate or restrict template submissions to the galleries.


The old templates gallery will be shut down in early 2017, giving you and your users time to transition to the new galleries. We’ll let you know the exact date with a message in the old gallery, but it will not take place before February 1st, 2017.

An important note regarding this rollout: 
To give you a chance to update your settings and curate your organization’s template galleries, we’re rolling out these features (both in the Admin console and in the home screens) to all admins, regardless of their release track, starting today. We’ll launch to end users on the Rapid release track today as well, with the rollout to end users on the Scheduled release track starting on December 7th. 

Launch Details
Release track:
  • G Suite administrators
    • Launching to both Rapid and Scheduled release
  • G Suite end users
    • Launching to Rapid release, with Scheduled release coming on December 7th

Editions:

  • Template galleries
    • Available to all G Suite editions
  • Moderation and restriction capabilities
    • Available to G Suite for Business and Education customers only

Rollout pace:
Gradual rollout (potentially longer than 3 days for feature visibility)

Impact:
All end users

Action:
Admin action suggested/FYI

More Information
Help Center: Enable templates for Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Forms
Help Center: Create a file from a template


Launch release calendar
Launch detail categories
Get these product update alerts by email
Subscribe to the RSS feed of these updates

Notifications and more in the Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides apps for Android

Check out the following new features in the latest versions of the Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides Android apps:

  • Notifications in Docs, Sheets, and Slides - Users who currently see notifications in their Google Drive Android app (for instance, when someone mentions them in a comment or shares a document with them) will now see notifications in their Docs, Sheets, and Slides Android apps as well. These notifications are specific to the app they’re working in and only appear if the user has an updated version of Google Drive installed on their mobile device.
  • Resize rows and columns in Sheets - Users will find it easier to resize rows and columns in the Sheets Android app, which now features options to specify the pixel sizes of rows and columns and to fit columns to their data exactly.
  • Create and edit data validation in Sheets - Just like they can on the web, users can now create and edit data validation criteria in the Sheets Android app.
  • Change the color of sheet tabs in Sheets - Users can now differentiate between sheets in a spreadsheet by changing the color of their tabs in the Sheets Android app.

Visit the Google Play Store to download the latest versions of the Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides apps for Android.

Launch Details
Release track:
Launching to both Rapid release and Scheduled release

Editions:
Available to all G Suite editions

Rollout pace:
Gradual rollout (potentially longer than 3 days for feature visibility)

Impact:
All end users

Action:
Change management suggested/FYI

More Information
Help Center: Edit rows and columns in a spreadsheet
Help Center: Create an in-cell dropdown list
Help Center: Copy, re-order, and delete sheets


Launch release calendar
Launch detail categories
Get these product update alerts by email
Subscribe to the RSS feed of these updates

Five new ways to reach your goals faster with G Suite

(Cross-posted from the The Keyword) 

One of the core promises of Google Docs is to help you and your team go from collecting ideas to achieving your goals as quickly and easily as possible. That’s why last month we launched Explore in Docs, Sheets and Slides — with machine intelligence built right in — to help your team create amazing presentations, spreadsheets and documents in a fraction of the time it used to take.

Today, we’re introducing five new time-saving features designed to speed up and simplify the way you work, so you can focus on bringing your team’s ideas to life.

1. Spend less time figuring out who owns what with Action Items

According to research by the McKinsey Global Institute, employees spend about 20 percent of their work week — nearly an entire day — searching for details internally and tracking down colleagues for answers. This can be especially true when a document is full of ideas, requests and comments, making it difficult to get a clear sense of who’s responsible for what.

To help keep your projects moving, when you type phrases like “Ryan to follow up on the keynote script,” or “Andrea to schedule a weekly check in” on desktop, Docs will intelligently suggest an Action Item to assign to the right person, thanks to Natural Language Processing (NLP).


You can also manually assign an Action Item to someone in the Docs, Sheets and Slides desktop and mobile apps by mentioning their name in a comment and checking the new Action Item box. The assignee will get an email notification and see the Action Item(s) clearly highlighted with a blue bar when they open the file.


2. Spend less time searching for the files that need attention

Once Action Items have been assigned, it’s easy for team members to identify documents, spreadsheets and presentations that need their attention. The next time they visit Docs, Sheets, Slides (or Drive) from their laptops or mobile apps, they’ll see a badge on any files with Action Items assigned to them, plus any unresolved suggestions that others have made to their files.


3. Spend less time building questions with smarter Forms

Since its launch in 2008, more than a billion questions have been asked in Forms, allowing us to identify common patterns, like question types and the response options that usually go with them. With the help of neural networks, we can now predict the type of question you’re asking and suggest potential responses for you to choose from, giving you back about 25 percent of the time you used to spend creating a Form.

Let’s say you’re planning an all-day event at the office and need to know which day works best for your team. When you type “What days are you available next week?” Forms will intelligently determine that “Checkbox” is the ideal question type, and generate related response options that you can add one by one or all together.


Also debuting today is a top-requested feature from our business and education customers — the new “File upload” question type. Your respondents can now upload files from their computer or Drive — all of which are neatly collected for you in a new Drive folder. Note: This feature is only available for G Suite customers in Forms shared within their organization.


4. Spend less time typing with a set of new voice commands

Last year, we launched Voice typing in Docs on the web to help you capture ideas, big and small, without lifting a finger. Today, we’re adding more ways to format and customize content with commands for changing text color, deleting words, inserting links and comments, plus a number of other ways to format, hands-free.

5. Spend less time switching between apps to get things done

We want you to be as productive and collaborative as possible, regardless of the tools you choose to work with, so we’ve partnered with Slack to make it even easier to work with Google Docs files. With a click of the "+" button in Slack, you can bring files from Drive directly into a conversation with your team, or create new Docs, Sheets and Slides files right from Slack. You can check out more details on Slack’s blog.


With the introduction of Explore, and more and more updates to products that build in machine intelligence, taking back time spent on mundane, repetitive tasks will only get easier with G Suite. Now, you can focus your energy on creative and strategic work, not busy work.

Launch Details
Release track:
  • Launching to both Rapid release and Scheduled release
    • Assigned action items
    • Priority badges
    • Voice typing improvements
    • Slack integration
  • Launching to Rapid release, with Scheduled release coming on November 2nd, 2016
    • Suggested action items
    • Suggested response options in Forms
  • Launching to Rapid release, with Scheduled release coming on November 9th, 2016
    • File uploads in Forms
Editions:
Available to all G Suite editions

Rollout pace:
Gradual rollout (potentially longer than 3 days for feature visibility)

Impact:
All end users

Action:
Change management suggested/FYI

More Information
Help Center: Add, edit, reply, or delete comments
Help Center: Edit your form
Help Center: Type with your voice
Slack Blog


Launch release calendar
Launch detail categories
Get these product update alerts by email
Subscribe to the RSS feed of these updates

Peeking into the future of work with Salesforce

Posted by Tom Holman, Product Manager, Google Sheets

Originally posted to Google Cloud

When it comes to redefining how people go about their everyday work, Google and Salesforce have shared a remarkably similar path, with our roots planted firmly in the cloud.

That's why we were very excited to share the stage last week at Dreamforce to showcase two integrations that Salesforce built on top of G Suite: Salesforce Lightning for Gmail and Sales Cloud integration with Google Sheets. In addition to existing integrations with Google Calendar, Gmail (for Salesforce IQ), Drive and Contacts, these new offerings will go a long way in helping people work effectively with smarter tools.

Salesforce Lightning for Gmail

Salesforce Lightning for Gmail

At Dreamforce, we showcased the upcoming Lightning for Gmail integration, which brings together our leading CRM and email services.

With this integration, sales reps can now streamline repetitive but important tasks: they can review Salesforce records relevant to their emails, add contacts from their address book into Salesforce, and even create new Salesforce records, all from within Gmail.

A pilot of Lightning for Gmail will be available by the end of this year for free to all Salesforce customers. Interested customers can contact their Salesforce account managers to sign up for the pilot program.

Sales Cloud and Google Sheets

Link any Sales Cloud List View to a source Google Sheet, and view, edit, and delete that data directly.

The Sales Cloud integration with Sheets, meanwhile, makes it easy for sales reps to link any Salesforce List View to a Google Sheet. Users can also view, edit, and delete records within Sheets and sync those changes back to Salesforce. Better still, the integration also supports your business logic and validation rules.

We gave a joint preview of the Sales Cloud and Google Sheets integration at Google I/O this summer, and today are happy to announce that it will be available in beta to all Sales Cloud customers by the end of this year.

We had a blast working with the Salesforce team to bring these new solutions to life.