About this product: 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.
If you're looking for an easy way to find photos on your PC, make a few editing fixes, and then share your images with others, look no further. Picasa, available as a free download from Google.com, makes it easy to instantly find, edit and share all the pictures on your PC. Every time you open Picasa, it automatically locates all your pictures in seconds and sorts them into albums. From there, you can apply basic edits to your photos, burn them to CD, post them on your blog, or email them to friends. In this colorful, compact guide, author Steve Schwartz starts at the beginning, walking readers through the Picasa interface and showing readers how to set preferences. From there, he launches into the heart of this book, offering project-based instruction for organizing, viewing, and editing your photos, and then shows you how to use Picasa's built-in tools to print, email, or order professional prints of your images. In addition, readers will learn how to share their photos instantly with Hello, Picasa's free instant messaging software. Throughout the book, full-page, full-color screen shots and simple, step-by-step instructions lead readers through several projects, such as saving an image to the Windows desktop, creating a screensaver, making movies, generating photo-based Web pages, running a slideshow, and creating posters, collages, and contact sheets.
About this product: I was looking for something that would serve as a good introduction to the array of Google applications, and this book is well-suited to that task.
What you'll get:
* A good introduction to 12 or 13 of the newer Google applications. Ledford spends a little more time on the applications that are likely to be more popular (mail, docs, spreadsheets) and a little less time on some of the others (Picassa, chat, etc.). Overall, I thought the focus was just about right.
* Ledford explains the basics of each application. He offers some tips and tricks to using each application. He breaks the discussion up around different features, where appropriate (e.g., Google mail vs. the calendaring function within GMail). Along the way, readers will learn why a particular app might be more or less useful to them than competing applications (e.g., Google spreadsheets vs. Microsoft Excel). Ledford points out the most significant advantages AND drawbacks of each Google App, which is quite helpful.
* For my purposes, I was interested in evaluating the whole Google suite of applications so that I could consider whether to move my organization away from Microsoft's Office suite and toward online applications. This book is a great first-effort in helping assemble that sort of information. Undoubtedly, much more will be written about Google's suite of applications. As one of the first (if not the first) to undertake this endeavor, however, Ledford does a commendable job.
What you won't get:
* Extensive details on any one application. For example, if you want to become a GMail power user, then this book is not for you. Consider this a very basic introduction to the variety of Google applications. For an in-depth discussion, you would need to look elsewhere.
* A substitute for playing around with each application itself. It is one thing to read about Google's application suite; it is another to use and practice on the apps themselves. In my opinion, there is no substitute of knowledge gained through trying to use each of these applications. I read this manual while on a vacation in Spain, where I had no internet access. I likely would have found it more useful if I could have used some of the tips and recommendations in real time. That said, Ledford's book still serves its purpose as a good introductory guide.
Overall, I would recommend this to anyone who wants to know more about Google Apps but was afraid to ask, and to anyone who is considering whether to attempt a life without Microsoft Office. There are other alternatives to Office, but Google's Apps probably are the most prominent of them, and Ledford's book serves as a useful introduction to them.
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