Hasta La Gadget!

Back in May, Google added a new research pane to Google Docs, offering the ability to search for any topic and get results without having to leave the document you’re working on. It’s a small feature, but helps save time and makes it easier for users. Today, the search giant has added the research pane to Presentations and Drawings.

When putting together a presentation or sketching up a drawing in Google Drive, users can now use the research pane to search for content and help them with their project without minimizing or opening up another window. For example, you can add a photo from your Picasa album, or grab a quote from a friend’s Google+ profile and paste it into your project, all from the same window.

Just like when the research pane was first introduced, Google Apps users will still only be limited to web-only search results, since personal content search is intended for individual accounts only. However, most students for which this feature would benefit usually only have individual accounts anyway, so the limitation probably isn’t too much of an issue.

If you find that you’re not a big fan of the research pane and it’s just taking up precious screen real estate, you can easily toggle it on and off right from your document. However, those who heavily rely on the Google ecosystem will no doubt get some great use out of the new feature, and it’s a time saver that’ll shave a few minutes off of your project work session each time you use it.

Google Docs research pane expands to Presentations and Drawings is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
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It’s a long overdue match, really — if the Google Drive productivity suite is considered the centerpiece of Google’s web app catalog, and the Chrome Web Store is the catalog, why weren’t the two combined? Google has seen the light by turning Docs (text), Sheets (spreadsheets) and Slides (presentations) into neatly packaged web apps that can be installed through the Chrome browser. New Chromebook owners won’t even have to go that far, as the trio will surface automatically in the Chrome OS app list over the next few weeks. The web app bundles might be simple, but they could be tremendous helps for anyone who wants to punch out a few quick edits while on the road.

Filed under: Internet, Software, Google

Google Drive apps reach the Chrome Web Store and Chrome OS for quicker web work originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 23 Oct 2012 16:44:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Breaking up with a web-based ecosystem is hard to do, especially when you have several gigabytes of data invested in a specific platform. However, things just got a whole lot easier for disgruntled vloggers. Google recently added YouTube to its Takeout data migration service, which now gives users the ability to pull all of their uploaded videos from the company’s servers in a single stroke. This groovy tool should definitely come in handy when you’re busy shopping around your latest foreign film to different movie studios. In addition to being extremely easy to use, the service will also send an email letting you know that your download has finished. Simply set it and forget it!

Filed under: Storage, Internet

Google gives users an easy out, adds YouTube to Takeout data transfer tool originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 28 Sep 2012 03:07:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Alt-week peels back the covers on some of the more curious sci-tech stories from the last seven days.

Sometimes we wonder, what would we have ended up doing if we didn’t spend our time trawling the web for the week’s best alternative tech stories? We could have been paleontologists, novelists, engineers, or if we were really lucky, worked for Google. Instead, here we are bringing you some of the more colorful tech-tales from the last seven days, which we’re really not complaining about. That said though, at least on this occasion, we got to taste a bit of all the above. This is alt-week.

Continue reading Alt-week 9.15.12: The ultimate wind machine, Egyptian Lego and the office of our dreams

Filed under: Misc, Science, Alt

Alt-week 9.15.12: The ultimate wind machine, Egyptian Lego and the office of our dreams originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 15 Sep 2012 19:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Humans are social creatures, and when working together as a team, the synergy delivers far more than what individuals are able to deliver. Having said that, Google Spreadsheets in Google Docs has been quite useful for me all this while, but when working within the context of a group, it is always better to do so in person than virtually. Just in case circumstances do not allow for everyone to meet, Google has introduced the ability to add discussions into your spreadsheets, making it less boring and more informative during your virtual shared spreadsheet sessions.

Basically, if a cell has a comment by someone, an orange triangle can be seen in the upper right corner. Hover the cursor over said cell, and the full discussion will be revealed. The total number of comments are also counted and tallied at the bottom of the screen on the sheet tab. Curious to know what everyone has been talking about? Hover the cursor over the comment icon and you’re privy to all that has happened.

Not only that, you are also able to +mention someone to in order to include them in a discussion automatically, as well as through a notification via email. Do you see yourself as more productive with the introduction of discussions in Google spreadsheets?

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Protected Ranges in Google Spreadsheets now available, Google Drive for iOS and PC offline editing introduced,