Posted by Maciek Nowakowski, Associate Product Manager

(Cross-posted from the Gmail Blog.)

When we check our email, many of us rely on the message snippets to figure out which emails to open first. We've been listening to your feedback though, and we know that sometimes, you want more than snippets. This is why I’m happy to announce that you can now preview messages in your inbox using a new feature in Gmail Labs called Preview Pane. It’s probably a very familiar layout to those of you who have used Gmail on a tablet device. We also think it’s going to work especially well if you have a larger resolution screen.




After you enable Preview Pane from the Labs tab in Gmail Settings you’ll see a toggle button in the top right corner of your message list, which lets you switch between preview and list views.


For those of you who have more vertical space you can also move the preview pane below your message list. You can enable this using the dropdown arrow next to the toggle button:


By default there is a 3-second delay in marking a conversation as read after previewing it. If that doesn’t feel natural to you, you can change the timing in the General tab of settings:


If you’d like to remove the new layout, simply return to Gmail Settings and disable the lab. Finally, don’t forget to let us know what you think about the latest addition to Gmail Labs.

Posted by Himanshu Vasishth, Software Engineer

(Cross-posted from the Docs Blog.)

One of the key features of Google Cloud Connect for Microsoft Office is the ability to easily sync Office documents up to Google Docs and to collaborate on them with others. You asked us to simplify the experience of downloading and opening Office documents stored in your Google Docs account, so today we’re doing just that. Now you can open any Office file stored in Google Docs directly from within Microsoft Office.

Posted by Irene Chung, Software Engineer

(Cross-posted on the Gmail Blog.)

Google Calendar is an essential tool for organizing your time and sharing your schedule with friends and coworkers. But what about letting others know about your preferred availability? Likewise, when you look at a business's online calendar, do you wonder why you can't just book an open slot instead of remembering to call during regular business hours? Now, with appointment slots in Google Calendar, any individual or business can manage appointment availability online 24/7.

Creating appointment slots

To get started, set up blocks of time you’d like to offer as appointment slots. Simply click anywhere on your calendar and then on "Appointment slots.” From there, create a single block of time or automatically split a larger block of time into smaller appointment slots.


Every Google Calendar has its own personal appointments sign up page; you can embed it on your website or give the URL directly to friends and clients. You can find the URL for your appointment page at the top of the set-up page, which you can access via the Edit details link.


Signing up for an appointment slot

When someone visits your sign up page, their calendar is overlaid for convenience and they can sign up directly for any available appointment slot. When they sign up, Google Calendar conveniently creates a new shared event on both of your calendars.


At Google, many people are already using appointment slots to manage their office hours. We’re starting to roll it out widely today, and appointment slots should be available for everyone within the next few days.

Posted by Grace Kwak, Product Manager

(Cross-posted from the Gmail Blog.)

Today we’re adding two features that make it easier to customize Google Calendar. First, you can now change your default event length from the standard 30 minute slot. If you frequently create 15 minute meetings, for example, you can now make 15 minutes the default length for all your events. This way, you don’t need to click into the event page to change the duration every time.



You can change the default length of your events from the Calendar settings page. Next to the “Default meeting length” option, choose the length you’d like from the drop-down menu on the right. From there, you can also enable “Speedy meetings,” which automatically shortens events that are 30 minutes or longer to allow you to prep for your next meeting or get to your next appointment if you have a packed schedule.



Second, for those of you who still prefer paper and print your calendar, you can now select a specific date range in the print dialog box. Google Calendar will automatically format your printout for the date range you choose.

Posted by Jaideep Mirchandani, Product Manager, Google Apps

Over the past few months, we’ve released a string of new features in Google Docs to give your business more tools for collaborative document editing and data analysis. From simpler file uploads to discussions and mobile editing in documents, we’re making it easier for you and your colleagues to work together on the web. Continuing with this effort, we’re launching pivot tables in Google spreadsheets, which will be rolled out to all Rapid Release users over the next 24 hours.

With pivot tables, you can quickly narrow down large data sets to get high level insights. Say you run a retail chain and you have thousands of rows of sales data broken down by purchase. It could be helpful for you and your sales manager to view the total annual revenue for each region without having to enter multiple formulas. In a matter of seconds, you can create a pivot table and summarize all of your data according to the factors you specify, all while collaborating with your sales manager on the spreadsheet.

To see how pivot tables work in Google spreadsheets, check out this video:



We hope pivot tables in Google spreadsheets will help you save time analyzing your data. For more details on using pivot tables, take a look at our post on the Google Docs Blog.

As we near the end of the March, we want to highlight some of the many recent updates made to Google Docs. You’ve already heard about Discussions in Google Docs, which introduced a better way to provide document feedback. Here are some of the other features that have been released in Google Docs over the past couple months:

• Filter your data in spreadsheets: We made it easier to analyze and view your data with the addition of filtering in Google spreadsheets. Applying a filter to a set of data can help you quickly narrow down the data set to find the data you need. By selecting a data set, you can filter and sort amongst many rows at once.
  

• 12 new file formats in the Google Docs Viewer: The Google Docs Viewer is used by millions of people every day to quickly view PDFs, Microsoft Word documents and PowerPoint presentations online. Not only is viewing files in your browser far more secure than downloading and opening them locally, but it also saves time and doesn’t clutter up your hard-drive with unwanted files. We recently added support for:
  
  
  • Microsoft Excel (.XLS and .XLSX)
    
  • Microsoft PowerPoint 2007 / 2010 (.PPTX)
    
  • Apple Pages (.PAGES)
    
  • Adobe Illustrator (.AI)
    
  • Adobe Photoshop (.PSD)
    
  • Autodesk AutoCad (.DXF)
    
  • Scalable Vector Graphics (.SVG)
    
  • PostScript (.EPS, .PS)
    
  • TrueType (.TTF)
    
  • XML Paper Specification (.XPS)

• Mobile editing in 45 languages: Last year, we launched mobile editing in English in Google documents. You can now edit your documents on the go in 45 languages on Android with Froyo (version 2.2) and on iOS devices (version 3.0+) including the iPad.

• Optical Character Recognition (OCR) in 34 languages: Last June, we introduced the ability to upload documents into Google Docs using Optical Character Recognition (OCR). We’ve now added support for 29 additional character sets, including those used in most European languages, Russian, Chinese Simplified and some other Asian languages. See the upload page for the full list.
  

• Multiple chart ranges and hidden sheets in Spreadsheets: We added the ability to chart multiple ranges and hide sheets in Google spreadsheets. In charts, you can now add extra ranges by clicking on “Select ranges...” and “add another range.” You can also manually add new ranges separated by commas. In addition, we introduced the ability to hide your sheets. You can now click on a sheet tab and select “hide sheet” to remove a sheet from view.

• Revisions, presence, and format painter in Drawings: We’re making it easier to work together in drawings. First, we’ve added presence highlights around shapes so you can keep track of which object each person is editing. Second, we added revision history which lets you see who made which change as well as go back to previous versions. Third, the new format painter lets you choose a source shape, press the format painter icon to copy its formatting, and then click on another shape to apply that formatting to the destination shape.
  

• Google Cloud Connect for Microsoft Office: Google Cloud Connect is now available in 39 languages. We’ve also added the ability to hide the toolbar.

• Hidden gridlines in Google spreadsheets: Under the View menu, you can Hide gridlines for each sheet, leaving only the borders that have been put there.

• Quick starring and improved sharing invitations: Now you can star documents while editing them. Once a doc is starred, you’ll be able to find the doc by clicking on the starred link in your document list. We’ve also updated document sharing so that when you share a doc with others, all new collaborators are now included on the email.

• Cloud printing on the go: now you can print from your smartphone with Google Cloud Print for mobile documents and Gmail for mobile. Just open a document in Google Docs or an email in Gmail in your mobile browser and choose “Print” from the dropdown menu in the top right corner. To get started, you’ll need to connect your printer to Google Cloud Print.

As with all updates in Google Docs, users get access to new features each time they open their browsers, and improvements roll out to customers with no need for administrators to manage patches or install software. Stay tuned for more updates to Google Docs.

Posted by Jeff Harris, Product Manager, Google Docs

(Cross-posted from the Gmail blog.)

People get a lot of email these days. On top of personal messages, there are group mailing lists, social network notifications, credit card statements, newsletters you might have signed up for, and promotional email from a shopping site you used once months ago. Gmail’s filters and labels were invented to help manage the deluge, but while I have about 100 filters that triage and label my incoming mail, most of my friends and family have all their messages in a giant unfiltered inbox.

Last year, we launched Priority Inbox to automatically sort incoming email and help you focus on the messages that matter most. Today, we're launching a complementary feature in Gmail Labs called Smart Labels, which helps you classify and organize your email. Once you turn it on from the Labs tab in Settings, Smart Labels automatically categorizes incoming Bulk, Notification and Forum messages, and labels them as such. “Bulk” mail includes any kind of mass mailing (such as newsletters and promotional email) and gets filtered out of your inbox by default (where you can easily read it later), “Notifications” are messages sent to you directly (like account statements and receipts), and email from group mailing lists gets labeled as “Forums.”


If you already use filters and labels to organize your mail, you may find that you can replace your existing filters with Smart Labels. If you're picky like me and still want to hold on to your current organization system, Smart Labels play nice with other labels and filters too. On the Filters tab under Settings, you'll find that these filters can be edited just like any others. From there, you can also edit your existing filters to avoid having them Smart Labeled or change whether mail in a Smart Label skips your inbox (which you can also do by just clicking on the label, then selecting or unselecting the checkbox in the top right corner).

Labs in Gmail are a great testing ground for experimental features, and we hope Smart Labels help you more effortlessly get through your inbox. If you notice a message that was automatically labeled incorrectly and want to help us troubleshoot, you can report miscategorizations from the drop down menu on each message (in doing so, you’ll donate the full message to our engineers so that we can improve the feature).

To get started with Smart Labels:

1. Sign in to Gmail and click 'Settings'.
2. Click the 'Labs' tab and select 'Enable' next to 'Smart Labels’.
3. Click 'Save Changes.'

Please note that Google Apps for Business and Education users will first need their administrators to enable Gmail Labs from the Google Apps admin control panel to take advantage of Smart Labels, and other Gmail Labs. For more information on Gmail labs for Google Apps, see the Help Center.

Every day, tens of thousands of people switch from Microsoft Outlook® and other client-based software to Google Apps. To make the transition as smooth as possible, we thought we’d share some tips on using Gmail.

Embrace conversations
Emails rarely come just one at a time; they’re usually part of a larger exchange. Gmail helps you manage messages more efficiently by grouping related emails into conversations. Conversations are a collection of messages with the same subject line and other similarities. When you click to read a conversation, you'll see all of the back-and-forth email responses that happen over the course of the entire email conversation.

This makes it easier to follow the full context of a conversation, and keeps your inbox less cluttered and more organized. If you prefer a more traditional view of your Inbox, you can always turn off Conversation view so that all emails arrive individually.


Forget delete, and archive your way to “Inbox Zero”
The average corporate inbox is only 300MB, which means too many people are forced to spend way too much time managing their inbox -- deciding which email to keep, and deleting the rest. With 25GB of storage, you probably won’t ever need to delete an email again because of storage limitations. And if you thrive on clearing your inbox, simply archive your emails to clear the clutter. They’re still fully searchable in an instant!

Search to sort
You may be accustomed to sorting email to find saved messages, which is a pretty limited way to find information because you usually know what you’re looking for. Gmail uses the power of search to help you quickly find what you want. You can even use advanced search operators to search by sender, date, attachment or a variety of other attributes. Try it and you'll find some of the qualities that Google.com is known for: great accuracy and really fast search results. Search is particularly more effective than sorting when you’re looking through multiple gigabytes of email!


Labels instead of folders
While you won't find folders in Gmail, labels give you even more flexibility to organize your email. You can’t put an email into multiple folders, but you can apply multiple labels to the same message, which makes it easy to manage information that may fall into more than one category.


By clicking on a label, you can view a chronological list of all conversations that have been tagged with that label. And you can even organize labels hierarchically, using the “Nested Labels” lab. (Your administrator needs to have enabled Labs for you to access them.)

Work offline
These days you’re probably almost always connected to the Internet. But in those increasingly rare moments when you’re not, you can still access Gmail. When you’re offline, you can work in your browser to compose messages, search, organize mail, and do all of the things you're used to doing while accessing your email online. Any messages you send while offline will be placed in your outbox and automatically sent the next time Gmail detects a connection. To enable offline Gmail, go to the ‘offline’ tab in Settings, select ‘Enable’ and then save changes.

New features
As a web application, Gmail can be updated and improved without the trouble of purchasing, downloading and installing updates. This means Gmail will continually offer new functionality to help you be even more productive, like Priority Inbox, integrated voice and video chat, and labs such as Apps Search and Desktop Notifications. To stay current on new features, we encourage you to subscribe to our RSS feed for updates to the Google Apps suite.

We hope you enjoy the experience we offer -- we believe that ultimately, a fully-searchable, delete-nothing inbox makes for happy, productive people. But if you’re still not quite ready to use Gmail’s web interface, you can keep using Outlook or other clients of your choice. For more tips, check out our detailed transition documentation, and let us know what else we can do to make your move to Gmail easier in the comments below.

Posted by Rajen Sheth, Google Apps Product Manager

Collaborating with colleagues from various teams in different offices is a daily facet of my work. I am based in Zurich, Switzerland, and many of the people I interact with are in California, USA, which is nine hours behind. Oftentimes I find myself invited to attend meetings that happen late in my evening, which proves that coordinating across time zones can be a challenge.

At Google we want to help you maintain a healthy work/life balance, so today we’re launching a set of new features that will improve your experience whether you’re scheduling across time zones or just across the hall.

Setting Up Working Hours
For Google Apps users, the new ‘Working hours’ setting allows you to configure the hours that suit your schedule, as you can see in the screenshot below:


Users setting up an event will be able to see your working hours clearly marked in your calendar in the event creation page. They will also be warned if they schedule an event outside your working hours. For example, when someone in California is scheduling an appointment with me for 11am their time, they will see a warning like this:


Find a Time, Make it Recurring
The new "Find a Time" tab on the event scheduling page lets you view your coworkers’ schedules at-a-glance and choose the best time for a meeting. This is especially helpful for scheduling events with a large number of attendees, particularly if they are spread out geographically. Also in the event scheduling page, we’ve launched a simpler interface for setting recurring meetings with a small window that appears when you select the “Repeats” check box. For Google Apps customers with the administrative control panel option set to “enable new pre-release features” users will automatically see these new changes to the event editor.

We’ve also made a number of changes on the back-end that improve the performance, consistency, and extensibility of Calendar, which we’ve announced on our Gmail blog today. Enjoy your meetings, now with fewer time zone scheduling hassles!

Posted by Oana Florescu, Software Engineer, Calendar

Update (8/30): While rolling out the new calendar features last week we identified a potential issue that caused us to delay the update. We are working to launch these new feature to users on domains that do not utilize the Google Calendar Connector (GCC) service early this week and we are working on supporting GCC users in the near future.

The process of going Google doesn't end with making the decision to migrate to Google Apps. That's why our Google Apps Deployment team is here to ensure that the millions of Google Apps users – from large businesses and schools to small community organizations – have the resources they need to help get Google Apps up and running.

If your company, school, or organization has decided to "go Google," but isn't yet fully "gone," today's post on the Official Google Blog points to some resources from our deployment team and tells more about the tools and guides available to help along the way.

Posted by Miriam Schneider, Google Apps team

Real-time information is becoming an increasingly important part of searching online – both for business and consumer search users. Yesterday we announced the launch of real-time results on Google.com, and today we're announcing that the Google Search Appliance (GSA) can show users tweets from Twitter next to their internal Search Appliance results.


Social information is important for businesses: employees searching for information needed to do their jobs benefit from real-time news too. They might be developing a new breakfast cereal, or designing a marketing plan for a clothing line, or writing strategy report for a political campaign. In all of these cases, understanding what is being said just as Twitter users are saying it can be invaluable.


Google’s focus is to provide the most relevant search results to users. In the case of the GSA, this means accessing information from multiple sources, aka universal search. To this end, we already offer a feature called Related Web Results, which allows employees to view results from Google.com alongside corporate search results.

Customers have told us that placing web results next to intranet ones often allows employees to think differently about a particular topic and approach it in new ways. By integrating enterprise search with more of the information that exists in the cloud, like tweets, employees can more easily leverage the wisdom of the crowd.

To turn the Twitter box on in GSA results, follow the instructions provided here. It should take no more than 15 minutes to get up and running. It can be enabled for only some users, all users, or set up so users can choose themselves whether they want to see the Twitter results by using a keyword trigger (like 'twitter'). Integration info and how-tos for this feature can be found here, and happy realtime reading.

Posted by Cyrus Mistry, Product Manager, Google Enterprise Search

Picture this: you're working on a new project with your team. You ask your IT admin to create a new group that includes all of your team members, keeping in mind that you must ask them to update the group every time people join or leave the group. Maybe you're even wishing that (a) you had a secure, central place to manage this group and communicate with it, and (b) you could easily search group archives for information somewhere other than your inbox.

That's when your admin gives you the good news: creating, managing and sharing with groups just got a whole lot easier. Today, Google Apps is giving business and school IT administrators the ability to let users create, manage and collaborate in groups without needing IT help. This launch is a major expansion to the mailing list functionality and content sharing we released earlier this year.

The following Google Groups features are now included in Google Apps Premier and Education Editions:

• Fast set-up. Employees and students can now create collaborative groups instantly without burdening IT, and manage the group settings to fit their needs.
• Searchable archives. Group discussions are archived by default, allowing users to easily search and view past and present discussions via the web.
• Sharing with a group. Once a group is set up, employees and students can easily share a document, spreadsheet, presentation, shared folder, site, calendar, or video with that group. No need to type in individual email address manually, or remember who joined or left the group. Plus, the shared items will only be accessible by the appropriate people, even as people join and leave the group.
• Reply on behalf of a group. In addition to communicating via email or the web interface, the new functionality lets group managers send a message on behalf of a group.
• IT capabilities. IT administrators still manage if and how users can create groups from the administrative control panel.

Google Apps Premier and Education Edition administrators can now enable the new groups functionality from the control panel by enabling the "user-managed groups" service. You can read more about this announcement on the Official Google Blog. Google Groups will be rolling out to Google Apps Premier and Education Edition domains over the next day, so if you don't notice these features right now, you should see them soon.

We're always developing new features to help you get your job done faster and more efficiently with Google Apps. Stay tuned to this blog for the latest updates as new features continue to come your way, or subscribe to our Google Apps update feed and get the news as it happens.

Posted by Shimrit Ben-Yair, Product Manager

Editor's Note: Taylor McKnight is a co-founder of SCHED*, a web based scheduling and social networking application for conferences and festivals. He is currently a partner at The Hype Machine, a music blog aggregator and discovery tool for music fans and has worked extensively as a web developer at Gawker Media and The University of Florida. Taylor built SCHED* using Google Docs, part of the Google Apps suite of messaging and collaboration apps available in Education, Standard and Premier Editions.

We're sharing Taylor's story as an example of how Google Apps speeds innovation and makes it easy for good ideas to turn into real businesses, quickly, reliably, and without the need for investment in IT infrastructure.

I'm a rabid music fan, and friends often ask me for recommendations when it comes to festivals, bands, and other music-related events. SCHED* was born out of a desire to keep track of my favorite events.

SCHED* is a simple, social scheduling app that Chirag Mehta and I launched as an unofficial SXSW 2008 Schedule and which spread like wildfire among attendees. There were more than 4,000 bands, panels, films and parties going on during that week and I was obsessed with not missing a thing. I had grown weary of manually building a schedule of recommendations for friends and wanted to build an easy way that anybody could create and publicize a schedule themselves.

We soon expanded to support all kinds of events and new clients including music festivals like Lollapalooza, tech conferences like The Next Web, and political conventions like the UK Labour Conference. We've now handled 80+ new events.

We ran the original version of SCHED* at SXSW 2008 as a makeshift solution using an exported Microsoft Excel spreadsheet file. Once we began working with clients, we began looking for a more streamlined solution – ideally, an online spreadsheet that they could update on-the-go and didn't require programming knowledge. Google Apps Premier Edition provided the answer.

Google Docs spreadsheets, included in Google Apps, was the clear front runner because a majority of conference organizers already had Google accounts and were familiar with the interface. Additionally, the API made it easy for organizers to retrieve data from their spreadsheets. Here's what it looks like when it's up and running:

Have a story to share about how you use Google Apps? Tell us here and we may follow up with you.

Have you ever wanted to watch a training video, but didn't feel you could take the time for it? Ever wished a slow speaker would talk just a little faster? Or maybe you'd like to skim through a presentation at high speed until you got to something really interesting?

All that is now possible with Google Video for business. Just select the video you want to watch, and you'll see a speed control in the player. Click the button to switch between 1.5x and real-time, or drag the pop-up slider to select the speed you want. The new speed setting is "sticky"...in other words, you can find particular sections of interest by dragging the position marker or clicking in the Scenes bar without dropping back to normal speed.

We've found that most videos are very comprehensible at 1.25x to 1.75x speed. If your video is captioned, you'll find that you can go even faster.

Give it a try. Once you start watching videos at 1.5x, you might never go back to real-time!

Google Video for business is part of Google Apps Premier and Education Editions, included with Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Sites, and more. To learn more about Google Apps, get started here.

Posted by Daniel Steinberg, Google Video team

Get timely updates on new features in Google Apps by subscribing to our RSS feed or email alerts.

In my work, being able to communicate and collaborate with many groups of people is crucial to productivity, and I often want to use Google Apps to share content with particular groups or teams. Typing in every user's email address manually is painstaking and inefficient, and remembering when people leave and join different teams is impossible. Like any user, I want to make sure that I reach the right people, and I want this to be easy and and efficient.

With that in mind, I want to share some shortcuts that help with sharing and groups in several of our apps.
Posted by Jeffrey Chang, Associate Product Manager, Google Groups

Get timely updates on new features in Google Apps by subscribing to our RSS feed or email alerts.

We often hear people ask, "How do I add a Google Map to my website?" Sometimes, it's from a small business owner simply trying to show directions to their store. Other times, it's from larger enterprises that want to create more complex mapping applications, overlaying their own proprietary layers of data on the map.Posted by Andrew Chang, Google Maps team

Our "Spam Trend" update last quarter summarized the rise in both levels and types of spam, with new players and techniques entering the market. This quarter, proliferation continues, with an unpredictable pattern of drops and spikes as 2009 moves along. Overall, spam is measurably up: Q2'09 average spam levels are 53% higher than in Q1'09 and 6% higher than in Q2'08.
Evidence of the resurgence in image spam can be seen in the graph below, which shows that the actual size of spam messages, measured in bytes, is back on the rise:

Posted by Chris Vander Mey, Senior Product Manager, Google Apps

Get timely updates on new features in Google Apps by subscribing to our RSS feed or email alerts.