Digital Inspiration

ALAN KAM LUN HO writes: We currently subscribe to MAIL MERGE from your company. WE are looking at getting DOCUMENT STUDIO as well — but would like to learn more about it first — especially with the following actual use-case scenario below: There's a really cool function in HubSpot that we like, but HubSpot is too expensive. This is the HubSpot "Workflow" function. From what I've seen—when someone submits a Google Form, such as our Late Notification Form (we are a school)—and the parents select "3rd Grade" for their child, the HubSpot Workflow automatically sends an email notification to the 3rd-grade teacher upon submission. In addition to the 3rd-grade teacher, the workflow also sends email notifications to other key personnel, such as the principal, front office staff, etc.   My understanding is that Document Studio can accomplish this as well. Solution Certainly, you can achieve this with Doc Studio. To accomplish this, you must create workflows that s...

Chase Wilson writes: As of this month I'm getting an error message when I try to access the G oogle add-on that says "Authorization is required to perform that action." This has never happened before and the app has worked flawlessly for years. Uncertain how to get the app working again;  Solution: Are you currently logged into multiple Google accounts within the same browser session? In such cases, Google add-ons may occasionally display an error message. Let us explore whether this workaround effectively resolves the issue. Open Google Chrome and navigate to the menu. Select the option to create a new incognito window. Subsequently, open the same Google Sheet or Google Form and attempt to access the Google add-on again. Please inform me if this action successfully resolves the problem.

Renee Davis writes:  I want to send the certificate I made to all event participants in an email. So after the certificate is merged it should automatically go to that person. How is that accomplished? With Document Studio, generating certificates from Google Form responses is straightforward. You can create presentation files in various formats, including Microsoft PowerPoint, PDF, or Google Slides.  The generated slides are automatically saved to your Google Drive, facilitating easy collaboration among users. This integration allows for efficient management and distribution of certificates based on form submissions. Create Certificates from Google Forms

Digital Inspiration is a popular tech blog by  Amit Agarwal . Our popular Google Scripts include  Gmail Mail Merge  (send personalized emails with Gmail ),  Document Studio (generate PDFs from Google Forms ) and   File Upload Forms ( receive files  in Google Drive). Also see  Reverse Image Mobile Search , Online Speech Recognition and Website Screenshots , the most useful websites on the Internet.

Chef Charlie Ayers joined Google as their first cafeteria chef in 1999. Though Charlie is no longer an employee of Google, he owns 40k shares of GOOG and that are alone worth $26 million. He also had plans to write a cookbook titled "Revealing the Secrets of the Google Kitchen" - that never happened but Chef Charlie is now busy consulting tech companies on deciding good food for their employees. Update: Chef Charlie Ayers wife Kimberly  just informed that the Cookbook is happening. It will be released in April/May of 2008. Also, Charlie is opening a restaurant in May/June of 2008. Read more about Google Chef Charlie on NYTimes or watch this video on "How much is the Google chef worth?" at MSNBC News . [Charlie Ayers - From managing the Google kitchen to managing millions]

For some reason, Google's Webmaster Dashboard says that access to following blogspot URLs is restricted by robots.txt. http://labnol.blogspot.com/2005/05/guide-for-google-adsense-publishers.html http://labnol.blogspot.com/2005/05/us-government-rss-library.html http://labnol.blogspot.com/2005/08/screen-capture-ocr-for-text-and.html http://labnol.blogspot.com/2005/12/anonymous-email-that-disappears.html http://labnol.blogspot.com/2006/03/great-firewall-of-china-blocks-skype.html http://labnol.blogspot.com/2006/03/online-logo-generator-text-logos-made.html http://labnol.blogspot.com/2006/03/waterfalls-and-kazaa-are-bad-for-your.html http://labnol.blogspot.com/2006/04/blogging-stocks-aol-blog-experiments.html http://labnol.blogspot.com/2006/05/adobe-employees-excited-about.html http://labnol.blogspot.com/2006/05/interesting-forms-of-art-from.html http://labnol.blogspot.com/2006/06/louis-vuitton-ruling-could-mean.html http://labnol.blogspot.com/2006/07/please-j...

Blogs that are on Blogger or WordPress can add the wonderful Outbrain star ratings widget to their blog posts. This ratings widget has been under a closed beta for some time but they finally made a public release today. Outbrain Ratings widget is light, requires no registration and intuitive - visitors can hover the mouse over the five stars and click any of them to rate your current blog post. Even if you have a regular website that's not a blog, this ratings widget can be installed on your site as well. You need such a rating widget to get feedback from all those reader who are subscribed to your blog aren't contributing to the discussion because they are probably too lazy to write a comment. Give them a system like this ratings widget that requires no effort and they'll be happy to say if enjoyed or disliked reading your blog post. Get the Ratings Widget here . If you are using Windows Live Writer to insert ratings in your blog posts, make sure you remove the...

When I wrote this story comparing Google Finance with Yahoo! Finance , the one area where Google had a lead over Yahoo! was ticker symbol search. While Yahoo! Finance required you to enter the exact stock ticker symbol in the search box, Google Finance would offer matching suggestion as you type the name of the company or stock symbol. Today, Yahoo! Finance have enhanced their quote lookup search box and it looks even better than Google - you can now find quotes for a company even if you don't know the stock symbol. The other nice addition is multiple search - you can look for stock symbols of multiple companies in the same search box - just separate the names by comma. When you hit Go, stock data for all those companies will appear on the same summary page.

This is exciting news for people who use Flickr for storing photographs on the web but prefer Windows Live Photo Gallery on the desktop for managing their picture and video collection offline. Microsoft today released a  new version of Windows Live Photo Gallery that lets you send pictures to Flickr directly from the desktop using Windows Live Photo Gallery. You can also bulk upload images and folders to Flickr using this new feature of Photo Gallery. Like the official Flickr uploader, this one from Microsoft will also resize your pictures before uploading them onto Flickr (optional). You can also specify the photo set where that picture should be uploaded to. Related: Compare Picasa with Windows Live Photo Gallery If you operate multiple Flickr accounts, Windows Live Photo Gallery lets you add them all to the Flickr uploader. You can download this Flickr enabled version of Windows Live Photo Gallery through Windows Automatic Updates (kb943550) or the common Windows Li...

Here's a simple question for anyone who has been on Facebook for some time now. How do you create a photo collage of your Facebook Friends (as shown above) without using any of the available Facebook Apps or third-party tools . And no matter how large your Facebook friends list is, the whole process should not take more than 2 seconds . Hint: This secret feature is available right inside Facebook though Mark Zuckerberg and his team never told us about it. Answer: Once you finish exploring all the options in Facebook, read the solution .

Before you upload PowerPoint PPT files to Google Presentations for editing, make sure you know that the opposite is not possible yet. Unlike other members of the Google Docs family, Google Presentations doesn't have an export function so you cannot download your edited PowerPoint slideshows out of Google Presentations in PPT, PDF or any other popular formats. Update: This is no longer required, you can now easily  export PPT files from Google Docs . Google Docs does allow you to download the presentations as a ZIP, which is a mix of HTML, CSS and JPGs, but again that's not a very useful or convenient format. Considering that PPT is such a universally accepted presentation format, it is quite safe to assume that PowerPoint export feature will meet Google Presentations very soon. But if you are getting desperate to get those PowerPoint slides out of Google Docs now itself because the boss wants them, the good old Print Screen key can be your friend. Open the Google Pr...

The Forbes magazine today launched a new feature called the " The Future " where they invited personalities to predict trends and technologies that will become popular in the near future. An extremely intelligent prediction about Google's future comes from David Ewalt where he says - Over the next 10 years, Google will solidify its hold on the world's information, and as it adds data service to its portfolio, it will give away free Internet access and phone service around the country . In 10 years, the company (and its ads!) will be omnipresent in American lives. David also expects that Google will lose the cool factor - Expect Google, at 19 years old, to be regarded much like Microsoft is today - bloated, monopolistic and oppressive . There's a very interesting quiz as well where you have to guess about events that are likely to occur in 2008 - Will Google hit $900? Will the richest person be from China ? What will the exchange rate be between the U.S....

Since Adobe PDF is an output format, you cannot edit or recreate the PDF file unless the source documents are available. Now Adobe Acrobat does allow you to apply numerous modifications to your existing PDF documents (like editing text, changing font attributes, inserting images and more) but, as you know, Acrobat is an extremely expensive software. If you are on a budget and wish to edit PDF documents without Acrobat , the easiest option is to make edits in the original document itself and recreate the PDF using Google Docs or any of the free PDF writers . When that is is not an option because you don't have the PDF source files, the PDFill PDF Editor ( link ) can help you manipulate PDF documents though it may work with password protected PDFs. The PDF Editor is freeware and lets you make basic changes to PDF files - you can reorder the sequence of pages, crop a PDF page, add text information in header and footer, add image stamps or even merge multiple PDFs into one. ...

Some websites disable the right click menu on their websites to prevent people from saving images and photographs to their desktop. There are several ways to bypass that "right click" barrier - you can either do a screen capture, or copy that protected image from the web browser's cache or read the image URL from the HTML source of the web page and then save the image using your favorite download manager. All the above methods work but the only problem is that they are geeky. So let's take look at another approach that requires absolutely no effort - it's called "drag-n-drop." Just point your mouse pointer over the image, press and hold the left click button and drag that image either to browser address bar or somewhere on destkop. That's it. The image file will be instantly saved to your computer even if the right-click option was disabled (because we used left-click). The drag-n-drop method really comes handy when the web page is opened i...

Few months ago, Flickr removed PayPal as a payment method and only those Flickr members could upgrade to a Flickr Pro account who had a Credit Card. This was met with a great deal of disappointment in the Flickr community as existing Pro members, who were not having credit cards, could not renew their yearly Flickr pro membership. Well, the news is that PayPal will make a comeback on November 20, 2007. However, PayPal will now be offered as payment option in Flickr via Yahoo! Wallet. Flickr will also provide local currency support for payments made my PayPal. Full thread here . Compare Flickr Pro with Picasa Web

Facebook users are not too pleased with the "walled garden" approach of Facebook. The reason is simple - while you can easily import your Outlook address book and GMail contacts into Facebook, the reverse path is closed. There's no "official" way to export your Facebook friends email addresses or contact phone numbers out as a CSV file so that you can sync the contacts data with Outlook, GMail or your BlackBerry. Some third-party Facebook hacks like "Facebook Sync" (for Mac) and "Facebook Downloader" (for Windows) did allow you to download your Facebook friends' names, emails, mobile phone number and profile photo to the desktop but they were quickly removed for violation of Facebook Terms of Use. How to Download Contacts from Facebook There are still some options to take Friends data outside the walls of Facebook wall. Facebook offers the Takeout option allowing you to download all Facebook data locally to the disk (include...

If you are also planning to sign up for a new Gmail account, consider opting for Google Apps Premier Edition that makes Gmail even better. Here are five reasons: 1. While 3 GB in free Gmail is lot of space, it can get exhausted - Google Apps gives you 25+ GB of storage space. 2. You can define a list of approved email senders and web domains - any messages from approved lists will always go to your Inbox bypassing the junk email filters . You can also block individual email senders and entire domains - messages from anyone in a blocked domain go directly to the Junk Quarantine. 3. Google guarantees a 99.9% uptime for Gmail. If things still go wrong, you can call Google's 24x7 telephone support for a solution. 4. Google Apps Premier users can hide all advertisements in Gmail that show in the right sidebar. 5. Now the top reason for using Google Apps email over Gmail - accidents do happen but with Google Apps Premier, you can recover deleted email messages from Gmail . I...

One of the very popular question in the FeedBurner FAQ is about merging XML RSS feeds from different sources (like Blogger, WordPress, Flickr, Twitter, Jaiku) and then syndicate the entire content as one FeedBurner feed. This is desirable because a single feed makes it extremely easy for your subscribers to track new content and updates from you. Though FeedBurner doesn't provide any native feed mixing service, you can use the excellent Yahoo! Pipes service to combine two or more feeds and burn them into a single FeedBurner feed. Here's a step by step guide: Step 1: Go to the Yahoo! Pipes website and Create a new Yahoo! Pipe. Step 2: Drag-n-drop the "Fetch Feed" tab from the Sources tab to the main drawing panel. Step 3: Add all the different Feed URLs in the same Fetch Feed Module (click the plus icon). Step 4: Once you are done adding all your RSS feeds, drag the lower circle from Feed Fetch module to the Pipe Output at the bottom. Step 5: Give...

To open a Word 2007 document without installing Office 2007, you either had to download the Office 12 Compatibility Pack or manually convert .docx to .doc format using any of the online conversion services. The limitation with Office Compatibility Pack is that it still requires a previous version of Microsoft Office on your computer. Not anymore. Microsoft recently introduced a free Word 2007 viewer that lets you view docx Word documents, even if you don't have any version of Word installed. You will still need to install the Office Compatibility Pack. Other than Word 2007, Microsoft also provides a PowerPoint 2007 viewer for pptx presentations. There's no Excel 2007 viewer yet but you can convert xlsx to xls using Zamzar and then view the converted spreadsheet in Google Docs. None of the Online Office suites (like Google Docs) currently support the new Office Open XML format of Office 2007. Word 2007 Viewer | PowerPoint 2007 Viewer | Office 2007 FAQ

After two weeks of testing, Microsoft today released a patch that will fix the Excel 2007 calculation errors . Earlier, if the result of calculation in Excel 2007 is a number from 65534.99999999995 to 65535, it is incorrectly shown as 100000 in the spreadsheet. The patch file weighs around 32 MB and that could be one of the reasons why Microsoft did not include it the regular Windows Update cycle though the patch itself is released on a Tuesday. More details and download links on Excel Blog . Once you apply the fix, it will update the main Excel.exe program to version 12.0.6042.5000 as well as the Graph and Office Art programs of Office 2007. This will also be a part of Office 2007 SP1.