After Hours

Welcome to After Hours, the Rank + File weblog covering the consumerization of enterprise IT.

Rank + File offers essential intelligence for CIOs and IT leaders on the technology their users bring inside the organization, by hook or by crook.

  1. It’s a common misconception: That unlike Excel, the Google Docs Spreadsheets program doesn’t support pivot tables.

    And it was true. Up until May, one had to enable a special third-party gadget that was two-menus deep. But no-longer. Google Docs Spreadsheets now fully supports Pivot Tables.

    Google adds features almost weekly to to Google Apps, so when surveying the Google Apps landscape, be prepared to check in frequently.

    (Also be prepared to wrap your mind around different models of features. Many Google Apps programs don’t map quite directly to Microsoft Office feature models.)

  2. Wily correspondents: your days are numbered. Google Apps enables email receipts.

    Read receipts allow senders to monitor the status of the messages they send and allow recipients to acknowledge receipt of mail.

    Opinion has long been mixed on email receipts. Overt aggression on behalf the sender? A necessary evil for evasive recipients?

    Most use receipts only as last resort when communicating with poor correspondents or as pseudo-legal documentation tool. In any case, they are a staple of enterprise culture. Long enabled in Microsoft Exchange/Outlook environments, Google has brought them to Google Apps.

    Email read receipts must be enabled by an organization’s domain administrator before users can access the feature.

  3. The Google Docs document list update: from inbox to file system

    The Google Docs document list had an extreme makeover on January 31st, and some of us are still adjusting.

    As we continue to fumble through what we miss, and coo over what we now adore, a theme emerges:

    • The old document list was like an inbox: The who and when was front and center.
    • The new document list is like a file system: The what is front and center. Thumbnails, grid views, type of file is emphasized.

  4. A nice Google-style tell a story through the typing advert for Microsoft Word 2010.

    Here, Microsoft shows what it might have looked like to see the founding fathers stumble their way towards The Declaration of Independence, one IM joke at a time.

    While it’s evocative of Google’s marketing style, the applications themselves have a least one major difference: Microsoft Word 2010 is a desktop program, and Google Docs is all in the browser.

    Thank you for the link, urlesque.

    (Source: URLesque)

  5. Finally: Edit Google Docs on Android, iPad and iPhone. Already? Input text with voice on Android.

    Google Docs users have long wanted to edit documents with their iPhone and Android devices. But it was the introduction of the iPad that made the pain of poor mobile support particularly acute. That ends today as Google rolls out updates to the Google Docs editor. Android, iPhone, and iPad environments are now supported.

    If anything, this announcement felt a bit overdue. But buried in their promo video was a bit of news that felt positively ahead of its time: Android users can now input text to Google Docs w/speech.

    Google didn’t mention this anywhere in the text of their blog post, but it merited a moment in the accompanying video, which we’ve embedded below.

    Mobile users should be seeing a new Edit button in their Google Docs experience over the next few days.

  6. Charts in Google Docs Spreadsheets have gotten a bit of a makeover.

    Most exciting to us: the newfound ability to customize chart color.

    As with most Google-style collaboration, embedding charts in external documents, sites, blogs isn’t just simple, but dynamic. Chart data dynamically reflects any change in the original data set without any kind of manual refresh.

    markhawker:

    Google Charts Editor in Google Docs.

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