Google Playing Around with Offline Usage of Google Docs

Came across a post of Google Blogoscoped today on Google testing using Google Gears for offline Google Docs access.

This would be huge in taking more market share from Microsoft Office. It would allow users to work with documents much in the same way they do with the desktop Microsoft version.

They seem to be only testing it out right now and will be initially making it only available for Google Docs and not for spreadsheets or presentation.

This is something I would us a lot, been enjoying it for my Google Reader.

Google Data API Integration

I was syncing up some of my OWS Network systems with the complementing Google systems today. Such as when you post a blog entry to your blog it will post to Blogger, and when you post an calendar entry to your web site it automatically publishes to Google Calendar.

So I started working with the Google Data API, and I noticed when you click on code samples and references it just sends to directly to Zend Framework. They have created Zend GData which gives you read / write access to the Google Data API's.

It is a very nice set of PHP classes that allow you to work with Calendar, Spreadsheets, Blogger, CodeSearch, and Base.

It saved me a lot of time and energy and gave me nice set of tools to get my systems integrated with Google right away.

Google Spreadsheets as a Data Store

I just finished BETA testing the DocSyncer tool which will keep mycomputer synced with my Google Docs account.

At first I had settings turned on to upload .html pages, which was a huge mistake....instantly it started publishing thousands of files of my local workstation, be careful.

Once I did get my 800+ word and excel documents published synced up without any effort I started looking through them and searching on topics. It was very interesting to find some items I don't even remember I have.

The I pulled out a simple JavaScript for pulling a JSON feed from a Google Spreadsheet and connected it to a list of businesses I had for the Portland area. Instantly I had published these business listings on the web using my Google Spreadsheet as a data store.

Very cool stuff, think it will be a while before everyone realizes the potential here.

Google Spreadsheet Charting

Google just keeps moving forward little by little toward a complete set of tools for the business user.

You can start making your Google Spreadsheet more full featured by offering code samples that allow you to implement spreadsheet charting in your web page or web application that is tied in with a Google Spreadsheet.

Here is an example of how innovative developers are using the google apps. This was made based on the fantastic JSON spreadsheet example from Google and the dynamic charting example from PlotKit. It follows that this uses the Plotkit charting library & Google Spreadsheets API.'

Using this tool from imagine-it.org you can 1) Load Spreadsheet Data 2) Customize chart output 3) Embed it in your website

Good stuff.