| Google Apps Hacks | 
| Author: Philipp Lenssen
Publisher: Make Books
Category: Book
List Price: $29.99
Buy New: $16.80
You Save: $13.19 (44%)
Buy New/Used from $16.80
Avg. Customer Rating:   (3 reviews)
Sales Rank: 8637
Format: Illustrated
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 374
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.6
Dimensions (in): 9.7 x 8 x 1
ISBN: 059651588X
Dewey Decimal Number: 006.76
EAN: 9780596515881
ASIN: 059651588X
Publication Date: April 16, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
|
| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
Can Google applications really become an alternative to the venerable Microsoft Office suite? Conventional wisdom may say no, but practical wisdom says otherwise. Right now, 100,000 small businesses are currently running trials of Google office applications. So are large corporations such as General Electric and Proctor & Gamble. Google Apps Hacks gets you in on the action with several ingenious ways to push Google's web, mobile, and desktop apps to the limit.
The scores of clever hacks and workarounds in this book help you get more than the obvious out of a whole host of Google's web-based applications for word processing, spreadsheets, PowerPoint-style presentations, email, calendar, and more by giving you ways to exploit the suite's unique network functionality. You get plenty of ways to tinker with:
- Google Documents -- Share and edit documents with others in real time, view them on the run with Google Docs mobile service, and use Google Notebook for web research
- Google Spreadsheets -- Add real-time data to spreadsheets, and generate charts and tables you can embed in web pages
- Google Presentations -- View them on a mobile phone and save them as video
- Gmail -- Send email to and from a mobile phone, adjust Gmail's layout with a style sheet, and a lot more
- iGoogle -- Create your own gadgets, program a screenscraper, add Flash games, and more
- Google Calendar -- Add web content events, public calendars, and your Outlook Calendar to this application
- Google Reader, Google Maps, Google Earth, and Google SketchUp: the new 3D modeling software tool
- Picasa, YouTube, and Google Video -- discover new ways to customize and use these media management apps
In addition, Google Apps Hacks outlines ways you can create a simple web site with nothing but Google tools, including Page Creator, Blogger, Google Analytics, and content from other Google apps. This amazing collection just might convince you that Microsoft Office is not the last word in business applications. The price is certainly right.
|
| Customer Reviews:
Things that you never knew could be done May 30, 2008
This book has proven quite useful to me as I'm trying to more and more take advantage of the free offerings that Google has. Google Apps, as they're currently known, are still in their development stage, but have a lot promise for moving your digital life on-line. This book has excellent tips on how to make the most of these apps. It is well organized (by app) and rates the "hacks" by difficulty/involvement. They're not hacks really, but rather unique ways to take advantage of using Google Documents, Spreadsheets, Presentations, Gmail and more. It is appropriate for the beginner to the moderate user, introducing CSS techniques and Greasemonkey (in some of the more useful tips.
All in all, well worth the money if you want all the information about using Google apps at your fingertips.
Got more than I bargained for... May 29, 2008
The title "Google Apps Hacks" is slightly misleading because this book covers so much more than the so-titled Google Apps suite: Google Docs, Gmail, Google Sites, Google Calendar, and Google Talk.
Phillip Lennssen covers a TON of Google applications: from Picasa, to Sketchup, to Maps, to Analytics.
I've been reading his blog for awhile: blogoscoped.com and always appreciated his insights into the industry.
The hacks covered in the book range from beginner to advanced, and one of my favorites is unicode characters in your email signature. It adds an extra flair and is delightfully.
If you use Gmail, or any other Google applications, this book is for you.
Life in the Age of Google Web Apps April 30, 2008
6 out of 6 found this review helpful
Sometimes I wonder how Microsoft can presume to compete with Google in the Web world. So much depends on search nowadays -- the Internet is one big store of valuable information. Yet I have to use an unsupported freeware utility to search my little Windows XP hard drive because the search feature that comes with the operating system is so slow and inflexible.
**Google Apps Hacks** introduced me to a Google universe that was even bigger than I had expected. I expected --and got-- lots of material on plugging into Google maps (lots of people are taking advantage of the possibilities here) and lots of tips on using GMail, gadgets, calendars and news feeds.
The biggest surprises for me were contained in the chapters on Google Docs. Part of the material was basic "how-to" and "did you know that..." information to help get acquainted with the features of Google word processing, spreadsheet and presentation software. In fact, it appears that this book itself was collaboratively composed by Philipp Lenssen along with O'Reilly staff with Google Docs.
I was most impressed by how easy and flexible the spreadsheet application is to use. The author provides a pile of tricks and tips useful for both the ordinary user and the programmer.
This book should attract programmers (and other Web citizens) who want to investigate and test drive the latest cool things that many people are having fun with -- and a bunch more are making money from.
|
|
|
