Wednesday, July 16, 2008 3:45 PM
What do wedding planners, gas mileage calculators and photo albums have in common? They're all examples of templates available in the Google Docs Template Gallery that Sarah Beth Eisinger (Docs Templates engineer), Grant Dasher (intern), and I built and (happily!) released today.
When researching how people use templates, we saw that lots of you create documents for all aspects of your lives. You need resumes and cover letters to look for jobs and fax cover letters and invoices to run your businesses. And of course you want to use documents in fun ways with family and friends, such as unique designs and layouts for invitation cards and calendars. Finally, everyone wants to be able to have tools that "just work": print mailing labels, track portfolio values, and manage projects without having to painstakingly create documents from scratch.
These needs inspired our new templates and gallery. We developed these in conjunction with Avery Dennison, Vertex42.com, TemplateZone, and Visa Business.
Many templates leverage the collaborative aspect of Google Docs so that several people can work on a single document online without having to email attachments back and forth. To hear the story behind two templates, watch these videos:
To get started, go directly to the template gallery or access it from the "New" menu in your document list. Templates are currently available only in English, but other languages are coming soon. They're also available to Google Apps users.
(Cross-posted on the Official Google Blog.)
27 comments:
This is a good news. Sans Templates, Google Docs lacked the sting. Good job. http://bit.ly/57MRU
Nice work! User generated templates will be nice. Do you think you can develop a Media Wiki export and import? Say I wanna import a Wikipedia page and go to work on it for print... or how about I wanna author in Google Docs and then export a txt file for Media Wiki with a folder of images. I would still have to upload all that to my MediaWiki, unless you geniuses can work that out too!
Why Google Apps people are always behind...:) I simply love this....Waiting for it to come to my google Apps
It was about time!! This is really useful, nice work!
Gilberto Padilha
FEATURE REQUEST
File->Save As Template
Also be able to share templates out publically or to a set list of people would be very good.
Much better than File->Save As New Copy
Templates could be stored within creators profile
Love this feature! I am already using some of the templates. Now, if we could just get Styles, then I think I could be happy for a while :)
Good news - but will they work with A4 paper? If so, is there a switch somewhere?
Thank you all so very much
Definitely need "save as template"feature. For example, if I'd like to create a stationary template within Google Apps for my company's employees and then share that template with everyone, it would be great to be able to do that!
I agree, there must a be a "Save as Template" feature. I would also like to add a "Publish as Template" freature. Ideally, I would also like to publish templates where I can add my Analytics code to track the use of the template. Finally, there must a way for companies to monetize the creation of templates from either Ad support of actual sales.
Actually a Great Feature, But it does miss something.
There is no option yet to add a template to an existing Document. So we have to Create a new document all together and Copy Paste stuff. Hope this gets added in next update :)
anyways Cheers
what about import export Mediawiki text like Open Office does?
+1 for "Save as Template" and "Share Template". Only missing thing for me to move all my docs to google docs...My invoicing, Letter Head etc. Good work guys...!! GOOGLE Rocks
First day of trying Google Docs - brilliant! But first thing I wanted to do was create my own template and then share it with a client. So, another +1 for "Save as Template" and "Share Template".
And yet one more vote for "Save as Template" option.
Templates are currently available only in English, but other languages are coming soon
com, TemplateZone, and Visa Business
Wonderful post, the videos really brought everything together.
It looks like a lot of people want to create templates and share them. There is a way to do that:
1. Create your Doc
2. Go to Share and select the checkbox "Anyone can VIEW this document..."
3. Copy and paste the URL to your website, blog, email, etc., appending &newcopy to the end of the URL like the one below:
http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=pIM_J1gg-sMPaQvhL86Q-cw&hl=en&newcopy
You also can leave off the &newcopy. If you do, then this will open the Doc in View mode, and then the person can choose to make a copy (from the File menu). But that might confuse them, so using &newcopy is probably a good idea.
Enjoy,
Vertex42
Save as template would be really useful and would add significant functionality
A nice feature would be to allow people to share groups of docs instead of just single docs one at a time. I'm using google docs to keep my employee informed, but having to share them one at a time is a pain.
I Agree with Ian in requesting the "Save as Template" Feature!
This has so many possibilities...
Thanks for all your hard work!
This solution with published documents and adding &newcopy simply doesn't work!!!
Another vote to be able to create my own template gallery that I can share with my group but not with the whole world.
Great work the templates are great. It would be better if there were 3 options for each template "Preview this Template" "Save this Template to Use Later" and "Use this Template Now"
would be nice if you could clean up the blog spam a bit also. This is crazy.
Understanding the logic of Google Docs is not obvious, most things are possible, but not easy to implement. It IS POSSIBLE to create and share templates, but not in the "logical" File, Save as template fashion. The solution is to work from the end backwards.....
Create and save the document you want to use as a Template. Then File, New, From template... This opens the template choice window. In the top are three options; Public Templates, Templates I have Used, and My Templates. Click "My templates". You will probably see a message saying you have not yet published any templates, and a link to Submit a Template. When you click this link, you can now submit a template to the public arena (so make sure your template doesn't contain any sensitive data). Choose the doc you just created as your template, give it a description and publish it. With some forethought to the naming, your users will be able to find the template thru the search. I just did this for a template called Copy of Test Text. Search for Test Text in Public Templates and you should find it.
Good hunting.
jc
(still struggling, really ;))
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