Google Apps Tips - Creating a Dashboard

Creating a Dashboard

Whether you have a complex involving many members or simple project having handful of team members - a dashboard enhances the visibility and helps in tracking. In an addition to your project management tools small communication is the key to project success, particularly around sharing status and progress updates to keep everyone moving in sync through each milestone.

Since Google spreadsheets are shared on the web and have rich formatting capabilities, they're the perfect tool to help coordinate fast-paced, ad-hoc projects. Here is how to create your own - simple but powerful project dashboard:

* Start with creating a new Google spreadsheet and invite your project team to the document
* Create four columns: Milestone, Owner, Status, and Notes
* Meet with your team to collaboratively identify, record, and assign project milestones in the project dashboard
* As the project progresses, use fill to update the status cells with green, yellow, or red to indicate progress, and record any issues in the 'Notes' field

Add additional columns like due date, etc. based on your particular project's needs.

You can share your sheet with other team members to collarobate, with others within or outside organization to just view (need to publish). You can even add the same to your Google Sites Page.

How to Measure Site usage statistics for Google Sites

Google Sites now provides a simple way to track site usage, by integrating with Google Analytics. This is available to Standard, Premier, Education and Team Editions using Language US English (New features are first released to US English)

Here is how to access this new feature:

• Sign in to Google Sites
• Open the site which you want to track
• Click 'Site Settings'
• Navigate to the settings page for 'Other stuff'
• Check the box for 'Statistics' and paste your Google Analytics account ID in the box, and click 'Save changes'.
  

To get a Google Analytics account ID you'll need to sign in to your Google Analytics account with the site details.

Gmail adds support for 8 new languages

Keeping up with its continuous development approach Google Apps mail has now added 8 new languages. This is available to Standard, Premier, Education and Partner Editions

New Languages
Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Tamil and Telugu

Gmail now supports following languages

Arabic, Bengali, Bulgarian, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Gujarati, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Kannada, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Malay, Malayalam, Marathi, Norwegian, Oriya, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Simplified Chinese, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Tagalog, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, Traditional Chinese, Turkish, UK English, US English, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese.

To access what's new - Sign in to Gmail, click 'Settings', and select the interface language you prefer.

For more information:
http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/users/gmail.html

Google Apps Tip: Google Docs Color-coded comments

When reviewing your co-workers online documents, you can insert color-coded comments to differentiate from the rest of the text.

How to insert color coded comments in a Google Document?

Place your cursor where you'd like your comment to appear, and click the 'Insert' tab along the top of the page. Select the 'Comment' icon from the displayed toolbar and let the ideas flow.

Using menu takes a lot of time. Is there are shortcut for inserting color-coded comments in a Google Document?

You can also use the keyboard shortcut, Ctrl-M, to insert a comment.