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Making a Printable Calendar in Google Calendars

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For a while now, I’ve been wanting a printable view of my Google Calendar. I maintain a family calendar of all birthdays and there are some family members that want a printable calendar.

Google Calendar does not wrap all day events in the month view, so you have to hover to look at the full event details.

So, I finally spent some time today to work it out. It was time consuming and annoying so I hope someone benefits from this to make it less time consuming for them.

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A4/Letter – the most annoying option in any software

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Why oh why is there ever any app that asks you whether you want to print this document or set up this document as A4 or Letter sized paper? Well, at least we should be thankful that there is even an option – how many apps do you use that are made in the USA and don’t even give you the option to change the paper size or change away from American spelling. (True story – an American colleague told me recently that she did not even know there was another paper size other than the “standard” and did not know it was called Letter). I can forgive regular users to not know there is a world outside the US of A, but I can’t forgive software developers.

Quick – do this test right now. Open Word to a brand new document, go to the Page Layout ribbon and choose Size – what is the default size that your blank documents are set to? If you don’t live in the USA and your documents are set to Letter, you have my permission to go and yell at your IT Department for not setting up your Word environment correctly – You probably still have American spelling in your documents and Inches in your Ruler and margins also!

Google Docs only very recently gave us the option of saving a default for our paper sizes and margins – yet the margins are STILL IN INCHES!!!! WHY?

Apart from having the option to change the settings very ocassionally for when you are preparing a document for a US audience, why does the setting even exist?

Google knows I’m in Australia, why can’t it determine the settings for me automatically as Metric and A4.

Microsoft Word knows my location from the Regional Settings on my PC – why aren’t my default Word Templates created as A4? (They should be if the location was set before installing Word, but I think it should be dynamically based on that setting – if you want to create specific Templates with other paper sizes, you can do that).

And worse of all, please, please, please, do NOT set the default as Letter and not even have an option for me to change it in the settings to anything else as the Default. Or on the other hand, please don’t make me change it every time I need to print. If I was in the US I would think – “why is this setting here every time I want to print a document – I would never ever change the paper size”, if I’m in anywhere else in the world I think “why oh why do these stupid American software developers make me have to choose my paper size every time I want to print a document!”. No one wins.

So, in summary:

  • Always have the option for A4/Letter paper sizes, American and other Spelling and Imperial and Metric measurements.
  • Set the default based on my location – you know my location!
  • Allow me to override the defaults if I need to (maybe I’m visiting the US of A).
  • Honour those defaults everywhere.
  • Have the ability to modify the defaults for once off cases (eg printing the same document to A4 then Letter for global audiences).

What are your thoughts? does this annoy you too?

WordPress.com Now Works

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I my series of posts last year on creating a web presence for your community group, I devoted one post to creating a calendar for your community group, where I lamented the fact that WordPress.com did not allow embeds of Google Calendars for some very strange reason. Thankfully this has now been rectified, and you can now embed a Google Calendar in your WordPress.com site. But it’s not only for Google Calendar but Google Docs as well. This is fantastic news, because this now makes WordPress.com the almost one stop shop for your basic website requirements, for a small business, community or sporting group – basically, WordPress.com now works!

I do strongly recommend WordPress.com if you fit into one of the following broad categories:

Individual

Like me, if you just want a place to record a bit about yourself, a landing page for your domain, and a place to rant or share your wisdom with the world, then WordPress.com is for you. See my post on WordPress.com for your domain.

It might be too structured for you if you want a highly visual site or want to quickly post from email and mobile, where Tumblr or Posterous would probably be better. If you want to sell stuff or embed ads or are fanatical about your google ranking, then it’s probably not the platform for you either.

Small Business

As I have mentioned before, if you are a small business, it’s easy to look at MYOB’s Atlas offering as a simple way to get a web presence for your business. Please don’t go down that path. Spend a little bit more time and effort, (and less money) and create a site that is individual to you and your business.

However, before you decide, have a look at the websites of your competitors – if you are in an industry that is highly visual, maybe just having your logo and a few images on your site is not going to be enough, and you will need a custom designed site.

Also, if you are going to sell stuff online, and you want a great looking simple site, then head over to Chieftech’s blog for a review of Goodsie.

Community Group or Sporting Group

WordPress.com is absolutely perfect for a community group or sporting group, which is why I did the whole series of posts on the topic.  I reckon with the combination of WordPress.com, Google Apps for Your Domain, MailChimp, and possibly a few other cool free or low cost tools that I have blogged about previously, you now have a fantastic platform for your Community or Sporting Group.

I would love to hear if you have any other ideas for either extending WordPress.com, or what other alternatives there are for Small Business, Community groups and the like to get a great web presence.

A Calendar for your Community Group

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UPDATE: WordPress.com now supports Google Calendar Embeds! See my post and the announcement from WordPress.com

This is the fourth post in a series of posts about creating A Web Presence for your Community Group. By now you have a Domain, your website up and running with WordPress.com and have set up Google Apps for Your Domain and now have email for all your core team members.

The next thing most community groups need is a Calendar of Events. Most community groups exist because they have events run for the members or the general public, and you need to be able to promote your events via your website. Your Google Calendar is perfect for this. You can even create as many different Calendars as you want to your Google Calendar, for different parts of your Organisation (eg Committee, Meetings, Events, or a calendar for each different sub group of your organisation.

I have put off writing this post for so long because I was really hoping that WordPress.com would come to the party and allow embedding of Google Calendars. Unfortunately they have not. Here is a WordPress.org (hosted wordpress) site showing an embedded Google Calendar (created by my friend @adb). This is what you can NOT do on a free WordPress.com site. Unfortunately it is still the best way to show your Calendar of Events, and it is such a shame that WordPress.com will not allow this.

However, here are a few other options to overcome this limitation:

  • Create an Event’s Page on your website and manually enter details about the events. This is not the best idea as you have to continually update it and there is nothing worse than looking at someone’s website with outdated information on it.
  • Add a Link to your Calendar of Events from your WordPress.com website’s Sidebar or Menu. See the Instructions from Google on how to make your calendar public, then use the HTML link from your Calendar Settings to create a link to the calendar. The Calendar will look like this one (created for a Community Sporting Group who’s website I look after). This option is the easiest, but the calendar page is separate from your website, and not branded with the look and feel of your website.
  • There is a trick you can use to create an RSS Feed of your events and display them in the sidebar of your website. This is quite complex and involves relying on another service. I would only recommend it for the technically adept. (I have not tried it yet).
  • I do hate to say this but maybe create your site in Posterous (pronounced post-er-us) rather than WordPress.com. Posterous is a new-ish Microblogging platform but it now has almost as many features as WordPress.com (and a great new feature of group sites). I found this Posterous site that looks great and has an embedded Google Calendar.

For right now, I would create a link to the Calendar, and wait a bit longer and hope that WordPress.com comes to their senses and allows Google Calendar embeds in future. UPDATE: Which thankfully they have now done.

When you do start to use Calendar Embeds, Google has a great new feature that helps you create the code to embed multiple calendars.

Collaborative Document Creation

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This is a bit of a different post, it was created collaboratively with Nicholas Rayner (@aussienick) using 4 different online collaboration tools to see if we could find which is the best collaboration tool for document creation. Nicholas is a bit of a Microsoft fan and I’m very much a Google fan so we both came into this process with a bit of our own biases. So we tried two Google products and two Microsoft Products:

  • Office Web Apps Online Editing
  • Word 2010 with the document saved on Office Web Apps
  • Google Docs
  • Google Wave (just because of my previous post saying how good Google Wave was now).

In each product we created the document, shared it, and edited the section about the experiences working with that product. Each section has then been copied and pasted into this post.

Here  is Nicholas’ version of the post.

Word Web App with the file shared on Skydrive.

How it works

  • Create the document from within Office Web Apps (http://office.live.com) or create it in Word and save it to the Web.
  • Open with the Word Web App and start typing.

Pros

  • Slick Word-like interface.
  • Nice editing environment.

Cons

  • A bit fiddly to set up and share the document.
  • Not actually live collaboration,  you get an error message that there is someone editing the document if you try to open it.
  • Limited features of Word – eg no Find and Replace.
  • Only works in IE (we tried it in Chrome and it works to edit, but then you don’t have the seamless switch to editing in Word).

End Result

  • Gave up on it as we are looking for a true collaborative authoring experience. It’s not collaboration, it’s document sharing, which it does well.

Word 2010 with document saved on Skydrive.

How it works

  • Create a new document and save it to  the web. (There is a save to web option in the save menu).
  • Share the document with the other user – you can do this from within office.live.com or when you are saving it from within word.
  • Start typing just like any other Office document.
  • You will see when the other person comes on line to start editing the document – it pops up at the bottom of the screen.
  • You will see the paragraphs that the other person is editing – those paragraphs are then locked to you for editing, and it tells you a nice message that you should wait for the other person to finish editing this paragraph.
  • Everytime you save, the other user gets notified that they can refresh that paragraph to see the changes you have made.
  • When both people save, the document gets updated in both places.

Pros

  • Seems to work well after we got the sharing and document open in outlook.
  • Cool popup down the bottom of the screen showing who is editing and gives their live messenger status so you can chat to them whilst editing.
  • You can see that the other person has locked the paragraph that they are editing.
  • NR: Made by Microsoft, everything they make is Awesome! JM: HEY, there will be NO ZEALOTRY HERE!
  • Full Word functionality.
  • It’s free!
  • Familiar Ribbon interface in Browser.

Cons

  • Requires Office 2010.
  • No Live Collaboration from Web Browser.
  • Can be slow in creating and accessing files through a Web Browser (probably due to being in Beta).

End Result

JM: I’m quite impressed with it. It works well. It does what they say it does. It’s free and it’s quite useable. I would use it again, no questions asked.

NR: Very impressive for a beta of a version 1 product from Microsoft. Really impressed with the Live Collaboration when editing in a client, just like with Office Web Apps for SharePoint but this is FREE and available now at office.live.com!

Google Docs

How it works

  • Go to google docs – http://docs.google.com or from the documents link in Gmail.
  • Create a new document.
  • Share it with another user – either enter an email address or choose from your Contact List.
  • They open the document and start typing.
  • You will be notified in the top right hand corner that they are editing the document too.
  • After a bit you will automatically see the changes the other person has done, right in your document.

Pros

  • Linked to your Google Account to easily share with contacts and integrate with GMail etc.
  • Nice environment to work in for straight text editing, eg for a draft document.
  • It won’t tell you where the other person is editing, but it will tell you there are conflicts and will let you copy your text if it won’t save it due to a conflict.

Cons

  • NR: Formatting is..well..crap.
  • JM: Formatting documents in Google docs is difficult as it is missing all the quick and easy shortcut keys for headings, bullets etc.
  • NR: Slow in syncing changes between the two users.
  • NR: No inline spell checker – JM: It works in Chrome – sort of – it only highlights that the word is misspelt, it won’t actually allow you to correct the spelling by right clicking on the word, so it is kinda annoying, If you want the word suggestion you have to use the spell check feature in the toolbar.
  • There is a really really cool chat feature inside the document if you are doing a Google Spreadsheet or Presentation, but it is completely missing when doing a document. This feature is sorely missing from this collaboration experience.
  • UPDATE 14/7/10: Not sure if we completely missed this, or it’s new today, but the chat panel and an indicator showing where the other user is typing is now showing up in Google Docs. It makes it a much better collaborative editing environment.

End Result

NR: Google Docs is good for basic document authoring and editing, the formatting has some issues, but overall it is a good product. I’d like to see the chat feature from the spreadsheet and presentation tools added to the Document authoring tool.

JM: I love Google Docs for quickly whipping up a new document, but for anything that requires formatting or printing, I will always go to back to Word or Excel.

Google Wave

How it works

  • Open up Google Wave.
  • Create a New Wave.
  • Add a person to collaborate with.
  • Start Typing.
  • When the other person starts typing, you will see exactly where they are typing and what they are typing letter by letter.
  • The name user who is typing is shown on the other user’s screen right where they are typing and you see the changes they make to the wave letter by letter.

Pros

  • Great collaborative editing experience.
  • Simple and easy to start and collaborate.
  • Can export to Google Docs when done by using the Ferry extension.
  • As well as typing the document, you can have a discussion below or even within the – eg chatting over the particular wording of one sentence.
  • Good Spell Check in both Chrome and Firefox.

Cons

  • Can get a little crowded and mixed up if you are typing in the same sentence or the same word as the other person.
  • Formatting still an issue – similar formatting issues to Google Docs and no keyboard shortcuts for headings and bullets.
  • Does not work in IE (but will in IE9).

End Result

  • JM: I actually like this better than google docs for simple text editing and thinking up an idea – but I would still go back to Word for final editing.
  • NR: I too prefer this over Google Docs. This would be great for small project teams and a group of people collaborating over a range of different things. I’ll definitely be using Google Wave going forward!

Conclusion

Well I was kind of surprised at what a good experience using Word 2010 was in a collaborative editing experience. If I was working on a proper document where the end result was a PDF or printed document, I would not hesitate to use Word for collaboration.

Even though I love Google Docs, after using Word, I wish it was a little better and had the visual indicator of where people are working. The chat window, which works great in a Google spreadsheet, is also sorely missing in Google Docs. So right now, for quick collaborative editing I would go with Wave, it is such a good collaborative experience for quick drafts or documents that will continue to exist in Wave.

Well done to Microsoft for producing such a great collaborative editing experience, and particularly that it is free and easy enough for anyone with Office 2010 and a live account to access. I recommend you give Word 2010 and / or Google Wave a go the next time you need to work together with one or more people on a document.