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Filed under: E-mail, Office, Web services, Google

Gmails adds Spreadsheets option for Excel attachments

Spreadsheets in Gmail

One of Gmail's handiest features has long been its ability to open a large variety of attachments with its "View as HTML" option. Now Google has taken it one logical step futher with an "Open in Google Spreadsheets" option when you receive an Excel file as an attachment. I checked it out and found it to be pretty convenient. While Gmail's HTML view is occasionally lacking, Google Spreadsheets is somewhat more faithful to the original, though charts are still lost in the process. Though like Google Blogoscoped's Philipp Lenssen I'm wary of lock-in, this is the sort of integration "Google Office" needs to compete against other desktop and web-based offerings.

Filed under: Windows, Macintosh, Linux, E-mail, Productivity, Web services, Mozilla, Freeware, Browser Tips

Attachment icons for Gmail

Gmail attachment iconsOoh, now this is cool: Lifehacker points us to a this great Stylish script that gently tweaks Gmail to put meaningful icons next to messages with attachments. Instead of a generic paperclip icon, this puts a PDF icon next to messages with PDF attachments, an image icon next to messages with attached images, and so on for Word docs, Zip files, text files, executables, video files, and so on. Very cool.

In case you're not familiar, Stylish is a great extension for Firefox that lets you set up custom styles for web sites, letting you do little things like the tweak above to things like reskinning or totally changing the layout of other sites, and even Firefox itself. Userstyles.org is a site that has collected hundreds of such scripts and is not to be missed.

[Link and image via Lifehacker]

Filed under: E-mail, Office, Productivity, Web services

Use Gmail to view Office files online

View as HTML in GmailThis weekend my girlfriend and I were visiting my mom. My girlfriend needed to view a PowerPoint file someone had sent her, but my mom's really, really old PC doesn't have PowerPoint and, believe it or not, is too old to run the free PowerPoint viewer. I thought for a moment and then remembered that whenever someone e-mails a document in a common format to my Gmail account, a handy "View as HTML" link shows up next to the "Download" link. "Forward it to your Gmail account," I told her, and lo and behold a few seconds later she was able to view the file (albeit with some funky formatting) right in Firefox.

Yesterday the clever folks at Lifehacker printed basically the same tip I gave my girlfriend: If you're traveling and need to read a document but don't have the right app for it, send it to yourself using Gmail. It's a simple idea, but can be a lifesaver, and it works like a charm with PDFs, Office, and OpenOffice.org files.

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The World's Hardest Game 2.0 - Time Waster

So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do. Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game. The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...

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