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.

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 12 Ratings

Not that helpful, at all - 2008-10-23
Reviewer Rating:
I was very disappointed with this book. The majority of the content isn't even technically about Google Apps. It goes into YouTube and Blooger and so forth. It even covers software that isn't by Google at all!

By doing so, it completely loses focus. On top of this, the content in the book is not very deep. The "hacks" are rather obscure, without covering any fundamentals or anything I would actually want to do.

I spent about two hours with it and it's sat on my shelf since. I shall likely resell it so as to not have wasted the paper!

Good Overview of Google Apps - 2009-01-01
Reviewer Rating:
I should confess that this book wasn't what I thought it was. I was interested in reading it because I misread the title. I thought it was about the Google App Engine - which is a technology that I really want to spend some time investigating. But it wasn't about the Google App engine, it was about Google Apps - the set of online applications that Google have been introducing over the last few years.

That misunderstanding meant that I had to adjust my expectations of the book somewhat. Instead of a book aimed at developers explaining the inner detail of a technology, I got a book which was firmly aimed at end users.

I don't often read computer books aimed at end users. I find that I'm not in the target audience. Unless an application is very complex then I like to think that I can work out how to use it without resorting to manuals. Of course that means that I often end up using only a small fraction of the functionality of an application.

The Google application set is no exception to this rule. I've been using many of the Google applications for some time. In particular I've started to write a lot of documents and spreadsheets using Google Docs, the online office suite which is intended as a replacement for Microsoft Office. I tend to work on several different computers so having my documents available on a web site means that the latest version is available to me on any computer.

Google Docs is one of the most widely-used parts of the Google application set and it's a good place for this book to start. The first four chapters present an over view of the applications and then one chapter each concentrating on documents, spreadsheets and presentations. As expected I found that I already knew most of what was described in the early parts of the chapters, but I found myself saying "oh, that's useful" quite a lot towards the ends of the chapters as I read about features that I hadn't come across before. For example, I had no idea that the spreadsheet application was able to access data from external web sites and extract information which can be used in your calculations. I'm sure I'll find that useful in the future.

The next chapter talks about what is probably the best-known Google application - Gmail (or, as it's known in the UK, GoogleMail). I have a Gmail account, but currently I only use it for a couple of high-volume mailing lists. I certainly learned a lot about Gmail and I'll probably start using it a bit more now. This chapter, however, demonstrated the obvious problem about using a book to learn about this products - improvements to the Google applications appear frequently and some of the information in the book is already slightly out of date.

Subsequent chapters go into other parts of the Google application set in a similar level of detail. Google Calendar, iGoogle (the customisable Google homepage) and Google Reader all get a chapter to themselves. Then we have a few chapters that cover multiple projects. There's a chapter on Picassa and YouTube, one on Google Maps, Google Earth and SketchUp (the last of which I had never heard of) and one on Blogger. The final chapter is about tracking the success of your sites using Google Analytics. In just about every chapter I learned something that will be useful to be.

All in all, I found this book well worth reading and I'd recommend it to anyone who has an interest in making better use of the Google applications. There are only two caveats that you should consider. Firstly, there's the fact that it's a very wide-ranging book and I think that few people would use all of the applications and therefore find all of the chapters useful. Secondly, as I mentioned above, all of the Google applications are being updated and improved at an incredible rate, so this is definitely going to be a book with a rather short shelf life.

A collection of hacks and tricks - 2008-09-06
Reviewer Rating:
Philipp Lenssen's GOOGLE APPS HACKS provides a collection of hacks and tricks to offer different ways of customizing Google Apps, from its email and spreadsheets to some of its desktop applications such as Google Earth. Owners of Google Apps learn all about document sharing, embedding web pages into Google Calendar, adding photos to its mapping system, and more.

Should be Gmail and Google Docs Hacks, not Google Apps - 2009-10-26
Reviewer Rating:
As a contract system administrator that is constantly recommending and implementing Google Apps for business (formerly Google Apps for Your Domain) I thought this would have some more in depth insight. This is not good for an administrator, but would be alright for an end-user.

I also purchased Google Apps Administrator Guide which was recommended on the same page and IT was the one that had the information that should be in this book too. There was very little mention about the business implementation and administration of the actual Google Apps. This was a how-to book for users of Google Docs, rudimentary usage of Google Sites, and being a "power user" with Gmail. Not a "hack" book of the business version of Google Apps.

Google Apps Hacks - 2008-11-09
Reviewer Rating:
Google Apps Hacks
This book is a keeper! Loaded with all kinds of things you would never think to look for. Such as did you know you can create PDF's with Google Docs? Or did you know you can upload photos of local landmarks for Google Maps? This books tells how to that and much more.

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