You have been using Google Analytics to track visitors (or page views) on your website but did you know that the same analytics service can also be used for tracking views inside Google Spreadsheets. You insert a little snippet of tracking code inside your spreadsheet and when someone opens the sheet, that visit will be recorded permanently in your Google Analytics account.
Google Analytics provides a JavaScript snippet that can be inserted into web templates for tracking visits. You cannot insert JavaScript inside the cells of a Google Spreadsheet but we can use the IMAGE function combined with some Apps Script to enable tracking inside spreadsheet. The visit is recorded as an “event” and not a “page view” and thus your spreadsheet opens will not artificially inflate your Google Analytics reports.
To get started, go to your Google Analytics dashboard and make a note of the Google Analytics tracking ID which is a string like UA-12345-67. This web tutorial explains how you can locate the ID inside your Analytics dashboard.
Now open any Google Spreadsheet that you wish to track and go to Tools, Script Editor and copy-paste the following code. This is a custom Google Spreadsheet function that will embed the 1×1 tracking GIF image in our spreadsheets.
/**
* Track Spreadsheet views with Google Analytics
*
* @param {string} gaaccount Google Analytics Account like UA-1234-56.
* @param {string} spreadsheet Name of the Google Spreadsheet.
* @param {string} sheetname Name of individual Google Sheet.
* @return The 1x1 tracking GIF image
* @customfunction
*/
function GOOGLEANALYTICS(gaaccount, spreadsheet, sheetname) {
/**
* Written by Amit Agarwal
* Web: www.ctrlq.org
* Email: amit@labnol.org
*/
var imageURL = [
"http://ift.tt/1jZhjuD",
"&tid=" + gaaccount,
"&cid=" + Utilities.getUuid(),
"&z=" + Math.round(Date.now() / 1000).toString(),
"&ec=" + encodeURIComponent("Google Spreadsheets"),
"&ea=" + encodeURIComponent(spreadsheet || "Spreadsheet"),
"&el=" + encodeURIComponent(sheetname || "Sheet")
].join("");
return imageURL;
}
Save the code, close the Apps Script editor window and return to the spreadsheet.
Click an empty cell and insert the following formula. The cell will be blank but it contains an embedded image. You may want to change the background color so it is easy to figure out which cell in the spreadsheet contains the tracking formula.
The GOOGLEANALYTICS() formula takes 3 parameters – the analytics ID, the spreadsheet name and the sheet name. This helps if you would like to separately track individual sheets inside a spreadsheet.
Now open the spreadsheet in a new browser window and go to Google Analytics, Real Time, Overview to test if the tracking is working. It may sometimes take a minute to record the visit. If you would like to see all the visits, go to Behavior – Events – Overview and click on the Google Spreadsheets category.
Also see: Track Gmail Messages with Google Analytics
The tracking would work even if the user has enabled ad blocking and that’s because Google Spreadsheets, like Gmail, serves images through a proxy server. The downside is that you will never know the location of the visitor since all visits will be show up as United States (the location of Google servers).
Adobe PDF may be the most popular document format on the web but there’s a reason why eBook lovers prefer the ePub format over PDF. PDF documents have a static layout with fixed page breaks but the layout of an ePUB document is “responsive” meaning it will automatically adjust for different screen sizes.
You can read an ePub book on your desktop or inside the Google Play Books app on your Android phone and they’ll look good. Also, since ePub files are essentially HTML5 documents under the hood, the text size and font family can be easily adjusted for an improved reading experience.
Adobe Stanza and Calibre are popular desktop software for creating ePub ebooks but now can now easily make one in the browser using Google Docs itself. Just write a document in Google Document, or upload an existing Microsoft Word file to your Google Drive, go to File menu and choose download as EPUB publication.
Here’s an ePUB version of this article, generated with Google Docs.
You get an ePub file that you can copy to your mobile phone or, better still, upload the ePub to the Google Books website and access the ebook from anywhere. You can even read it in the browser. To upload an eBook to Google Books, go here and click the Upload Files button. The files are only visible to you.
ePub files are readable on iPad, Nook and Google Play books. Amazon Kindle doesn’t support the ePub format but there’s an easy way to convert ePub into MOBI format that is supported by Kindle.
Do you need a quick organization chart to show the hierarchy of employees in your business? Well, just open a blank Google Spreadsheet, put the employee names in a column and your org charge should be ready in minutes. Here’s a sample org chart created with nothing but Google Sheets.
Here’s how you can put together an org chart in Google Sheets. It will be a live chart meaning as you update the employee names or hierarchy in the spreadsheet, the org chart would update itself. Let’s get started.
Step 1. Open a Google Sheet and put the employee names in column A and the names of the immediate managers in Column B.
Step 2. Select the cells that you’ve just entered and choose Chart from the Insert menu in the spreadsheet.
Step 3. The Chart Editor will open inside Google Sheets. Switch to the Chart Types tab and uncheck the option that says “Aggregate Column A.” Then scroll down the list of available chart types, choose “Organizational Chart” and click Insert to add the chart into your spreadsheet.
Unlike flowcharting tools like Visio, you don’t have enough formatting options for org charts in Google Sheets except for changing the background and fill colors of various nodes in the chart. And if you hit the little drop-down arrow in the chart box, you’ll see an option to download the charge as a PNG image for embedding on other websites.
Github, in simple English, is a website for hosting source code. The site is built for programmers and, if you are not one, it is highly unlikely that you have ever used Github. Repositories and Forks, the basic building blocks of Github, may seem like second-nature to developers but, for everyone else, Github continues to be a complicated beast.
Github isn’t just a place for developers though. The site can be used a writing platform. It can host HTML websites. You can use Github to visually compare the content of two text files. The site’s Gist service can used for anonymous publishing and as a tasklist. There’re so many things do on Github already and you can how use it as a free file hosting service as well.
It takes few easy steps to turn your Github into a file repository. You can upload files from the browser and you can add collaborators so they can also upload files to a common repository (similar to shared folders in Google Drive). The files are public so anyone can download them with a direct link. The one limitation is that the individual files cannot be larger than 25 MB each. There are no known bandwidth limits though.
Step 1: Go to github.com and sign-up for a free account, if you don’t have one. Choose the free plan as that’s all we need for hosting our files.
Step 2: Click the “New Repository” button, or go to github.com/new, to create a new repository for hosting your files. You can think of a repository as a folder on your computer.
Step 3: Give your repository a name and a description and click the Create button. It helps to have a description as it will help others discover your files on the web. You can have Private repositories too but that requires a monthly subscription.
Step 4: Your repository will initially be empty. click the Import Code button on the next screen to initialize the repository.
Step 5: Paste the URL http://ift.tt/1OpAlq3 into the repository field and click Begin Import to create your Github repository for hosting files.
Your Github repository is now ready. Click the Upload Files files button and begin uploading files. You can drag one or more files from the desktop and then click Commit Changes to publish the files on the web. Github will accept any file as long as the size is within the 25 MB limit.
Github has a built-in previewer for PDF, text and image files (including animated GIFs) so anyone can view them without downloading the actual file. Else there’s a simple URL hack to get the raw (downloadable) version of any file hosted on Github.
After the file has been uploaded to Github, click the filename in the list and you’ll get the file’s URL in the browser’s address. Append ?raw=true to the URL and you get a downloadable / embeddable version.
For instance, if the file URL is http://ift.tt/1OpAn0V, the direct link to the same file would be http://ift.tt/1KDmLEG. If the uploaded file is an image, you can even embed it in your website using the standard img tag.
Here’s a sample file repository on Github. The T-Rex image is here and the direct link is here. You can go to the Repository settings and add one or more collaborators. They’ll get write access to your repository and can then add or delete files.
Open the Google website on your desktop computer and you’ll find a little microphone icon embedded inside the search box. Click the icon, say something and your voice is quickly transcribed into words. Unlike earlier speech recognition products, you no longer have to train the browser to understand your speech and, for those who don’t know touch typing, speech is often a faster mode of input than the keyboard.
Sounds like magic, right? Well, did you know that you can also include similar speech recognition capabilities to your own website with a few lines of code. Visitors can search your website, or even fill forms, using just their voice. Both Google Chrome and Firefox browsers support the speech recognition API.
Before we dive into the actual implementation, let’s play with a working demo. If you are viewing this page inside Google Chrome (desktop or mobile), click the voice icon inside the search box and say a search query. You may have allow the browser to access your microphone. When you are done speaking, the search results page will open automatically.
The HTML5 Web Speech API has been around for few years now but it takes slightly more work now to include it in your website.
Earlier, you could add the attribute x-webkit-speech to any form input field and it would become voice capable. The x-webkit-speech attribute has however been deprecated and you are now required to use the JavaScript API to include speech recognition. Here’s the updated code:
<!-- CSS Styles -->
<style>
.speech {border: 1px solid #DDD; width: 300px; padding: 0; margin: 0}
.speech input {border: 0; width: 240px; display: inline-block; height: 30px;}
.speech img {float: right; width: 40px }
</style>
<!-- Search Form -->
<form id="labnol" method="get" action="http://ift.tt/1gKlIhB;
<div class="speech">
<input type="text" name="q" id="transcript" placeholder="Speak" />
<img onclick="startDictation()" src="//i.imgur.com/cHidSVu.gif" />
</div>
</form>
<!-- HTML5 Speech Recognition API -->
<script>
function startDictation() {
if (window.hasOwnProperty('webkitSpeechRecognition')) {
var recognition = new webkitSpeechRecognition();
recognition.continuous = false;
recognition.interimResults = false;
recognition.lang = "en-US";
recognition.start();
recognition.onresult = function(e) {
document.getElementById('transcript').value
= e.results[0][0].transcript;
recognition.stop();
document.getElementById('labnol').submit();
};
recognition.onerror = function(e) {
recognition.stop();
}
}
}
</script>
We have the CSS to place the microphone image inside the input box, the form code containing the input button and the JavaScript that does all the heavy work.
When the user click the mic image inside the search box, the JavaScript checks if the user’s browser supports speech recognition. If so, it waits for the transcribed text to arrive from Google servers and then submits the form.
The Dictation App also uses the speech recognition API though it writes the transcribed text to textarea field instead of an input box.
Some notes:
* TCX (Training Center XML) is a common file format for fitness activity data that can be imported to many fitness tracking tools such as Garmin Connect and Strava. By default, Fit samples location data with low accuracy and frequency to reduce device battery consumption. These Activities are exported into the Low Accuracy folder. Activities recorded with Fit's active mode will contain more detailed location paths and more accurate data.
* CSV files are easily read by spreadsheet software or parsed programmatically but may not be easy to import into fitness tracking software.