Google April Fools' Day 2017

April Fools' Day should probably be called Google Fools' Day, since there are so many Google hoaxes.

Google Japan developed a "bubble wrap" version of the Japanese keyboard. "The Google Japanese input bubble wrap version is a keyboard that realizes 'I want to press in my mind, I want to keep pressing'," according to Google Translate.

Another product for your smart home? Meet Google Gnome, "a voice-activated, hands-free tool designed to make backyard living effortless. Need to know what animal is squeaking in your bushes? Stay still and ask Gnome what sound an opossum makes. Running low on birdseed? That’s where Gnome comes in. You can even use Gnome's proprietary high-intensity lasers to trim your hedges into whatever shape your heart desires."

The Chrome OS team brings the most popular mobile accessories to the Chromebook, which already blurs the line between mobile and desktop. Chromebook Groupie Stick, Chromebook Cardboard, Chromebook Workout Armband will soon be available in the Google Store. "To take advantage of beautiful, high-resolution displays, as well as great photo editing apps, we've carefully engineered the first Chromebook-sized selfie stick. Never again will you miss the perfect groupie."

Haptic Helpers make VR even more immersive. "We're taking VR to the next level with Haptic Helpers. Using a modest set of everyday tools, these VR virtuosos can simulate more than 10,000 unique experiences, all from the comfort of your own home. Smell the roses. Listen to the ocean. Feel a fluffy dog!"

You can now play the classic arcade game MS. PAC-MAN in Google Maps. "Avoid Blinky, Pinky, Inky, and Sue as you swerve the streets of real places around the world. But eat the pac-dots fast, because this game will only be around for a little while." Just go to the Google Maps site or open the Google Maps app for Android or iOS and click or tap MS. PAC-MAN at the bottom.

Google Cloud Platform expands to Mars. "By opening a dedicated extraterrestrial cloud region, we're bringing the power of Google’s compute, network, and storage to the rest of the solar system, unlocking a plethora of possibilities for astronomy research, exploration of Martian natural resources and interplanetary life sciences. This region will also serve as an important node in an extensive network throughout the solar system. Our first interplanetary data center — affectionately nicknamed 'Ziggy Stardust' — will open in 2018," mentions Google.

... To be continued ...

How to Email Unique File Attachments using Mail Merge for Gmail

Mail Merge, available for Gmail and Google Inbox, is a perfect tool for sending personalized emails to one or more email addresses using a simple Google Sheet. If you never performed merge before, please watch the Mail Merge tutorial and documentation to get started.

One of the most popular features of Mail Merge is its unique ability to send different file attachments to different email address. For instance, if you are applying for a job at different companies, you can attach the same PDF resume in all email messages but the cover letter could be different with each application.

This step-by-step tutorial explains how you can you can use Mail Merge for Gmail to send unique email attachments to your contacts. Mail Merge pulls files from Google Drive and includes them as attachments in the outgoing email messages.

Step 1: Install the Mail Merge add-on.

Step 2: Open a new Google Sheet, go to Addons > Mail Merge with Attachments > Create Merge template to initialize the sheet.

Step 3: Add one or more rows in the Mail Merge sheet. To keep things simple, you can add the First Name, last Name, and the Email address as shown in the screenshot.

Attach Google Drive files to Mail Merge

Step 4:  Go to Addons > Mail Merge > Add File Attachments > Insert Files from Google Drive and select one or more files that you wish to send with your email message. You can also select the option Select Files from Computer if the files are on the computer.

Mail Merge will get the direct link of the selected file(s) and inserts them into the File Attachments column. If you wish to send more files with the same email message, you can add the drive links in the same cell, separated by the comma.

Easily Add File Attachments with Mail Merge

In the previous step, we used the Google File Picker to select the files from Google Drive. This is slightly tedious more so as you have to repeat the steps for every row in your Mail merge sheet.

There’s an easier way though for adding attachments to merge. Instead of using the File Picker, you can simply put the name of the file in the File Attachments column. The addon, at the time of sending the email, will search your Drive for that file and attach it to the email message.

If you have multiple files in Google Drive with the same name, you can specify the folder path where the file is located. The syntax is \\Folder A\\Folder B\\filename.ext

I want to show you one more technique for quickly attaching files to your Mail mere sheet. Go to Addons > Mail Merge > Add File Attachments > List Files in Google Drive Folder. Now select the parent folder in your Google Drive and the addon will generate a list of every file it found inside that folder, including sub-folders.

Now switch back to the Mail Merge sheet and you’ll notice that a drop-down has been added to every cell in the File Attachments column. This makes it even easier for you to select files from Drive.

So we are all set. Go to the mail merge menu, choose Configure and run merge (video) to send your emails that all have unique attachments. You’ll find a copy of the emails in your Gmail Sent items.

For detailed instructions, please watch the video tutorial.

Gmail Blocks JavaScript Attachments

If you try to send a JavaScript attachment using Gmail or if you want to download a .js attachment, you'll get a new anti-virus warning: "Blocked for security reasons", "1 attachment contains a virus or blocked file. Downloading this attachment is disabled".

.JS has been added to the long list of file types that are blocked by Gmail for security reasons. The full list: .ADE, .ADP, .BAT, .CHM, .CMD, .COM, .CPL, .EXE, .HTA, .INS, .ISP, .JAR, .JS (NEW), .JSE, .LIB, .LNK, .MDE, .MSC, .MSI, .MSP, .MST, .NSH .PIF, .SCR, .SCT, .SHB, .SYS, .VB, .VBE, .VBS, .VXD, .WSC, .WSF, .WSH. "To prevent against potential viruses, Gmail doesn't allow you to attach certain types of files, including: certain file types (listed above), including their compressed form (like .gz or .bz2 files) or when found within archives (like .zip or .tgz files), documents with malicious macros, archives whose listed file content is password protected, archives whose content includes a password protected archive."

The GSuite Blog informs that "for inbound mail, senders will get a bounce message explaining why the email was blocked. If you still need to send .js files for legitimate reasons, you can use Google Drive, Google Cloud Storage, or other storage solutions to share or send your files."

You can still send JavaScript files using Gmail if you change the extension. What about downloading old .js attachments? Try the workarounds from this post.

See the Email Sender’s Company and Logo in your Gmail Inbox

The default layout of your Gmail inbox has the sender’s name listed in the left most column followed by the subject and the date of the message. The emails are sorted in reverse chronological order with the newest messages listed at the top.

The problem with this layout is that you cannot figure out who the actual sender of a message is without actually opening the email. For instance, if you get an email from Angus who works at Google and a second email from another Angus who is employed with Microsoft, Gmail will simply show Angus as the sender for both emails.

To solve this exact problem, I wrote Gmail Sender Icons and it is now available for everyone. It is a Google Chrome extension that will make it easy for you to identify the company or the organisation of the email sender right inside the message list of your Gmail inbox.

Check out the screenshots and you’ll get the idea.

The add-on extracts the email address of the sender, parses the website domain from the address and pulls the favicon image (often same as the logo) of the domain. It then appends the logo image and the company’s domain as a label to the message subject thus making it easy for you quickly identify the message sender.

It run entirely in your browser and not even a byte of your Gmail data is shared with anyone outside your browser. The Chrome extension internally uses the InboxSDK library to parse emails on the client’s side.

When your inbox is flooded with emails and you’d only like to focus your attention on messages that are from known senders, this Gmail extension will be a big help. It shows the sender label in default message views and search results.

You can also use Gmail Sender Icons to quickly identify emails from known domains in the spam folder than may have been mistakenly identified as spam by Gmail filters. Give it a shot.

Gmail Sender Icons

Google Image Search Shows Colorful Suggestions

Google Image Search has a different way to display suggestions: it now shows a long list of colorful boxes with related searches. You can click one or more boxes to dynamically refine search results.

For example, when searching for [sportswear], Google shows suggestions like: [women basketball], [tennis], [badminton], [golf], [volleyball], [nike woman], [alexander wang], [adidas], [fashion], [performance], [vintage], [trendy], [urban], [school], [gym], [90's], [70's], [vogue], [luxe], [avant garde], [korean], [italian], [french] and more. It's interesting to notice that each category of suggestions has a different color.

Here's the old interface:

Google Image Search Starts Playing YouTube Videos

Google Image Search's mobile interface tests a new feature that starts playing snippets from a YouTube video at the top of the search results page. It's not disclosed as an ad, there's no sound and you can't stop or hide the video, which continues to play on repeat.

Right now, the experiment seems to be limited to fashion-related queries like [men jackets], [lookbook], [winter outfit], which match videos from YouTube channels like New Look and River Island. "New Look is a South African-owned British global fashion retailer with a chain of high street shops. (...) The chain sells womenswear, menswear, and clothing for teens," according to Wikipedia.

Google only shows labels like: "New Look on YouTube", even though this looks like an experimental ad format. I hope it will never become a regular feature, as it's pretty annoying and it wastes Internet bandwidth.

YouTube Desktop Notifications, Now For Everyone

It looks like YouTube's notification experiment is now a regular feature and you can no longer disable it by clearing cookies. When sign in to your Google account, YouTube's desktop site no longer shows Google+ notifications in the navigation bar: it replaces them with YouTube notifications.

"Your notifications live here. Subscribe to your favorite channels to get notified about their latest videos," informs the new notification box.

How to Make Phone Numbers Callable in Google Sheets

If you click an email link on a webpage, it opens your default mail program. Similarly, you can make phone numbers on your website “callable” meaning when someone clicks the phone number, it will launch the dialer on their mobile phone and initiate dialing of the specified phone number. It is recommended that you make phone numbers clickable as more and more people would be accessing your site on their mobile devices.

How to Insert Clickable Phone Numbers in Web Pages

We use the simple tel protocol to convert a plain text phone number on a web page into a clickable telephone link.

For instance, if you click this link on a mobile phone, it will open the phone dialer prefilled with the specified number. There’s no need to copy-paste numbers.

How to Type Phone Numbers in a Google Sheet

It is a bit tricky to type phone numbers inside Google Spreadsheets. Here’s why:

Phone numbers are mostly made of digits preceded by the plus (+) symbol. The problem is as soon as add the plus sign in the spreadsheet cell, it assumes that you entering a math formula and tries to calculate the value.

There are two simple workarounds to this problem. You can enclose the phone number inside double quotes (“) and precede it with an equal to (=) sign.

An even easier alternative is to use the single quote (‘) before the phone number. Google Sheets will then interpret the cell’s value as text and the phone number formatting will be preserved.

How to Make Phone Numbers Clickable in Google Sheets

Coming to the main problem, how do you make phone numbers inside a Google Sheet clickable. The obvious answer would be to use the =HYPERLINK() method with the tel protocol but, unfortunately, Google Sheets do not support it.

So a formula like =HYPERLINK(“tel:12345”, “Call Me”) would not work since sheets will only allow regular http and mailto hyperlinks. There’s a simple workaround though.

You can create a regular hyperlink in the cell pointing to a website which in turn redirects to the actual telephone link. To see this in action, add https://ctrlq.org/call/ before any phone number in the Google Sheet and it will turn into a clickable telephone link.

Say you have the phone number in cell A1. Add this simple formula in any other cell and it will create a telephone link just like on a regular webpage.

=HYPERLINK(“http://ift.tt/2juJx9s; “Call our support team”)

To get a better idea, open this Phone Number Google Sheet inside the Sheets app of your Android or iPhone and try clicking any of the phone links.

Also see: Add Images in Google Spreadsheets

Know What Facebook Can See Inside Your Photographs

When you upload any photograph to your Facebook account, they look at the actual content of the photograph and try to determine what objects and scenes are inside the image. You may not have added any description, yet Facebook can determine what that picture is all about.

Whether you are having a pizza, enjoying the sun on a beach, playing with your dog or spending an evening with friends, Facebook can accurately figure it out from the photo itself. They internally use these machine generated captions to make your pictures more accessible to blind users.

Facebook Computer Vision Tags

If you are curious to know what information Facebook visual recognition algorithms have found in your own pictures, here’s an easy way to view that data.

1. Open any photograph on the Facebook website and click the thumbnail to view the enlarged version of the image.
2. Right-click the image and choose Inspect to open the Chrome Dev Tools. This trick would work across all modern browsers since they have developer tools built-in.
3. Look at the alt attribute of the image tag* and you’ll find the description of the image as seen by Facebook (video tutorial).

[*] If the <img> tag is not visible in developer tool, you may need to expand the parent <div> tag.

Video Tutorial – Facebook Image Tags

Facebook’s computer vision tags cover multiple concepts including food, objects (e.g., eyeglasses), people’s expression (are they smiling?), sports, nature (sky, mountains), and more. The best part – if you are in a group photograph, Facebook can accurately tell you the exact number of people in the frame.

A Github user has created a Google Chrome extension that takes away all the manual work and overlays the tags on the pictures without you having to hunt inside the developer tool.

YouTube Notifications in the Navigation Bar

YouTube has recently started to experiment with replacing Google+ notifications in the navigation bar with YouTube notifications. You get notifications for recently uploaded videos from your subscribed channels, but only if you've enabled notifications for those channels. For example, you can go to the subscription manager and click the bell icon next to a channel to enable or disable notifications.

The settings button sends you to the Notifications section from YouTube's Settings page and the 3-dot icon next to each notification lets you turn off notifications from the corresponding channel.

If you don't like this experiment, you can always clear cookies for youtube.com in your browser's settings and opt out.

Google's New Mobile UI for Recipe Search

Just in time for New Year's dinner, Google has a new mobile interface for recipe search. I searched for [avocado mayo] and noticed a long list of related searches below the search box and ads: salad, egg salad, chicken, avocado salad and more. You can select more than one related search and this helps you refine the results.

When selecting a related search, you get a completely different interface that only shows recipes: bigger expandable cards, bigger thumbnails, infinite scrolling.

How to Add a Picture Password to your Google Forms

Google Forms have this “all-or-none” problem. The forms are either public (anyone can fill your form) or, if you are on Google Apps, you can create forms that are visible to everyone in your organization. It is however not possible to restrict access to forms to specific people.

Another shortcoming is that Google Forms do not allow passwords or CAPTCHAs to prevent spam bots from filling your forms with random data. Google itself maintains the reCAPTCHA project but it is not known if integration with Google Forms is in the works. There is a workaround, though.

Google Forms with Picture Passwords

Google Forms do not support CAPTCHA but they do offer an option to attach images with questions. These can be used as picture passwords.

The idea is simple.

We add a multiple-choice question where the user is asked to pick an image from a selection of multiple images. If they select the correct image, the main form is displayed else an error message is shown. Also, these images are shuffled so the answer’s position is random for each respondent.

How to Make Google Forms with Picture Passwords

Take this sample Google Form for a spin and you’ll get the idea.

Open a new Google Form and create 3 sections. The first section will have the picture password, the second section will contain the error message and the last one will have the actual questions that you want to ask users who have passed the anti-spam test.

In the first section, create a multiple choice question and attach a different image with every choice. Make this a required question and turn on the shuffle order for the question. Also turn on the option “Go to section based on answer” for the section so that only valid answers are taken to the main form.

For each choice that is not valid, choose “Go to section 2” (see screenshot) and choose “Go to section 3” for the right choice. In section 2, do not add any questions but for the error message in the section description. Also set “Go to section 1” after section 2 so that the user cannot go to the main section 3 without passing the picture test.

Make the Google Form live and respondents will only see the main questionnaire if they have solved the problem in section 1. You should also check out another technique for restricting access to Google Forms with passwords.

Related: File Upload Forms for Google Drive

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The story, How to Add a Picture Password to your Google Forms, was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 15/12/2016 under Google Forms, Internet.

How to Generate a Report of Bounced Email Addresses in Gmail

Some of the email messages you have sent through Gmail might not get delivered at all. There could be a problem with the recipient’s email address, their mailbox could be full or maybe the mail server could be specifically blocking your emails due to the content of the message.

When an email message is returned, you get a bounce-back notice from MAILER-DAEMON@gmail.com and it will always contain the exact reason for the delivery failure along with the SMTP error code. For instance, an error code 550 indicates that the email address doesn’t exist while a 554 indicates that your email was classified as spam by the recipient’s mail server.

How to Get a List of Email Addresses that Bounced

It is important to keep track of your bounced messages and remove all undelivered email addresses from your future mailings as they may adversly affect your sending reputation.

Mail Merge keeps track of all your bounced messages in Gmail but if you are using mail merge yet, here’s an open-source Google Script that will prepare a list of all email addresses that have bounced inside a Google Spreadsheet.

Gmail Bounce Report – Getting Started

Here’s how you can get started:

1. Go to labnol.org/bounce to make a copy of the Google Spreadsheet.
2. Click the Gmail menu (adjacent to Help) and choose Bounce Report.
3. Allow the Google Script to access* your Gmail account.
4. Watch as the Google Sheet is populated with bounced addresses.

[*] The sheet uses an open-source Google Script that runs inside your own account and doesn’t share even a byte of data with anyone.

The email bounce report includes the email address that bounced, the reason why that email failed to deliver and the date when the bounce occurred. The spreadsheet will also have a direct link to the bounced message received from MAILER-DAEMON@google.com.

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The story, How to Generate a Report of Bounced Email Addresses in Gmail, was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 14/12/2016 under GMail, Internet.

An Undocumented Gmail Trick – Search Emails by Date and Time

Gmail supports a plethora of search operators to help you instantly find that elusive email message buried in your mailbox. You have size search – like larger_than:5mb – to find the big messages in your account. File search – like has:attachment filename:doc – will locate email messages that contain file attachments of specific types. This graphic illustrates all the known search operators that work both on Gmail and Google Inbox.

Date Search in Gmail

Date search in Gmail helps you locate emails sent or received in a specific period. Here are some examples:

• newer_than:7d from:me – Emails sent in the last 7 days
• after:2016/12/01 to:me – Emails received in the month of December 2016

Specify Time Modifiers in Gmail Search

Gmail also supports time-based searches allowing you to find emails in the specific hour, minute or second. For instance, you can limit your Gmail search to emails that were received between Dec 10 8:15 PM and Dec 10, 2016 8:45 PM.

To get started, convert the date and time to Epoch time and then use the timestamp with the standard after or before search operator of Gmail.

For instance, the Epoch time for Dec 10, 2016 8:15 PM is 1481381100 and the Epoch time for Dec 10, 2016 8:45 PM is 1481382900. Use the search query after:1481381100 before:1481382900 and you’ll get a list of all emails received during that 30-minute period.

Epoch time is the number of seconds that have elapsed since January 1, 1970 (UTC). Use the Epoch converter to represent a human readable date and time in Epoch and use that timestamp with the before or after search operator of Gmail to find that elusive email.

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The story, An Undocumented Gmail Trick – Search Emails by Date and Time, was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 13/12/2016 under GMail, Internet.

How to Receive Notifications for Google Forms on your Mobile Phone

The Email Notifications add-on for Google Forms will send you the form data in an email message each time a respondent submits your form. You can use the same add-on to also send automated emails to the form respondents immediately after they complete your Google Form.

The popular Google Forms add-on has been updated and it can now send push notifications to your mobile devices as well. That means when respondents complete and submit your online form, you’ll get an instant real-time notification (sample) on your iPhone or Android phone. The notification text can also include answers from the Google Form.

A fast response time is a key to success, especially in areas like customer service and closing sales leads, and mobile notifications will ensure that your important form entries are never lost in the daily deluge of emails.

Setup Mobile Notifications for Google Forms

It takes a few easy steps (video tutorial) to get up and running.

1. Install Email Notifications for Google Forms from the Google Add-on store.
2. Install the IFTTT mobile app on your Android or iOS device.

Next, we need to create a connection between our Google Form and the IFTTT app so that mobile notifications are triggered on the mobile phone immediately after the form is submitted.

1. Configure IFTTT

Open ifttt.com on your desktop and create a new applet. Choose the Maker service for if-this condition and set the Event name as the name of your Google Form. For if-this-then-that action, choose Notifications as the service and set the text as . Click Finish to make your IFTTT applet live.

2. Configure Google Forms

Open any Google Form, go to the Addons menu, choose Email Notifications and then select Mobile Notifications. Enter the Event name, the IFTTT key and the notification text. You can put any in the text and these will be replaced with actual values filled by the user.

That’s it. Click the Test button to test the connection between the form and your mobile phone. If it works, click Save to enable mobile notifications.

If you have multiple Google Forms, you need to create separate IFTTT applets for each form and the event name should be unique for each applet.

Internally, when someone submits your form, the Google Addon triggers and sends a web request to the IFTTT service which in turn pushes the notification to your mobile device.

Troubleshooting Mobile Notifications

• Ensure that your mobile is connected to the Internet.
• The event name in the applet should match the event name in the form configuration.
• You are logged into the IFTTT app on your mobile phone.
• Check the activity log to ensure that notifications are getting sent.
• If you are still facing any issue, contact support.

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The story, How to Receive Notifications for Google Forms on your Mobile Phone, was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 13/12/2016 under Android, Google Forms, IPhone, Internet.

Google Translate's 5000 Character Limit

For some reason, Google Translate now has a limit of 5000 characters per translation. There's even a character counter at the bottom of the input box. If you happen to paste a long text that has more than 5000 characters, you'll get an error message ("maximum characters exceeded: X characters over 5000 maximum") and a "translate more" option that lets you translate the rest of the text.

I don't understand the purpose of this restriction, considering that Google doesn't impose any limitation when translating web pages. It's worth pointing out that Google Translate's API has a similar limitation: "the maximum size of each text to be translated is 5000 characters, not including any HTML tags". Google's translation card from Google Search has a different limit: about 2800 characters.