Google Docs added a cool new feature that lets you select all the text with similar formatting, so you can quickly make some changes. It's like "find and replace" for formatting.

For example, you can right-click a word from a text that uses the "Heading 1" style, click "select all matching text" and change the style to "Heading 2". Unlike Microsoft Word, Google Docs doesn't select the text that has additional formatting applied over a style.



"Clicking Select all matching text will look for parts of your document that match your selection's text style — its font, font weight, size, color, and whether it's been bolded, italicized, or underlined, or struck-through. It will not take into account paragraph styles, such as line spacing or alignment," explains Google.

Now it's time for Google to add "paste and match", which lets you paste some text without having to worry about formatting. Now you need to use the "paint format" button.

{ via Google Drive Blog }

Sometimes web apps are better than native apps because they can be constantly updated and users always have the latest version. Google still hasn't released a native Google Maps app for iOS, but it has improved the mobile web app by adding support for street view. Now the Google Maps web app has all the features from Apple's old maps, even if the performance is inferior.

"With access to Street View on your phone, you can use panoramic, street-level imagery to explore and navigate the places around you, even on the go," informs Google. Obviously, Street View for mobile browsers uses SVG and HTML5, not Flash.



If you've updated an iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad to iOS 6, open maps.google.com in Safari, tap the arrow icon and then "add to home screen". Now you can open Google Maps from the home screen, search for local business, get directions, switch to the satellite view or open your personalized maps. Google has constantly improved the maps service in the past 7 years, so Apple has a lot to catch up.

The Google Maps web app is not new, but it will be used a lot more, now that Google Maps links no longer send users to the built-in maps app and open in the browser.

Adding a phone number to a Google account is not always required, but even if you can get away without adding one, Google will periodically ask you to verify your account when you log in. It's just a security feature that discourages spammers from creating a lot of Gmail accounts, but it's still annoying.

"In an effort to protect our users from abuse, we sometimes ask users to verify their identity before they're able to create or sign into accounts. Requiring proof of identification via phone is an effective way to keep spammers from abusing our systems," informs Google.

Now when you create a Gmail account, there's a new option that lets you skip the CAPTCHA: "skip this verification (phone verification may be required)".


After enabling this option, Google asked me to verify the account by sending a text message or making an automated call.


Just because you don't skip the CAPTCHA doesn't mean that Google won't ask for your phone number. I've tested this and Google asked me to verify an account even after solving the CAPTCHA.

It's interesting to notice that Google's wording is "phone verification may be required", which means that it's not always required. A few years ago, phone verification was limited to a small number of countries, but now it's widespread.

Google still asks you to create a Gmail account when you sign up from Google.com, Google Image Search, Google Translate, Gmail, Google Play and Google+, but you can create a Google account using a non-Gmail email address from other Google services like Google Maps, Google Calendar or Google Drive.

{ Thanks, Herin. }

YouTube lets you download the videos you've uploaded to the service, but the feature has a lot of limitations. "You can download MP4s of your own uploads, so as long as they do not have any copyrighted content or an audio track added through the Audio tool." But that's not all: "there is a limit of two downloads per hour for downloading your video to MP4. The Download MP4 button will not appear next to your videos if you've already downloaded two videos in an hour."


The limitations are absurd, considering that they are your videos and you've uploaded them. There are many services and apps that let you download any YouTube video, but they break YouTube's terms of services.

Fortunately, Google's Data Liberation launched a much better feature in Google Takeout: download the original videos you've uploaded to YouTube with one click. That's right, no more limitations, you can download all your videos and it's the only way to get the original versions, not the videos transcoded by YouTube. "No transcoding or transformation - you'll get exactly the same videos that you first uploaded. Your videos in. Your videos out," explains Google.


Hopefully YouTube doesn't find out about this feature and cripple it with some preposterous limitations.

{ Thanks, Herin. }

Gmail has constantly improved its search technology, but there's something you couldn't do until recently: search inside attachments. Sure, you could find an attachment if you knew the filename or some keywords from the message. If someone sent you a text file or an HTML file, Gmail indexed its content, but Gmail couldn't index PDF files, Word documents, PowerPoint presentations and other popular attachment formats.

The good news is that Gmail has finally added support for searching inside attachments. I've just tested this feature for .pdf files, .doc documents, .ppt presentations and it works, even though some old attachments may not be indexed yet.

To find messages that have attachments, search for has:attachment and add some keywords to your query. To restrict your search to PDF files, search for has:attachment filename:pdf.


As you can see from the screenshot, Gmail found a message with no text in the body and no subject. Obviously, Gmail indexed the PowerPoint attachment.

{ Thanks, Kenny. }

Google Trends is one of the small services that haven't been discontinued by Google. It uses data from Google search to show information about the popularity a query. A few years ago, Google also launched a more advanced version of Google Trends called Insights for Search and now the two services have been merged.


"We've updated the line chart and map using HTML5 based Google Chart Tools so you can now load the page on your mobile devices, visualize the results without scrolling, and get Hot Searches not just for the U.S., but also India, Japan, and Singapore," informs Google.

There are some casualties: Google Trends for Websites is no longer available, headlines are no longer displayed next to the chart (you can still find them when you mouse over the chart). Basically, the new Google Trends is a simplified version of Insights for Search, so you'll see many cool features like predictions, comparing locations and time ranges, finding the most popular queries from a region, restricting results to a category or a date range, checking results from specialized search engines like Image Search, Google News or Google Shopping.

CardDav is an open standard for syncing contacts and it's closely related to CalDAV, a standard for synchronizing calendars. Google Calendar already supports CalDAV and now it's time for Google Contacts to add support for CardDAV.

If you have an iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad and you want to sync your data with a Google Account, you probably select "Gmail" from the list of accounts and you're disappointed to find out that you can only sync your mail, calendar and notes, not to mention that there's no push support. What about your contacts? A better option is to add a new account that uses Microsoft Exchange to sync. You can also manually add a CardDav account using these instructions, assuming that your device uses iOS 5 or iOS 6. If you need push support, the only option is to use Exchange.


"By supporting IMAP, CalDAV, and CardDAV together, we're making it possible for 3rd parties to build a seamless Google Account sync experience," says Google. There are many applications and services that support CardDav: Apple's Address Book from Mac OS X, Atmail, CardDAV-Sync for Android, Apple's iOS.

YouTube tests yet another interface and this time it's both for the homepage and the video pages. For the first time, Google's navigation bar is added to YouTube. The sidebar from the previous experiment includes some options that used to be placed at the top of the page and used to be persistent. Now you have to click "My subscriptions" every time you go to YouTube's homepage if you want to remove reccomendations.

The upload button now has a drop-down that lets you go to the video manager and the analytics section, while the browse button has been removed. You can no longer go to the "inbox" from the homepage. When you click the button next to your Google Profile avatar (which is also new), YouTube sends you to the settings page, where there's a tab for the inbox.



Video pages have a button that toggles the sidebar, so you can quickly access the feed, your subscriptions, the history and other sections without having to visit the homepage. It's interesting to notice that most YouTube sections have a consistent feed-like interface, whether they're displaying videos from your subscriptions, recommendations, playlists or your history.



Here's how you can try the new interface. If you use Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Safari or Internet Explorer 8+:

1. open youtube.com in a new tab

2. load your browser's developer console:

* Chrome - press Ctrl+Shift+J for Windows/Linux/ChromeOS or Command-Option-J for Mac

* Firefox - press Ctrl+Shift+K for Windows/Linux or Command-Option-K for Mac

* Opera - press Ctrl+Shift+I for Windows/Linux or Command-Option-I for Mac, then click "Console"

* Safari - check this article

* Internet Explorer - press F12 and select the "Console" tab.

3. paste the following code which changes a YouTube cookie:

document.cookie="VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE=vSPn-CmshUU; path=/; domain=.youtube.com";window.location.reload();

4. press Enter and close the console.

You can also check the previous UI experiments for the homepage and "watch" pages.

Update (December 7, 2012): The new interface is available for everyone and you can no longer go back to the old layout.

{ Thanks, Pascal. }

Google Docs changed the Microsoft Office format for exporting documents and switched to Office Open XML. "The built-in exporting feature from Google Docs to Microsoft Office will now allow users to download Google documents as modern Office formats (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx), as opposed to the older formats (.doc, .xls, .ppt) that were standard in Office 97-2003. For users who still use Office 97-2003, we recommend installing the free compatibility plugin from Microsoft, which will allow them to open modern Office file types," informs Google. The same feature will be added to Google Apps on October 1st.


Google Docs can still import Office 97-2003 files, so it's not clear why the modern Office formats weren't included as an additional optional in the "download as" menu. For some reason, if you use the "email as attachment" feature and select "Microsoft Word/Excel/Powerpoint", you can still get the old formats.

The Register predicts that a lot of business users will complain. "The move is troublesome not only for stick-in-the-muds who haven't upgraded their Office installs: it's perfectly feasible that much of a large business' corporate memory will be in the old binary formats (along with spreadsheets containing large, custom macros that nobody's rewritten in the newer versions yet)." Google Docs will continue to import existing files and there's a compatibility pack for old Office versions, but that doesn't mean corporate users won't complain.

And now, back to our regularly scheduled programming. It may seem counterintuitive, but sometimes web apps are better than native apps. Now that browsers are so advanced and powerful, web apps can integrate with the operating system, are fast and easy to update.

Take the new YouTube app for iOS. Now that Apple removed the YouTube app from iOS 6, Google had to develop its own app for YouTube. The application looks just like the YouTube for Android, but it doesn't properly integrate with the operating system. It doesn't support AirPlay, so you can't redirect videos to on an Apple TV or a computer. You can't close the YouTube app and continue playing videos in the background, which is especially useful for music videos. The new YouTube app doesn't let you switch to the low-quality video flavor, which is better suited for slow Internet connections.


Perhaps the most annoying issue is that the YouTube app doesn't buffer the video when you pause it and the unused buffer is discarded when you close the app. Let's say you start watching a 10-minute video and you close the app after 3 minutes (for example, you get a phone call). Even if the video has been completely buffered, the YouTube app will download it again once you go back and tap the "play" button. The same thing happens when you open the Notification Center or double-click the Home button.

What if you're trying to find a video and you enter multiple queries? How do you go back to the start page? Just the tap the "back" arrow for each query you've typed. That's really annoying.

What if you want to see the most popular YouTube videos today and you're signed in to your Google account? Just scroll the entire list of subscriptions from the sidebar and you can finally see the "popular" section.

Surprisingly, none of these issues happen in YouTube's mobile web app available at m.youtube.com. Sure, the web app doesn't look so polished and you can't read the comments while watching a video (you're not missing too much), but it works pretty well. Google will probably fix these issues in the future releases, but for now YouTube's mobile site is better.


And speaking of mobile apps, if you have an iPhone 5 or you've updated an iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad to iOS 6, it's worth trying the mobile Google Maps available at maps.google.com and even adding a shortcut to the home screen. Google takes its time developing the Google Maps app for iOS.