Changing e-mail address for Google Apps user

Now it is possible to change an existing Google Apps user email address (administrator included). I am not talking about nickname, but about real renaming (thus, it will also work for login). It works with standard edition too.

Kudos to Google Apps France for the finding.

Google docs features

This is probably incomplete. Input welcome!

However harsh I may appear by time, let me be clear: this is the most powerful web editor I know. I am very demanding (I am a certified Word specialist as well as a typography connoisseur) and well aware of Google Docs’s shortcoming, but still I am very impressed. There is still room to grow, but most people won't even use half of present-day features.

I won't do the same for Spreadsheet, as I don't know it well enough.

Basic features

• Auto-saving
• Cancel/redo
• Limited formatting: non-customisable style, frustratingly basic templating, bold/italic/underline, strike-through, superscript and subscript, left/right/center/justify, nested listing (now with hybrid ordered/unordered), line-height (limited), paragraph spacing (limited)
• Webfonts (limited choice, no advanced typography settings like swashes, alternate letters or ligatures; Word or Textedit lovers, be on your way.
• Insert link, anchor, drawing, image, footnote, special characters (impressive), horizontal line (buggy with table of contents, though), visible page break, table of contents (awkwardly customisable), header, footnotes
• Search/replace (limited: the only option is case-sensitiveness—way below Word)
• Table (up to 20×20 cells quick creation, unlimited after)

Printing

• Native printing. Nor more PDF in-between. Ctr+PCmd+P supported (which means you cannot print the HTML page of the Google Docs—you can only print the doc itself, but I don't see any use for this anyway)
• Visible pagination (can print pages numbers too)
• A4, Executive,…
• Laandscape or portrait
• Background color (won’t be printed, though)

Import/export

• Import: Word (ODF too?), picture (OCR), unconverted Word (with a previewer; not that faithful)
• Export: ODT, PDF, RTF, text, Word, HTML

Localisation

• Language selection (for spellchecking and translation)
• Translate document
• Personal dictionary
• Customisable character replacement ((c) => ©)

Collaboration

Going Wave!

• Live commenting (impressive) with mail alerts and @mentions
• Real-time collaboration
• Advanced access control
• Revisions

Layout

• Ruler
• Indent/outdent
• Freefloating pictures

Others

• Equation (not calculation; just writing; LaTeX alternative, MathML?)
• Completely full screen possible (browser full screen + hide ruler + two time hide command + hide warning bar). WriteRoom beware!
• Statistics (word counting, signs counting)

Regrets

• Still no offline browsing :(

Shared contacts in Google Apps: I finally understood

I keep reading that Google Apps allows shared contacts and that it does not allow shared contacts? Why two opposite statements?

Because its sharing is not what most people expect when talking about sharing.

What you can share is the list of users in your domain. Not the list of partners/clients/prospects. And this is what most people (me included) expect.

Shared contacts, but not shared addressbook. And this is deeply annoying. This is the number one feature request for Google Apps (closed, read-only survey, sorry). Hopefully, someone at Google will investigate upon this.

Gmail and label colours

Checked today: when applying a colour to a label and its sub-label, colour only apply to already-existing sub-labels. If you create a new label later on, it won't have any colour, you will have to update it manually.

Depending on cases and people, it may be a feature or a limitation (for me, it is a limitation).

Mail features that Gmail doesn't support (yet)

• Recipient-based mail formatting. Your boss wants you to attach an nice signature, but you hate HTML. With offline clients (Thunderbird, Outlook…), you can decide to reply with HTML for a given contact and with plain text for others
• Sender-based recipient address. You have configured two addresses for sending: me@home.org (default) and me@work.com. Way too often, you accidentally send a professional email with your personal address. The only known software I know which can prevent this is the incredibly-powerful-but-scaringly-CLI mutt (and the even more powerful mutt-ng)

Want them? Ask for them!
Template:

Recipient-based mail formatting. See http://goo.gl/yyR6Z

Sender-based recipient address. See http://goo.gl/yyR6Z

On Google Contacts

When entering a new contact’s email address, Google will automatically scan its database to check if this user has a public profile with a picture. If s/he does, then it will be displayed on the contact entry. Neat!

This picture won’t show up as a thumbnail in list view, though.

Selecting a date range with Calendar

This will later be part of a longer chapter about Calendar. For now, it will be a standalone post without any introduction to Calendar — this will come later.
It is possible to select an arbitrary date range with calendar, as shown here.

Three days

Two weeks

Just a limitation: after more than seven days in a row, Google Calendar switches to week selection. Which means that after 7 days comes not only 14 days, but also Monday to Sunday (or Sunday to Monday, depending on your locales). And that you can’t have a ten-days calendars.

Utilities — available storage space

Google Accounts — Manage Storage. Unified page for all of your storage (at least Gmail and Picasa—I don't see Google Docs, why so?)