New and improved Blogger mobile apps

Inspiration for a new post can happen at any place and time: on the couch, while shopping, at a game, or in the kitchen. Fortunately, mobile devices enable you to stay connected wherever you are.

With that in mind, we just launched updated apps for both Android and iOS. The updated apps include a visual facelift and other features which make it easier for you to create and share -- wherever your imagination runs wild. Some of the more notable improvements include:

• Landscape support for composing posts
• Sharing to Google+
• Ability to view a scheduled post time
• International support in 30+ languages
• iPad support

We hope you enjoy these improvements, and keep writing great blog content on the go.
Get Blogger in the Play store to get the latest on your Android phone or the App Store for iOS devices.

Check Your Gmail Stats using Gmail Meter

One day I was looking at how many messages I have in my sent mail, and realized there are a lot of things I wanted to know about my email habits. How much of my emails do I read, and do I reply fast enough? As luck would have it, Romain Vialard, a Google Apps Script Top Contributor, developed a tool called Gmail Meter powered by Google Apps Script.

Gmail Meter is an Apps Script which runs on the first day of every month and sends you an email containing different statistics about your Inbox. In a similar way to how recently introduced Google Account Activity gives key stats about how you’ve used your Google Account, Gmail Meter gives you different types of statistics that will help you analyze your Gmail habits.

• Volume Statistics show you the number of important and starred messages, the number of people who sent you emails, and more. Volume statistics can be very useful in determining how you are using email efficiency tools like Priority Inbox.

• Daily Traffic gives you an estimate of when you receive messages and when you send them during a given month. For example, in the graph below you can see how the peaks in my “Sent” curve indicates that I write emails in spurts.

• Traffic Pattern lets you get a sense of your overall email activity over the past week.

• Email Categories tells you how you are managing your Inbox. In the pie chart below, you can see that the majority of my emails are labeled. My Inbox is tiny compared to other labels which indicates that I keep a lean and mean Inbox.

• Time Before First Response shows you how long it takes you to reply, and how long it takes others to reply to you. By looking at this chart, I can infer that I reply faster than others I communicate with.

• Word Count tells you whether you are writing long emails. The example below shows that most of my emails are shorter than 200 words.

• Thread Lengths help you understand whether you participate in long conversations resulting in long threads.Top Senders and Top Recipients help you identify who you communicate with more frequently.

How to Setup Gmail Meter

It is easy to set up Gmail Meter. First, go to Google Docs and open a Spreadsheet. Click on Tools > Script Gallery. Search for “Gmail Meter” and click Install. You will now see a new menu item called Gmail Meter on your spreadsheet. Click on Gmail Meter > Get a Report. You can then choose the type of report. Preparing a report may take some time and you will get an email once the report is ready. If you would like to know more about how this script works, be sure to check this tutorial.

Learning about my email habits has helped me become more email efficient. So, before you read that next article on "Writing Effective Emails," be sure to learn more about your own email habits using Gmail Meter.

Google Docs in January: Styles, Sparklines, Google+ sharing, and more

One of the best things about working on web apps like Google Docs is that it gives us the flexibility to frequently bring you new features and improvements. Starting this month, we’re going to make some small changes to how we communicate what’s been happening in the world of Docs. Instead of writing blog posts for each and every minor update, we're going to try bundling them together monthly to give you a detailed overview of our favorite features and a short list of other notable changes to make sure you don't miss out on anything new.

On that note, we’ve got a bunch of new features that launched today, as well as some great things that improved over the month of January.

Customizable styles in documents
Giving your document consistent and beautiful formatting should be easy. Before today, if you wanted to update all the Subtitles in your document to look a particular way, you had to change each of them one at a time. That’s too many steps. Now you can restyle all your regular paragraphs, headings, or titles with just a couple clicks. For example, if you want to update all the Subtitles in your document to be a particular size, set one Subtitle to that size, select it, right click and choose Update Subtitle to match selection. This will change all the Subtitles already in your document and automatically update the style for any new Subtitles you create. Plus, with the new Options menu in the styles dropdown, you can set the current document’s styles as the default for new documents or you can load your default styles into the current document.

Sparklines in spreadsheets and more charting options
In Google spreadsheets, we’ve added more charting options and support for sparklines to make it easier to communicate data. The new options give you a bunch of tools to create more sophisticated charts including different Y-axes on either side of the chart, formatting options for the axis and title text, and all sorts of other customization for how your lines, bars, or pies are displayed. We’ve also added sparklines, which let you display line or bar charts inside of cells and are handy for presenting and comparing data in a simple, bite-sized way. In the example below, we’ve used sparklines to plot currency exchange rates over a 30-day period.

Sharing forms on Google+
Sharing the forms you create in Google Docs with the right people shouldn’t be a hassle. Today we added a Google+ share to the form editor so that you can share your forms directly with your circles with just a couple clicks.

And there’s more…
On top of today’s new features, here are some changes from January that you may have missed:

• Adding images to your docs from a high quality stock photo gallery. Simply go to Insert > Image, select Stock photos, and then search for the images that you want.

• A more streamlined format for document discussion notifications that batches multiple discussions into a single email.
• Quickly opening and selecting items from specific menus with keyboard accelerators. For example, when using Google Chrome, Ctrl+Option+E on a Mac and Alt+E on Windows or Linux will open the Edit menu.

• Copying and pasting via the context (right click) menu in documents when you have the Chrome App installed.
• Easily adding Google drawings or Google Groups discussions to a Google Site from the Insert menu.

• Progress bars while uploading files to Google Sites.
• Searching for text inside of PDFs in your documents list using Optical Character Recognition.

If you’d like to learn more about what we’ve been up to in January, I’ll be doing a Hangout On Air later this week this to talk about these changes and listen to your feedback. Stop by our Community Manager Teresa’s Google+ page on Thursday, February 9 at 12 p.m. EST (Pakistan Time 10 p.m)  to tune in.

How to change the display font size in Gmail?

Change the display font size using your browser's keyboard shortcuts. Hold down Ctrl or Cmd, and press + to make the font bigger, - to make it smaller, and 0 to return to normal.

If you've ever accidentally changed your font size, Ctrl/Cmd + 0 is especially useful!

Watch this video guide.

Announcing the Blogger app for iOS

Today we’re excited to announce the new Blogger app for iOS. With the Blogger app, you can write a new blog post and publish it immediately or save it as a draft right from your iOS device. You can also open a blog post you've been working on from your computer and continue editing it while you're on-the-go. Your blog posts are automatically synced across devices, so you’ll always have access to the latest version.

Pictures are worth a thousand words, and the Blogger app makes it easy to add photos either by choosing from the gallery or taking a new photo right within the app. You can also add labels and location to provide more details about the post.



Download the Blogger app today for iOS versions 3.2 and above in the App Store. Although the user interface is only available in English at this time, the app supports blog posts written in all languages. If you’re using an Android-powered device, you can download the Blogger app for Android from the Android Market.

Google Apps for Education mailbox sizes are growing

We’re increasing Gmail storage for our Google Apps for Education users from 7 GB to 25 GB.

Editions included:
Google Apps for Education

Languages included:
All languages supported by Gmail

How to access what's new:
Starting next week, new schools that migrate to Google Apps for Education will receive 25 GB mailboxes. Existing accounts will see their storage size increase over the next few weeks.

Mobile editing in 45 languages, printing in spreadsheets

Last year, we launched mobile editing in English and more page sizes in Google documents. We’re excited to announce that we’ve expanded on both of these features this week by adding 44 more mobile editing languages and more print sizes to Google spreadsheets.

Mobile editing now in 45 languages
You can now edit your documents on the go in 45 languages on Android with Froyo (version 2.2) and on iOS devices (version 3.0+) including the iPad. Learn more at mobile.google.com/docs.

More print sizes
Following in the footsteps of last week’s hide gridlines update, there are now eight more print sizesin Google spreadsheets, including tabloid, statement, executive, folio and A3, A5, B4 and B5.

As always, feedback in the comments and on the forums is appreciated.