Tag Archives: G Suite

Unlocking G Suite for Nonprofits: Improve internal workflow and communication

Whether you have a team of five or 500 a seamless, collaborative workflow is critical in the digital age. Our goal is to make sure that your nonprofit is able to focus on changing the world by using technology to save time -- not waste it. In the digital age though, information sharing can often be complex; your team might not work in the same office, or even the same timezone. Some team members might be in an office with computer access, while others are in the field on mobile devices. Who from your team should be able to access confidential documents?

This brings us to a key question: How do you empower team members to work together towards a common goal, and use technology to enable it?

Great question. We’d like to introduce you to G Suite - (formerly  Google Apps for Work ). G Suite aims to help teams work together in real-time -- no matter where they are in the world.

Today, we’re spotlighting a few nonprofits to share how their teams  are using Google tools and apps to improve workflow and internal communication.

Mercy Beyond Borders - Internal Communication with Sheets & Sites

Mercy Beyond Borders (MBB) is a U.S. nonprofit that aims to forge opportunities for women and girls in extreme poverty to learn, connect, and lead. Utilizing a small office in the U.S. as home base, MBB targets rural areas in Haiti and South Sudan. In both of these areas, cultural norms and poverty prohibit full participation of women. In fact, these areas offer minimal education and opportunities for employment, which often  impedes the development of leadership skills or positions. Mercy Beyond Borders focuses its programs on providing trainings, scholarships, leadership camps, and business loans for women.

To achieve their mission, Mercy Beyond Borders faces the challenge of balancing US-based operations with field work in remote areas like South Sudan and Haiti. Their nonprofit partners range from large organizations to local schools to individuals. So how does Mercy Beyond Borders ensure that all staff, vendors, and partners stay connected and working together in sync?
MBB-trained nurse in South-Sudan village
MBB-trained nurse in South Sudan village. Photo credit: Mercy Beyond Borders

Mercy Beyond Border began using G Suite to streamline its workflow, connecting their team across the globe. Using G Suite, MBB’s team is able to access, share, and collaborate together in real-time. Take a glimpse into how they do it:

  • Track Finances: MBB manages their overseas program budget expenditures in Google Sheets. Using this tool, the domestic office tracks monthly vendor payments in Haiti. This enables the staff to wire more money as needed in order to ensure program success. Additionally, using Sheets enables the team to provide transparency in the organization, clarifying spending and creating a simple overview of total annual expenses. This standardized and collaborative approach to data enables better efficiency and communication between domestic and international offices.

  • Store images: Mercy Beyond Borders regularly takes photos in the field to keep the domestic office up to date on progress and communicate stories to their donors. The team overseas is able to upload the pictures to Google Drive, which allows them to share or retrieve the images at any time.

  • Share Information: It’s imperative that MBB shares frequent updates with the Board of Directors, highlighting current developments, areas for growth, and new opportunities. To keep the Board of Directors apprised of progress, the team created a MBB Board website with Google Sites as a way to provide updates outside of meetings. The site functions as a central hub, where the Board can find all relevant information and resources at their discretion. The website is organized in subsections including internal updates from the Executive Director, background articles on country conditions and descriptions of new partnerships. To take it one step further, MBB also added a comment section for board members to engage in open communication.

“It [G Suite] helps to better connect, engage, and keep Board members up-to-date in between meetings, or  if they are unable to make a meeting (in which case they can view the Meeting Archives page),” said Adrienne Perez.


MyFace - Increasing productivity and improving internal workflow by remote access

Established in 1951, MyFace was founded to address the medical, surgical and psychological needs of those living with facial deformities. The organization offers access to care and treatments --- regardless of the severity of the anomaly, the length of treatment, or the family’s ability to afford care. In America alone, 1 in 650 children is born with an facial cleft. Every year, MyFace helps more than 1,000 patients seek treatment. Of this population, 85% are children, 70% live in poverty, and 95% require long-term care. The costs involved in this are high and verges on insurmountable for low income families. With this in mind, MyFace ensures that all children receive highest quality interdisciplinary and comprehensive reconstructive care by doctors who provide their services pro bono.

As a small nonprofit (their staff of eight including their therapy dog, Bentley), employees are required to perform a variety of different tasks. On any given day, team members might be responsible for website design, grant proposal writing, and marketing strategy. And oftentimes, what one employee starts today is  picked up by another employee tomorrow. Because it’s often all-hands-on-deck, collaboration is particularly key for MyFace.

Our mission of changing faces and transforming lives can be fulfilled with the help of technology from G4NP Carolyn Spector Executive Director MyFace

To address their challenge, MyFace began using Google Drive to centrally store, access, and share information from anywhere at anytime. Drive helped decrease the amount of time that MyFace spends on administrative tasks, like sending documents back and forth or working with out-of-date data or information. Drive’s tools like Docs and Sheets enable the team to collaborate both in and out of office.

MyFace also deals with an overwhelming amount of data and information. The team needs this data to not only be easy to store, retrieve, and share — it needs to be secure, since it contains confidential and personal patient information. G Suite offers that as well, ensuring that all information is kept private and secure. (Want to know more about G Suite security and how safe they really are? Read more about it here).

“Our mission of changing faces and transforming lives can be fulfilled with the help of technology from G4NP because it offers invaluable resources to nonprofits of any size at no cost,” stated Carolyn Spector, Executive Director of MyFace.

MyFace Staff photo
MyFace team. Photo credit: MyFace

Having global teams of different sizes with varying access to technology can make timely communication difficult, if not impossible. While nonprofits like Mercy Beyond Borders and myFace strive to accomplish unique missions, both organizations are passionate about changing the world. And about using the right technology to help. Utilizing tools like G Suite has been key for nonprofits like these in order to improve internal workflow and communications. For Mercy and my Face, making information shared, up-to-date, and secure has been crucial for navigating the Technology Age.

Interested in learning more about the tools available to your nonprofit? Check out our website to see how G4NP can help your nonprofit with real-time, up-to-date communication and data sharing.

//

To see if your nonprofit is eligible to participate, review the Google for Nonprofits eligibility guidelines. Google for Nonprofits offers organizations like yours free access to Google tools like Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Drive, Google Ad Grants, YouTube for Nonprofits and more. These tools can help you reach new donors and volunteers, work more efficiently, and tell your nonprofit’s story. Learn more and enroll here.

Footnote:  Statements are provided by Nonprofits that received free products as part of the Google for Nonprofits program, which offers free products to qualified nonprofits.

Source: Google Cloud


Unlocking G Suite for Nonprofits: Improve internal workflow and communication

Whether you have a team of five or 500 a seamless, collaborative workflow is critical in the digital age. Our goal is to make sure that your nonprofit is able to focus on changing the world by using technology to save time -- not waste it. In the digital age though, information sharing can often be complex; your team might not work in the same office, or even the same timezone. Some team members might be in an office with computer access, while others are in the field on mobile devices. Who from your team should be able to access confidential documents?

This brings us to a key question: How do you empower team members to work together towards a common goal, and use technology to enable it?

Great question. We’d like to introduce you to G Suite - (formerly  Google Apps for Work ). G Suite aims to help teams work together in real-time -- no matter where they are in the world.

Today, we’re spotlighting a few nonprofits to share how their teams  are using Google tools and apps to improve workflow and internal communication.

Mercy Beyond Borders - Internal Communication with Sheets & Sites

Mercy Beyond Borders (MBB) is a U.S. nonprofit that aims to forge opportunities for women and girls in extreme poverty to learn, connect, and lead. Utilizing a small office in the U.S. as home base, MBB targets rural areas in Haiti and South Sudan. In both of these areas, cultural norms and poverty prohibit full participation of women. In fact, these areas offer minimal education and opportunities for employment, which often  impedes the development of leadership skills or positions. Mercy Beyond Borders focuses its programs on providing trainings, scholarships, leadership camps, and business loans for women.

To achieve their mission, Mercy Beyond Borders faces the challenge of balancing US-based operations with field work in remote areas like South Sudan and Haiti. Their nonprofit partners range from large organizations to local schools to individuals. So how does Mercy Beyond Borders ensure that all staff, vendors, and partners stay connected and working together in sync?
MBB-trained nurse in South-Sudan village
MBB-trained nurse in South Sudan village. Photo credit: Mercy Beyond Borders

Mercy Beyond Border began using G Suite to streamline its workflow, connecting their team across the globe. Using G Suite, MBB’s team is able to access, share, and collaborate together in real-time. Take a glimpse into how they do it:

  • Track Finances: MBB manages their overseas program budget expenditures in Google Sheets. Using this tool, the domestic office tracks monthly vendor payments in Haiti. This enables the staff to wire more money as needed in order to ensure program success. Additionally, using Sheets enables the team to provide transparency in the organization, clarifying spending and creating a simple overview of total annual expenses. This standardized and collaborative approach to data enables better efficiency and communication between domestic and international offices.

  • Store images: Mercy Beyond Borders regularly takes photos in the field to keep the domestic office up to date on progress and communicate stories to their donors. The team overseas is able to upload the pictures to Google Drive, which allows them to share or retrieve the images at any time.

  • Share Information: It’s imperative that MBB shares frequent updates with the Board of Directors, highlighting current developments, areas for growth, and new opportunities. To keep the Board of Directors apprised of progress, the team created a MBB Board website with Google Sites as a way to provide updates outside of meetings. The site functions as a central hub, where the Board can find all relevant information and resources at their discretion. The website is organized in subsections including internal updates from the Executive Director, background articles on country conditions and descriptions of new partnerships. To take it one step further, MBB also added a comment section for board members to engage in open communication.

“It [G Suite] helps to better connect, engage, and keep Board members up-to-date in between meetings, or  if they are unable to make a meeting (in which case they can view the Meeting Archives page),” said Adrienne Perez.


MyFace - Increasing productivity and improving internal workflow by remote access

Established in 1951, MyFace was founded to address the medical, surgical and psychological needs of those living with facial deformities. The organization offers access to care and treatments --- regardless of the severity of the anomaly, the length of treatment, or the family’s ability to afford care. In America alone, 1 in 650 children is born with an facial cleft. Every year, MyFace helps more than 1,000 patients seek treatment. Of this population, 85% are children, 70% live in poverty, and 95% require long-term care. The costs involved in this are high and verges on insurmountable for low income families. With this in mind, MyFace ensures that all children receive highest quality interdisciplinary and comprehensive reconstructive care by doctors who provide their services pro bono.

As a small nonprofit (their staff of eight including their therapy dog, Bentley), employees are required to perform a variety of different tasks. On any given day, team members might be responsible for website design, grant proposal writing, and marketing strategy. And oftentimes, what one employee starts today is  picked up by another employee tomorrow. Because it’s often all-hands-on-deck, collaboration is particularly key for MyFace.

Our mission of changing faces and transforming lives can be fulfilled with the help of technology from G4NP Carolyn Spector
Executive Director MyFace

To address their challenge, MyFace began using Google Drive to centrally store, access, and share information from anywhere at anytime. Drive helped decrease the amount of time that MyFace spends on administrative tasks, like sending documents back and forth or working with out-of-date data or information. Drive’s tools like Docs and Sheets enable the team to collaborate both in and out of office.

MyFace also deals with an overwhelming amount of data and information. The team needs this data to not only be easy to store, retrieve, and share — it needs to be secure, since it contains confidential and personal patient information. G Suite offers that as well, ensuring that all information is kept private and secure. (Want to know more about G Suite security and how safe they really are? Read more about it here).

“Our mission of changing faces and transforming lives can be fulfilled with the help of technology from G4NP because it offers invaluable resources to nonprofits of any size at no cost,” stated Carolyn Spector, Executive Director of MyFace.

Having global teams of different sizes with varying access to technology can make timely communication difficult, if not impossible. While nonprofits like Mercy Beyond Borders and myFace strive to accomplish unique missions, both organizations are passionate about changing the world. And about using the right technology to help. Utilizing tools like G Suite has been key for nonprofits like these in order to improve internal workflow and communications. For Mercy and my Face, making information shared, up-to-date, and secure has been crucial for navigating the Technology Age.

Interested in learning more about the tools available to your nonprofit? Check out our website to see how G4NP can help your nonprofit with real-time, up-to-date communication and data sharing.

//

To see if your nonprofit is eligible to participate, review the Google for Nonprofits eligibility guidelines. Google for Nonprofits offers organizations like yours free access to Google tools like Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Drive, Google Ad Grants, YouTube for Nonprofits and more. These tools can help you reach new donors and volunteers, work more efficiently, and tell your nonprofit’s story. Learn more and enroll here.

Footnote:  Statements are provided by Nonprofits that received free products as part of the Google for Nonprofits program, which offers free products to qualified nonprofits.

Keep calm and collaborate on: how UK businesses connect remote workers with G Suite and GCP

G Suite helps businesses stay connected from all over the globe. Here are a few examples of Google Cloud customers who are using G Suite to collaborate, increase productivity, and drive efficiency, no matter where they are.

Customers stock their fridges easier with Morrisons, G Suite, and Google Cloud Platform

Eleven million customers trust Morrisons, a leading UK supermarket, to provide quality food at affordable prices each week. With 120,000 staff nationwide across more than 500 sites, good communication is crucial.  G Suite helps Morrisons connect every member of their team affordably, whether they’re picking stock in a warehouse or serving customers in store.

Morrisons used to print half a million sheets of paper every week and file them in over 3,000 filing cabinets in order to fulfill compliance requirements. Now, with collaboration in Docs and rapid information collection with Forms, they've reduced paperwork. Outside the office, staff have replaced clunky VPNs and outdated handheld devices with G Suite, which can work on any device. And with Google’s intuitive administrative tools, local managers can set up new accounts in three minutes instead of five to ten days.

Instead of shared logins, all employees have a G Suite account, and Google+ brings these colleagues from across the company together to share tips and advice.  Morrisons also improves services based on customer feedback collected by shop floor staff that use apps on mobile devices.

1

Remote researchers with the UK Department of Health collaborate with G Suite to solve global health concerns

Approximately 600,000 patients between 2014-2015 participated in studies with the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR), a part of the the UK Government’s Department of Health. Whether NIHR researchers are investigating to see if nuts can cure nut allergies or testing the effectiveness of schizophrenia medication, every one of their projects is different in its size, duration, and location. This means they need to cater to a fluctuating roster of around 6,500 remote researchers on top of 2,000 core organizational staff.  

With G Suite, NIHR has cut their IT system costs approximately in half compared to their previous system and have also saved an estimated several million pounds using Hangouts to replace travel.

Each team member uses Gmail instead of disparate email addresses or aliases like before. They use Google+ as a corporate broadcast tool to reach all of their users with news and advice.

They also can work from any device with peace of mind knowing that their data will stay secure with appropriate security permissions no matter where they designate their “lab” for a day. Since the team switched to G Suite four years ago, they’ve yet to experience a loss of service or data.

NIHR researchers integrate G Suite with the vast array of systems. Some use Awesome Table to plan diaries and manage processes, and others use G Suite and Maps to create heat maps from source data to assist in research.

2

Travis Perkins uses G Suite and Chromebooks to build the UK’s future infrastructure

Travis Perkins plc is the UK’s leading building merchant and largest supplier to the construction market. The company’s IT team of four uses G Suite to help their 30,000 colleagues optimize their work day.

Coordinating 2,000 building supply branches, home improvement stores and suppliers is a major challenge, and G Suite tools encourage creativity among employees in central offices and on the warehouse floor by showcasing these new user-led solutions.

For example, customers often arrive in store with a brick they want to match, and by photographing the brick and uploading the photo to Google+, masonry experts across the country can pool their knowledge and suggest solutions right away.

The company also built a new intranet on G Suite, which combines Calendar, Gmail, Drive and Sites for its employees. Travis Perkins staff use this tool to present tasks, deadlines, performance reviews, status of colleagues, calendar reminders and Hangout links where a team can jump into a meeting — all from one screen. Based in the cloud, the directory is available on mobile and is easy to access and update. With cost-effective Chromebooks and Google’s web-based system in warehouses and stores, Travis Perkins is helping unleash the talent and skills of everyone on their team.

travis perkins quote card

To learn more about how your team can collaborate with G Suite, check out: https://gsuite.google.com/together/.

Source: Google Cloud


Keep calm and collaborate on: how UK businesses connect remote workers with G Suite and GCP

G Suite helps businesses stay connected from all over the globe. Here are a few examples of Google Cloud customers who are using G Suite to collaborate, increase productivity, and drive efficiency, no matter where they are.

Customers stock their fridges easier with Morrisons, G Suite, and Google Cloud Platform

Eleven million customers trust Morrisons, a leading UK supermarket, to provide quality food at affordable prices each week. With 120,000 staff nationwide across more than 500 sites, good communication is crucial.  G Suite helps Morrisons connect every member of their team affordably, whether they’re picking stock in a warehouse or serving customers in store.

Morrisons used to print half a million sheets of paper every week and file them in over 3,000 filing cabinets in order to fulfill compliance requirements. Now, with collaboration in Docs and rapid information collection with Forms, they've reduced paperwork. Outside the office, staff have replaced clunky VPNs and outdated handheld devices with G Suite, which can work on any device. And with Google’s intuitive administrative tools, local managers can set up new accounts in three minutes instead of five to ten days.

Instead of shared logins, all employees have a G Suite account, and Google+ brings these colleagues from across the company together to share tips and advice.  Morrisons also improves services based on customer feedback collected by shop floor staff that use apps on mobile devices.

1

Remote researchers with the UK Department of Health collaborate with G Suite to solve global health concerns

Approximately 600,000 patients between 2014-2015 participated in studies with the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR), a part of the the UK Government’s Department of Health. Whether NIHR researchers are investigating to see if nuts can cure nut allergies or testing the effectiveness of schizophrenia medication, every one of their projects is different in its size, duration, and location. This means they need to cater to a fluctuating roster of around 6,500 remote researchers on top of 2,000 core organizational staff.  

With G Suite, NIHR has cut their IT system costs approximately in half compared to their previous system and have also saved an estimated several million pounds using Hangouts to replace travel.

Each team member uses Gmail instead of disparate email addresses or aliases like before. They use Google+ as a corporate broadcast tool to reach all of their users with news and advice.

They also can work from any device with peace of mind knowing that their data will stay secure with appropriate security permissions no matter where they designate their “lab” for a day. Since the team switched to G Suite four years ago, they’ve yet to experience a loss of service or data.

NIHR researchers integrate G Suite with the vast array of systems. Some use Awesome Table to plan diaries and manage processes, and others use G Suite and Maps to create heat maps from source data to assist in research.

2

Travis Perkins uses G Suite and Chromebooks to build the UK’s future infrastructure

Travis Perkins plc is the UK’s leading building merchant and largest supplier to the construction market. The company’s IT team of four uses G Suite to help their 30,000 colleagues optimize their work day.

Coordinating 2,000 building supply branches, home improvement stores and suppliers is a major challenge, and G Suite tools encourage creativity among employees in central offices and on the warehouse floor by showcasing these new user-led solutions.

For example, customers often arrive in store with a brick they want to match, and by photographing the brick and uploading the photo to Google+, masonry experts across the country can pool their knowledge and suggest solutions right away.

The company also built a new intranet on G Suite, which combines Calendar, Gmail, Drive and Sites for its employees. Travis Perkins staff use this tool to present tasks, deadlines, performance reviews, status of colleagues, calendar reminders and Hangout links where a team can jump into a meeting — all from one screen. Based in the cloud, the directory is available on mobile and is easy to access and update. With cost-effective Chromebooks and Google’s web-based system in warehouses and stores, Travis Perkins is helping unleash the talent and skills of everyone on their team.

travis perkins quote card

To learn more about how your team can collaborate with G Suite, check out: https://gsuite.google.com/together/.

Join Diane Greene, Sundar Pichai and Eric Schmidt at Google Cloud Next ‘17

We're eight weeks out from the most influential cloud conference of the year, and today we're excited to announce new keynote speakers. On March 8-10, 2017, Google Cloud Next '17 will bring together thousands of developers, partners, customers and IT professionals with industry leaders and experts from Google at Moscone Center West in San Francisco.

Next ‘17 is a unique opportunity to hear from the Google leaders who are helping define the future of the cloud, including Diane Greene, SVP of Google Cloud; Urs Holzle, SVP of Technical Infrastructure, Google Cloud; Brian Stevens, VP of Cloud Platforms and Prabhakar Raghavan, VP of Apps, to name a few.

In addition, we're excited that Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman of Alphabet will be sharing their vision in keynotes at Next.  

You'll also have the chance to hear from some of the brightest minds in technology, including Fei-Fei Li, Chief Scientist for ML/AI, Google Cloud and Professor of Computer Science at Stanford; Vint Cerf, Google's Chief Internet Evangelist and Sam Ramji, VP of Compute and Developer Services, Google Cloud. We have more exciting industry leaders that will be joining us onstage, so stay tuned for more updates.

We've planned three packed days of content, sessions, talks and tracks to share what's next for Google Cloud and the industry more broadly. Day one will focus on our vision and business strategy, day two will share Google's cloud technology and product roadmap and day three of Next '17 will center around the cloud ecosystem and why we’re committed to building an open cloud.

Beyond the keynotes, Next ‘17 offers opportunities to engage in hundreds of sessions, code labs, solutions workshops, machine learning activities, technical training, bootcamps and certification programs. Participate in more than 250 technical sessions led by Google experts paired with customers and partners. You can learn about everything cloud, from using cloud machine learning and container development on Google Cloud Platform (GCP), to building with an API-first architecture, to creating G Suite add-ons. 

Ready to register? Take advantage of early bird pricing ($500 discount!) until January 17.  

We look forward to welcoming you in March.

Source: Google Cloud


Welcome Limes Audio to G Suite

Today, we’re excited to announce the acquisition of Limes Audio. The Limes Audio team builds technology that makes voice communication systems sound better, so that you can hear the person you're talking to, and they can hear you.

As more and more businesses adopt our video conferencing solutions, powered by Chromebox for Meetings and Google Hangouts, it’s critical that we provide a great audio experience. With G Suite customers now relying on video communications for their day-to-day meetings, it's more important than ever to ensure low-cost, high-quality audio.

One of the biggest challenges to a great video meeting is the audio quality. Conference rooms today come in all shapes and sizes and that can provide a challenge for acoustics. Additionally, a poor internet connection can hamper voice quality in video conference calls. Limes Audio has been building solutions that remove the distracting noise, distortion and echoes that can affect online video and telephony meetings, improving the overall online conference experience.

We’re excited to work closely with the Limes Audio team to introduce new solutions that offer our customers the best online voice quality on the market.

Welcome Limes Audio!


Source: Google Cloud


Welcome Limes Audio to G Suite

Today, we’re excited to announce the acquisition of Limes Audio. The Limes Audio team builds technology that makes voice communication systems sound better, so that you can hear the person you're talking to, and they can hear you.

As more and more businesses adopt our video conferencing solutions, powered by Chromebox for Meetings and Google Hangouts, it’s critical that we provide a great audio experience. With G Suite customers now relying on video communications for their day-to-day meetings, it's more important than ever to ensure low-cost, high-quality audio.

One of the biggest challenges to a great video meeting is the audio quality. Conference rooms today come in all shapes and sizes and that can provide a challenge for acoustics. Additionally, a poor internet connection can hamper voice quality in video conference calls. Limes Audio has been building solutions that remove the distracting noise, distortion and echoes that can affect online video and telephony meetings, improving the overall online conference experience.

We’re excited to work closely with the Limes Audio team to introduce new solutions that offer our customers the best online voice quality on the market.

Welcome Limes Audio!


Source: Google Cloud


Formatting text with the Google Slides API

Originally posted on G Suite Developers blog

Posted by Wesley Chun (@wescpy), Developer Advocate, G Suite

It's common knowledge that presentations utilize a set of images to impart ideas to the audience. As a result, one of the best practices for creating great slide decks is to minimize the overall amount of text. It means that if you do have text in a presentation, the (few) words you use must have higher impact and be visually appealing. This is even more true when the slides are generated by a software application, say using the Google Slides API, rather than being crafted by hand.

The G Suite team recently launched the first Slides API, opening up a whole new category of applications. Since then, we've published several videos to help you realize some of those possibilities, showing you how to replace text and images in slides as well as how to generate slides from spreadsheet data. To round out this trifecta of key API use cases, we're adding text formatting to the conversation.

Developers manipulate text in Google Slides by sending API requests. Similar to the Google Sheets API, these requests come in the form of JSON payloads sent to the API's batchUpdate() method. Here's the JavaScript for inserting text in some shape (shapeID) on a slide: 

{
    "insertText": {
        "objectId": shapeID,
        "text": "Hello World!\n"
}

In the video, developers learn that writing text, such as the request above, is less complex than reading or formatting because both the latter require developers to know how text on a slide is structured. Notice for writing that just the copy, and optionally an index, are all that's required. (That index defaults to zero if not provided.)

Assuming "Hello World!" has been successfully inserted in a shape on a slide, a request to bold just the "Hello" looks like this: 

{
    "updateTextStyle": {
        "objectId": shapeID,
        "style": {
            "bold": true
        },
        "textRange": {
            "type": "FIXED_RANGE",
            "startIndex": 0,
            "endIndex": 5
        },
        "fields": "bold"
}
If you've got at least one request, like the ones above, in an array named requests, you'd ask the API to execute them with just one call to the API, which in Python looks like this (assuming SLIDES is your service endpoint and the slide deck ID is deckID): 
SLIDES.presentations().batchUpdate(presentationId=deckID,
        body=requests).execute()

To better understand text structure & styling in Google Slides, check out the text concepts guidein the documentation. For a detailed look at the complete code sample featured in the DevByte, check out the deep dive post. To see more samples for common API operations, take a look at this page. We hope the videos and all these developer resources help you create that next great app that automates producing highly impactful presentations for your users!

Formatting text with the Google Slides API

Posted by Wesley Chun (@wescpy), Developer Advocate, G Suite

It's common knowledge that presentations utilize a set of images to impart ideas to the audience. As a result, one of the best practices for creating great slide decks is to minimize the overall amount of text. It means that if you do have text in a presentation, the (few) words you use must have higher impact and be visually appealing. This is even more true when the slides are generated by a software application, say using the Google Slides API, rather than being crafted by hand.

The G Suite team recently launched the first Slides API, opening up a whole new category of applications. Since then, we've published several videos to help you realize some of those possibilities, showing you how to replace text and images in slides as well as how to generate slides from spreadsheet data. To round out this trifecta of key API use cases, we're adding text formatting to the conversation.

Developers manipulate text in Google Slides by sending API requests. Similar to the Google Sheets API, these requests come in the form of JSON payloads sent to the API's batchUpdate() method. Here's the JavaScript for inserting text in some shape (shapeID) on a slide: 

{
    "insertText": {
        "objectId": shapeID,
        "text": "Hello World!\n"
}

In the video, developers learn that writing text, such as the request above, is less complex than reading or formatting because both the latter require developers to know how text on a slide is structured. Notice for writing that just the copy, and optionally an index, are all that's required. (That index defaults to zero if not provided.)

Assuming "Hello World!" has been successfully inserted in a shape on a slide, a request to bold just the "Hello" looks like this: 

{
    "updateTextStyle": {
        "objectId": shapeID,
        "style": {
            "bold": true
        },
        "textRange": {
            "type": "FIXED_RANGE",
            "startIndex": 0,
            "endIndex": 5
        },
        "fields": "bold"
}
If you've got at least one request, like the ones above, in an array named requests, you'd ask the API to execute them with just one call to the API, which in Python looks like this (assuming SLIDES is your service endpoint and the slide deck ID is deckID): 
SLIDES.presentations().batchUpdate(presentationId=deckID,
        body=requests).execute()

To better understand text structure & styling in Google Slides, check out the text concepts guidein the documentation. For a detailed look at the complete code sample featured in the DevByte, check out the deep dive post. To see more samples for common API operations, take a look at this page. We hope the videos and all these developer resources help you create that next great app that automates producing highly impactful presentations for your users!

Modifying email signatures with the Gmail API

Originally posted on G Suite Developer blog

Posted by Wesley Chun (@wescpy), Developer Advocate, G Suite

The Gmail API team introduced a new settings feature earlier this year, and today, we're going to explore some of that goodness, showing developers how to update Gmail user settings with the API.

Email continues to be a dominant form of communication, personally and professionally, and our email signature serves as both a lightweight introduction and a business card. It's also a way to slip-in a sprinkling of your personality. Wouldn't it be interesting if you could automatically change your signature whenever you wanted without using the Gmail settings interface every time? That is exactly what our latest video is all about.

If your app has already created a Gmail API service endpoint, say in a variable named GMAIL, and you have the YOUR_EMAIL email address whose signature should be changed as well as the text of the new signature, updating it via the API is as pretty straightforward, as illustrated by this Python call to the GMAIL.users().settings().sendAs().patch() method: 

signature = {'signature': '"I heart cats."  ~anonymous'}
GMAIL.users().settings().sendAs().patch(userId='me',
        sendAsEmail=YOUR_EMAIL, body=signature).execute()

For more details about the code sample used in the requests above as well as in the video, check out the deepdive post. In addition to email signatures, other settings the API can modify include: filters, forwarding (addresses and auto-forwarding), IMAP and POP settings to control external email access, and the vacation responder. Be aware that while API access to most settings are available for any G Suite Gmail account, a few sensitive operations, such as modifying send-as aliases or forwarding, are restricted to users with domain-wide authority.

Developers interested in using the Gmail API to access email threads and messages instead of settings can check out this other video where we show developers how to search for threads with a minimum number of messages, say to look for the most discussed topics from a mailing list. Regardless of your use-case, you can find out more about the Gmail API in the developer documentation. If you're new to the API, we suggest you start with the overview page which can point you in the right direction!

Be sure to subscribe to the Google Developers channel and check out other episodes in the G Suite Dev Show video series.