Fsteff

This blog has moved

noreply@blogger.com (fsteff) — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 16:35:00 +0000

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Google Forms revealed

noreply@blogger.com (fsteff) — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 22:44:00 +0000

Google Document is great for many things and the GD Forms is a very easy way to request feedback from your users, be it per email or embedded into a web page.
Forms however, lack the capacity to be customized - i.e. except for those fixed styles - so it can sometimes be hard to actually embed in into a web page, without breaking your style.

Then I discovered Gill Smith's (and Ahab's) excellent page which showed some URL parameter options to customize the forms a bit, but when I went through the list I found that most of them were not working. They also didn't provide a fix to remove the footer and change the padding, so I knew I had to try to digg it out myself.
I used a Rebol script (thanks HMK!) to probe the the options, and after 180000 page requests, I finally had a complete list of parameters that actually did something to the forms.
And more importantly, I had also discovered how to do the things I needed!

In order to share this with others I've created an interactive test page:

To the left in this picture, you can see all the options that are currently known to work, and a space is provided where you can insert the css you would like to inject. Once you press the submit button, the specified Form page will be loaded on the right, so you can immediately see your result. Once you are satisfied, copy the generated URL from the lower part of the page and insert it where-ever you want to use your form.

With this you can do the following to a Google Docs Form page:

Remove the Footer.
Change font-size globally and per section.
Add padding and spacing whenever you need it.
Many other things...

Please ask questions - and come with good ideas for usage - in the comment thread on this page.

--
Fsteff

WEEKNUM() for Google Docs & Spreadsheets

noreply@blogger.com (fsteff) — Sun, 29 Jul 2007 13:16:00 +0000

I've been using Google Docs & Spreadsheets for some time now. Mostly the spreadsheets, though. During that time I've made some relative complex spreadsheets, and I'm really pleased with them.
However there still are a few normal spreadsheet commands missing, and yesterday I was in need for exactly one of them: WEEKNUM() (as detailed in ISO 8601:2000)

What I needed was to get the number of the week in a year (1 to 53) for any specific date.
After some time hacking at the keyboard, I got the following formula to work.
The date to check is located in cell C5.

=INT((C5-DATE(YEAR(C5-WEEKDAY(C5-1)+4),1,3)+WEEKDAY(DATE(YEAR(C5-WEEKDAY(C5-1)+4),1,3))+5)/7)

The above imitates the WEEKNUM() command, implemented in most spreadsheets, except on one count:

It's ONLY ISO 8601:2000, so there's no option to set the type.

Very usefull for me... perhaps usefull for you, too?

Thanks for the usefull comment, Piotrek. It's been fixed now.