We're five members of the Google Docs team - ask us anything
reddit.com
reddit.com
Useless opinion: Not to throw in my lot with the most downvoted (and barely visible) of comments here, but seriously, these "Ask us anything about our product!" AMAs from big companies are uniformly marketing chaff. Total yawnfest since no one dares answer challenging questions for fear of running afoul of their legal team (or, in fact, the legal system down the road when their words can be used against the company).
This rigidness makes this sort of "community outreach" exceedingly boring. In my terrible, stupid opinion, companies worth asking questions of never have time to get a bunch of managers, a PR/marketing person and a single engineer together to answer only the most sycophantic or safe questions (again, I don't blame them for being concerned with self protection).
Give me email responses from Gabe Newell to completely random gamers any day over this sort of canned interaction.
So you could think of it as marketing chaff, or think of it as a product team listening to their users. I'm an optimist so I choose the latter. :)
For instance, in the submission for Facebook's development on the Android application, there was an entire thread with devices affected by a specific bug.
Google seems to use reddit's commenting system far better than their own "Google Moderator" (http://www.google.com/moderator/#16/e=7f3 p.s. does anyone know if any of these 3K+ questions were ever answered anywhere?)
if cell < 0 make entire row red
This isn't currently possible because the conditional can only check the value of THIS cell, not others. As the other comment indicates, it also helps expand what values you can evaluate. I use excel heavily and this is one of the largest gaps between it and google docs for me.
I kid, but it's sad that reddit is still so unreliable. It had a pretty good run lately. I wonder how they're coming with the transition off Amazon EBS.
Herein we will pay lip service to a barely innovative also-ran office product that happens to use a lot of complex JavaScript (which is fashionable), answering any questions posed with vague responses whose only substance is an alignment with our corporate goals. In truth we've probably spent the best years of our lives fixing bugs relating to the pixel-perfect positioning of the buttons in a particular form in the application.
Our motivation for writing this IAmA is most likely to convince ourselves that despite our cog-like position in a massive corporation wherein our only career path is sideways or into middle management, our jobs and lives have some semblance of meaning, and have created significant value for the planet. If upper level management approved our IAmA, they did so only for the goodwill and free PR that may result from it.
In truth, we are but 5 representatives of a company whose massive weight is being used to shape the future of the industry in ways favorable only to itself and its stockholders, and deeply unfavorable to small, independently controlled companies. Its recruitment drive has been turned so high in recent years that the mere name-dropping of "Google" is unlikely to mean much with regard to our individual skill-sets. We are mediocre developers with limited vision, working for a company that chooses our direction for us. --
I'm sorry for being so negative, but honestly there is almost nothing of value to be derived from these kinds of posts, it's not like these guys are authorized to tell us anything of substance with regard to future product plans. Guaranteed 90% of the comments are feature requests and self-congratulatory nonsense.
Information is stuck in cog-like positions which teams revolve around, so how can we reprogram?
The top questions right now are on offline, security of Docs, outlook for mobile app, formatting problems, only some of which I'm personally concerned about. So I'm hopeful reddit feedback works its way into prioritization and product plans.
If you bothered to actually look through some of the thread, it's actually a pretty nice read. A good chunk of upcoming features and design decisions were revealed, they took note of a number of feature requests, and some nice personal questions were answered as well, putting a nice human face on some of the invisible hands working on one of the world's largest online office suites.
I don't particularly consider this kind of endless, banal content centered around a handful of behemoth companies and trendy news topics interesting, especially with legitimately insightful articles buried in the new queue and receiving hardly a click (example: https://www.nytimes.com/cwire/2011/06/09/09climatewire-this-... ).
If I tire day in, day out of reading the same rhetoric on Hacker News that I can find covered on the BBC (e.g. the ~5 articles they currently have dedicated to LulzSec on their technology home page, kids finding SQL injections really classifies as content for a boutique technical news site?), and can't respond with a little sarcasm, then perhaps HN isn't worth my time.