Did you know that you can use google for much more than surfing? Apart from being able to just search websites you can get the local time anywhere, get stock quotes, use it as a simple calculator, and so much more. Here are a few tricks to make you a more productive Google user.

Caluclator

This is a feature I use a whole lot and it’s extremely simple. Just type in a simple expression and Google will solve it for you. I think the calculator goes as far as square roots, so if you need your quadratic equations solved look elsewhere. However for simple multiplication tasks or additions, just write in what you need like so:

“126+3235″
“76*12″

Currency converter

This is something I tried a few months back because I was converting currencies a lot and I thought, hey, maybe Google has this. So I wrote “420 USD in HUF” which neatly converted my $420 into Hungraian Forints. To use this you need to know the three letter abbreviation of the currency you need, but looking that up is just a few seconds. Be sure to always caps all the characters in the currency’s name though or else it won’t work. Here’s the syntax again:

“125 USD in GBP”
“300 EUR in USD”

Time finder

Finding the time anywhere is really easy with Google, all you need to do is prefix any city with “time”. The cool thing about this is that Google lists all found cities, since there are four “Plymouth’s” for example, and seeing them all listed, and their location makes finding any time a cinch, just use:

“time Plymouth”
“time Budapest”

Weather

Finding the weather in any city is exactly the same as finding the time, just prefix the city with “weather” and you’ll get forecasts for anywhere. Sadly this doesn’t work as flexibly as the time option, you won’t get all the cities listed if you just type Plymouth, but it’s still a quick and easy way to get a forecast, just type:

“weather Budapest”
“weather Los Angeles”

Unit conversion

I used to live in the US, but since I have been using meters and kilograms for 20 years, so I’m a bit out of touch with pounds and inches. In these cases unit conversion is really handy, but you usually have to visit a site for that which takes way to long. Just type it into Google! You can convert a lot of types here, just use the following syntax:

“16mi in km”
“75kg in lbs”

Spell checking

I don’t know if this is a real feature or not, but if you don’t know how to spell a word, just type it into Google, if you misspell it, Google will ask you if you meant something else. If you type recieve instead of receive, Google will say: “Did you mean receive?”. The functions here a pretty limited and in some extremely rare words may not work, but for the simple spell checking of one word it’s perfect.

Google Notebook was a nice service to begin with, but it lacked many features. Now that it has matured a bit, a lot of options and ways to organize and be more productive were added, making this not just a thought jotter, but a full fledged organizer. Here are a few tips helping you to turn Google Notebook into something more like OneNote or EverNote than textpad and notepad.

Create a note title

Whenever I write in my Google notebook I always create titles. There are two reasons you should start this good practice. One is obvious, when the note is (or notes are) expanded you can easily see what’s what without having to read into notes. The second reason is that when the notes are collapsed, you can also identify notes very quickly. So that your titles are identifiable in collapsed mode it is best if you add a special symbol after them.

I usually create titles in the format “text - text |”. If you create lists for separate days of the week you could create a title on the first line saying: “tuesday - shopping list”. This will be collapsed and all formatting will be removed, but due to the hyphen and the pipe after, your title will be identifiable when the note is collapsed.

Use labels for future reference

Labels were originally not part of Google Notebook, but they are very welcome now. Labels allow you to group notes that are otherwise totally unrelated. I could have a shopping list in there somewhere and I could also have a post on Hack Your Day about how to productively shop with a shopping list.

While in this particular example I may not benefit from seeing the link between these two, who knows? Perhaps while shopping I find a totally cool method which I only remember to share because I saw the link between the two.

Nevertheless, labeling can help you organize and conserve space by enabling you to reduce your notebook count. Not that you have space limitations, but the simpler your system the better. You can then go to the sort menu and sort by label, or just click on a label to list all notes that belong there.

Combine Google Bookmarks and Google Notebook

Google’s bookmark service has been fully integrated into Google Notebooks, giving you a unified way of organizing notes and bookmarks. Visiting the two services separately is still an option, but pretty pointless, since Notebook offers a much better experience. You can add bookmarks like usual, jot down your notes and so on, they will be updated in both places.

What changed though is that you now have all of Notebook’s tools to help you manage them. You (or a collaborator) can add a comment, assign a label, and this all adds to your organization and productivity, since it is integrated into your system.

Use the Firefox Browser extension

The Notebook Firefox extension is actually one of the best extensions I’ve seen, you can use it for all sorts of stuff. The main reason I suggest using it is that this is the tool that allows you to gather data like you can with Outlook and Evernote.

The extension opens a small window in your browser and allows you to paste data, or actually create and manipulate notes like you do in the full screen browser version. The windows is small, about 300×200px, but still provides a rich experience, very similar to the normal editing mode, how they managed to make this work is a mystery to me.

The browser extension also comes with a handy context menu entry enabling you to save snippets of data as you highlight it. You can right click anywhere on a page and click “note this with Google Notebook” and the small editor will autmatically open, creating a new note with the URL as the title. If you highlight any text on the page, this will automatically added to the note as well.

This will shave hours of your working time in the long run, and will probably save you some frustration as well, this is one extension I rely on heavily because often I save the stuff I want to write about like this. No need to find relevant entries in my RSS feed or bookmarks, I just open Google Notebook.

Use the drag and drop feature

If you hover your mouse over the left hand side of a note, you will see that you can drag it. You can simply take a note and drag it into a different notebook. This is a great feature if you want to keep a record of things to do and things done. Just drag the note to the relevant Notebook.

You could also use this for task management. Just create a task list and Notebooks for phases of a project. When a task enters a new phase just drag and drop it. There are many other ways you can use this feature, it will keep you productive by taking clicks and checkboxes away from the equation and letting you simple rearrange your thoughts.

Make full use of the comments option

Remember that you can use comments for youself, this isn’t just for other users to share their thoughts on your notes. I use a comment box like the “add a note” feature when creating bookmarks. For example when creating a task I would try to be as brief as possible and then add things to do with it in comments.

You can also add notes like “waiting for input” in the comments, or you could add ingredients to a recipe you still need to buy. The uses are again endless, and can contribute a lot to your productivity.

Since the comments section gets condensed as you collapse the notes, it is also good practice to keep your comments short and well organized too, this will enable you to make the most info out without needing to open anything.

Google Docs has implemented a much awaited feature, the full use of CSS in documents. This essentially means that those of you versed in CSS can create great looking documents instead of black, white and grey ones.

Color and some format options were already available of course, but you can now specify borders, you can add divs with styling, create different types of lists in seconds. Since all this is implemented in CSS, you can just specify different classes for different types of content and then encase the specific contents in divs.

This means you will format your document once, which will take you 10 minutes, and after that formatting a whole blog of text will only take about 2 sends. Considering you may want a border, a different font, a different background color and font color, and underline and so on, this is a huge productivity jump.

You can also edit the html, so essentially Google Docs has become a HTML editor with a WYSIWYG option. Tihs is awesome in my opinion, I now have full control over the visuals of my documents, making me much more likely to use Docs instead of Word for example.

As I was happily updating my theme on Hack Your Day I managed to overwrite the index.php file of my website danielpataki.com instead of the one for Hack Your Day. I only noticed now, so I had no undo option and no local copy, since I just made that page 2 days ago and hadn’t backed up yet, stupid, I know.

I a last desperate attempt I looked up the page on Google and clicked on cache to see Google’s view of my site, which luckily was the one I designed earlier. Instead of spending 5 hours pulling out my hair and shouting I managed to restore everything in 5 minutes.

If you’ve lost some website related code and you found out in about 24 hours you have a very good chance of recovering the data with Google’s cache. It depends on when Google’s spiders get to you, but if you get lucky you can retrieve everything.

I am not really into showing people job opportunities, but this is too good to miss! Gmail is hiring people for four different positions in seven locations including Europe, so all you European computer wizzes take a look!

Although I’m perfectly happy doing what I do, I would love to work with Google, I’m really sorry I don’t live in the US, or have the programming skills it takes, it seems the only position for me is CEO.

If you’d like to be a rapid prototyper, an analytics engineer, a software engineer or a user interface software engineer head on over to the hiring page for more info. If you get the job from my referral, you could implement an idea I have maybe, perhaps put an ad fir Hack Your Day into every simgle piece of email that goes through Google. Best of luck to all the applicants!

Google is implementing Google Gears into Google Docs, a feature long awaited by many in the online community. This means that you will be able to use Google Docs without internet access, and when you do manage to go online your stuff will be synchronized automatically.

Offline access will probably mean that you will loose some features, but no loss of data, and the ability to edit documents online. I don’t really know what features you can use, since I haven’t got the feature yet, but I’m sure that basic text editing will be seamless.

The benefits of Google Gears is great, now you don’t have to worry about getting disconnected or if you’ll be able to work from the train or not. Just go to offline mode, write all you want and when you get wired again docs will sync on its own.

The feature is initially only offered in English, and for now only for text documents, no spreadsheet and presentation mode yet, but I’m sure the time will come. I am eager to try out this new implementation of Google Gears, if you have this feature already, do comment on how it’s working.