Transfer iPad Pages documents to Google Docs

Last December Google Docs stopped supporting the increasingly useful “email in” feature that allowed you to email in documents to your Google Docs account. Since the iPad version of Pages is so poor in sharing documents, I was hoping to be able to use this feature to send documents to my Google Docs account. Alternatively, you could use one of the still poor-quality third-party word processors that support Google Docs sync, available in the App store (Mobile Editor is a sham, while Office HD2 is decent, but far from elegant). I also had no luck copy and pasting from Pages to Office HD2, hoping I could create a document in pages and copy it over to the Google Docs-aware Office HD2 (this ended up crashing my iPad, actually).

Instead, here’s the roundabout way of sending your Pages documents to Google Docs:

• Create a Pages document.
• Email a copy of the Pages document to yourself (to a valid Gmail account, obviously).
• Open Safari on your iPad, open Gmail. (Here’s the hack) At the bottom of the page switch from the mobile (iPad-specific) version of Gmail to the “Desktop” version. You may receive a warning about using an unsupported browser.
• Open the email to yourself in the desktop version of Gmail. Click “Open in Google Docs”.

After a short conversion process the document will open in (read-only) Google Docs for mobile. You can now access this Google Doc document on any other computer or through third-party Google Docs-aware applications

Making Google Docs pretty with user-supplied CSS

This tip comes via Merlin Mann, but since the tip was buried in a recent Macbreak Weekly podcast, I thought it would be helpful to surface here.

With Google Docs you can change a document look and feel with plain-Jane CSS editing. This is available from within Google Docs; with an open document go to Edit->Edit CSS. Inside the window that is displayed add any CSS rules you want to style your document with. The CSS doesn’t quite stay with the document if you export to Microsoft Word (it appears to make a best-guess), but internally to Google Docs (including exporting as PDF) the styling persists for the life of the document. Using Merlin Mann’s user-supplied CSS allows you to create really attractive Google Docs documents. Further, inside the CSS rules for font-family, you can supply your own system-only fonts within the font-stack, so you aren’t limited to Google Docs’ poor typefaces. Obviously, if you open the document on another machine that doesn’t have that local font available, it will not work and will instead default to the next item in the font stack.

You can download Merlin Mann’s user-supplied CSS here (includes specific instructions).