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There's a good chance your home or business is now on Google Street View, the street level photographic view in Google Maps (http//:maps.google.co.uk). How so? Over the last year Google UK has been steadily mapping the entire country and every major road (and many minor ones) has now been photographed.

Google reckons over 90 per cent of the UK has now been mapped at street level, an incredible task. Google Street View originally started off in the UK last March and was available to just 25 main cities. Now it's pretty much everywhere and all you have to do is click and drag the 'little man' icon on Google Maps to a road that's outlined in blue! ... read more »

A spreadsheet was one of the first business applications to run on a computer, and it’s remained pretty much unchanged. If you’ve used spreadsheets, this part of Google Docs should seem familiar.
The main part of the screen is divided up by a grid. Each segment is known as a cell, which come in three types: text, a static number or a calculation.
The first two are pretty obvious. The third, a calculated value, uses internal functions to process numerical data from elsewhere and place the result in the cell. You won’t see the working out, just the answer in the destination cell. ... read more »

Creating a document purely for your own enjoyment isn’t a common practice – usually it’s a way to communicate information with someone else. In the previous section we looked at how to import and export files, but Google Docs enables you to begin sharing your data long before you’ve even finished it.
Although it’s more usual that you would finish a document before wanting someone else to see it, in many cases it can be easier to collaborate with colleagues on a document. If you’ve ever done this before, you may be familiar with the ping-pong of emails containing file attachments. What starts out being seemingly simple often results in a creakingly full inbox, inconsistencies between versions and a headache working out where bits have been changed and where it all went wrong. ... read more »

Now you can upload just about any file to Google Docs, not just Office documents. So if you need somewhere online to dump your digital photos or music files you can. With huge amounts of storage on Google accounts there's never been a better time to start using Google Docs, we'll have more on some of Google Docs' hidden features in a special series of online tutorials coming soon - watch this space.

If you're a fan of the speedy Google Chrome browser you'll be interested to know that Google's added a clever bookmark syncing tool to the browser which operates just like Xmarks (Foxmarks). If you download the beta of Google Chrome 4, either as a version upgrade from Chrome or a new install, you'll get an option in your "wrench" menu to synchronize bookmarks, enabled through your Google account.

Google has just updated its engine to allow for some really useful new features. Simply enter your search term and select Show Options under the search bar. This brings up a new menu which lists the new realtime features on the left. You can search within documents to find specific dates, search reviews with key points already highlighted for you and even use a Wonder Wheel, which groups related content for you in a kind of handy mindmap.

It all updates the search engine results pages instantly for you too. This is the first glimpse of advanced search in action. Take a look at the introductory video at http://bit.ly/avAUh and soon you'll be using Google in a more effective way!

The increasingly popular browser Google Chrome is to get extensions by May according to news reports. It's taken months to get this far whilst Firefox and IE push on with fantastic third-party extensions, but Chrome's are bound to be good following its successful start to life. These plugins enhance and personalise your browser to how you want it. If you haven't tried Chrome yet do you think extensions will win you over?