Tech Tips for Writers #114: How to Embed Google Docs

Tech Tips for Writers is an (almost) weekly post on overcoming Tech Dread. I’ll cover issues that friends, both real-time and virtual, have shared. Feel free to post a comment about a question you have. I’ll cover it in a future Tip.

Q: So many colleagues are sharing their documents through Google Apps, but I don’t know how to do that. Can you help?

A: I love this part of Google Apps–that it’s easy to share your documents–whether they’re a document, a spreadsheet, a slideshow, a form, or even an image–with anyone you choose in a variety of ways. One is by embedding the entire document file into a blog or webpage so colleagues and friends don’t have to click through to another site and hope that works.

Here’s what you do when your Google Doc is complete:

• save it by a name of your choice
• File>Publish to the Web (on the menu bar)
• make a few selections (for example, if you’re sharing a slideshow, it’ll ask if you want it to be automatic)
• click ‘Publish’ (Google Forms skips this step–it assumes you are going to embed)
• click ‘Embed’
• copy html code
• paste into blog, wiki, website like I did below:

<iframe src=”https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1Qm9xsxEl-hN-Wt2xyb3ylu9Y8qi3A5aQw-hvdadSqSU/viewform?embedded=true&#8221; width=”760″ height=”500″ frameborder=”0″ marginheight=”0″ marginwidth=”0″>Loading…

Above is the HTML code. It looks weird because I pasted it into ‘visual’ on WordPress rather than ‘text’. Here’s what it looks like if I paste it into the right spot (well, I used a Google Form, but the idea is the same).

BTW, this might be the hardest part of using embeds–finding the right place to paste that confusing code.

Is that cool?

But, what if your doc is created in Word (or Open Office) and you uploaded to your Google Drive. Can you ‘Publish to the web’ then? Sure, but first, you must open the file through Google Apps. Here’s how you do that:

• Upload the doc to your Google Drive.
• Double click; go to Open With>Google Docs.
• Once it’s open in Google Docs, follow the directions above.

More tips on Google Apps and Google:

Google Apps Support Bloom’s Taxonomy–Take a Look

Weekend Website 123: Google Gravity

Weekend Website #109: Google World of Wonders

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Jacqui Murray is the author of the popular Building a Midshipman, the story of her daughter’s journey from high school to United States Naval Academy. She is the author/editor of over a hundred books on integrating tech into education, adjunct professor of technology in education, webmaster for four blogs, an Amazon Vine Voice book reviewer,  a columnist for TeachHUB, Editorial Review Board member for Journal for Computing Teachers, monthly contributor to Today’s Author and a freelance journalist on tech ed topics. You can find her book at her publisher’s website, Structured Learning.