Archive for the 'how to' Category

My dad, at 60, is a voracious blogger who comes up with a lot of curious questions on computers. He uses a HP laptop with Windows Vista ( $%^!) which I used a few years ago . I never gave him admin rights on his laptop considering the curiosity of his computer skills(!!!) until later part of last year. Yesterday, he was complaining that the MS Office software in his laptop stopped working after he clicked on something about trial membership of 2007. Now, he says he could not create documents in the laptop. I was thinking of a simpler solution where in he does not have to worry about installing huge chunk of software still create documents without much hassle. It occurred to me, this is the right time I bring him to the cloud.

Here are a few benefits, as I can see –
1. Stop paying for software to create documents.
2.Documents are saved in the cloud, which is highly available Google servers.
3. Easy for collaboration (sharing, contribution etc) with friends and family.

So, here is an attempt to help my dad on “How to create documents in Tamil using Google Tools – Cloud Solution”. Let me know if this silly or useful or whatever in comments. Happy Cloud Computing!

1. Create a Google account from here. Almost, everybody has one.
2. Install the Google chrome browser from here. Although this solution works with Internet Explorer browser, I personally recommend Google Chrome which is faster.
3. Download the Google Transliteration IME from here choosing Tamil as the language. other languages can also be installed based on user’s needs. At the time of this writing, Google Transliteration IME support 22 different languages.
4. Go through the process of setting up language bar to support Tamil. Detailed instructions given here.
5. Login to Google Docs with Google account here. Click ‘Create new Document’.
6. Click on “EN” Language bar and change the language input to “TA” Tamil. the Language bar is found in the task bar.
7. Start typing and Google will transliterate. For ex: In order to write தொலைபேசி, one has to type “TholaiPesi”. It takes a few minutes to get accustomed to google transliteration. Once done typing, change the language back to English by clicking TA in the Language bar.
8. Save the document and format according to the needs.

P.S. : The whole process of installing and using Google Transliteration IME can be eliminated using online Google transliteration too. But for the ease of it, Google Transliteration IME option comes in handy with other uses and saves a lot of ‘ALT+TAB’ ing.

Courtesy Google Google Transliteration IME is an input method editor which allows users to enter text in one of the supported languages using a roman keyboard. Users can type a word the way it sounds using Latin characters and Google Transliteration IME will convert the word to its native script. Note that this is not the same as translation — it is the sound of the words that is converted from one alphabet to the other, not their meaning. Converted content will always be in Unicode.

Google Transliteration IME is currently available for 22 different languages – Amharic, Arabic, Bengali, Farsi (Persian), Greek, Gujarati, Hebrew, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Nepali, Oriya, Punjabi, Russian, Sanskrit, Serbian, Sinhalese, Tamil, Telugu, Tigrinya and Urdu.