We’ve been using this little known feature of Basecamp for some time, so I thought I would post it for the benefit of the casual visitor. The good makers of Basecamp have neglected to include a useable collaborative document authoring tool. Since Google has included such a tool as part of the free Google Apps suite, including documents from there into Basecamp seems the natural way to augment what 37-signals have left out. To add a Google Doc to a Basecamp writeboard:
- Create a Google Doc (or spreasheet, presentation, whatever).
- Copy and past the URL of the document (minus the “https:”) into TextPad or Notepad.
- Make a Writeboard in Basecamp, give it any name.
- Paste the following text into the writeboard contents and replace the bold text as required:
<iframe src=”http://www.fluxinc.ca//docs.google.com/a/www.fluxinc.ca/Doc?docid=asdfkj92399332&hl=en” frameborder=”0″ height=”600″ scrolling=”no” width=”950″></iframe><style type=”text/css”> .Sidebar, .writeboardtitle { display: none; } .col {width: 1024px;}</style> - Save your writeboard, and you’re done! A nice, wide, writeboard with the toolbox hidden to make more space.
Remember to share your Google Doc with whoever you want to view/edit it — Basecamp permissions do not translate into Google Apps.
doesn’t work for me in Basecamp Classic.
Sorry to hear it. This was posted back in 2009 however. It’s quite possible the URL has changed — google now called docs, drive, and maybe the argument syntax is different. We’ll see if we can update this for you.
Yep, confirmed, you might need to change the src attribute to:
src=”http://www.fluxinc.ca//docs.google.com/a/www.fluxinc.ca/document/d/f90fj01-20f-20f-20d2l3kjlkncaldklkdsfjasf/edit”
You can get the full URL by editing a document and copying and pasting. Also, you could include the “https:” prefix. Google made SSL compulsory, and the original URL scheme in this post assumed you could send either http, or https, depending on how you were accessing Basecamp.