YJL

Google Account Activity was announced earlier today, I immediately signed up and waited for my report. I think it actually finished within 3 hours, but I got to bed a few minutes before the notification email arrived. Anyway, here is a screenshot from my report:


I feel I am not much of a Google user anymore, got no much done with Google stuff I guess.

Wait! I posted 80+ post in this blog this month, Blogger is included in Google Dashboard. So, where the heck are they? Beta only, therefore not yet, I assume.

I wish they will also include some significances from Google Analytics and... Google Code? I don't know, I thought I use Google a lot, why I couldn't think of something I want to read about in this activity report. But I did, didn't I?

Yesterday, when I was reading my custom Full Referrer URL report, I saw an Email button (with BETA label alongside). This was added back in last November.

Out of curiosity and hopefully there would be some convenience from this feature, I decided to try it out:


Today, I got the email and realized it's an attachment (of course). There is no direct way to view within Gmail, I had to open it with a local program to view. The file format like CSV or TSV is not very friendlily human-readable, there is no alignment across columns. So I am not sure what's the point of sending this format regularly.

I doubt anyone have patience to import the file into spreadsheet for custom analysis every day. Weekly, maybe. That is only reason I can think of why you need such function. But if you do, then using API will be much smarter way to do like I do to generate my daily reports. I am just too lazy to customize one for this Full Referrer URL report which only have a few entries a day, it is not really worth my time.

After I read that announcement post, it reminded me that there is a PDF export version option. I resent the report with PDF and only once (in Frequency) to have a sneak preview. I think this is the best way to review the report, Gmail supports PDF format, you don't even need to have a local PDF viewer program. You can just view it online, awesome! This is a sample:


I reset for a new schedule for PDF version and make it active for 12 months. You can delete or edit scheduled emails from Admin Assets Scheduled Emails.