Google's standalone web apps for Docs, Sheets and Slides now show a list of templates you can choose to quickly create a document, spreadsheet or presentation. For example, Google Docs shows templates for resumes, reports, letters and you can expand the list to see even more templates (essays, class notes, project proposals, meeting notes, brochures, newsletters).



Google Sheets has templates for to-do lists, budgets, calendars, schedules, invoices, time sheets and more.


Google Slides also has a few templates for photo albums, pitches, status reports, lesson plans, portfolios, weddings, party invites and more.


Another new feature lets you get insights on a spreadsheet by simply selecting a range of cells and clicking Explore. This feature works in the desktop web app and the Android app and it shows trends, patterns and even charts for the data you've selected. It's surprisingly useful.


Google Docs now shows the new changes in a collaborative document. "If there are new changes, click the New changes button to the right of the Help menu. You can also click the File menu > See new changes."

Voice typing lets you dictate a text in Google Docs for desktop, but only if you use Chrome. Activate this feature from the Tools menu and speak in one of the 40 supported languages. You can say "period", "comma", "question mark", "exclamation mark", "new line", "new paragraph" to add punctuation to your text.



You can customize your forms by picking a theme or adding a photo. Google chooses the right color palette to match your photo. Insert images and YouTube videos to illustrate your questions.


{ Via Google Docs Blog. Thanks, Brendan and Jérôme. }

How to export all your notes from Google Keep? I found two ways to do this.

One option is to use a feature that converts one or more notes to a Google Docs document.

1. Select all your notes: go to Google Keep and press Ctrl+A (or Cmd-A for Mac).

Important: This only selects the notes from the current view, so archived notes aren't included. You can repeat these steps for archived notes or select all your archived notes and unarchive them.


2. Click the 3-dot icon from the top of the page and pick "Copy to Google Doc".

3. Wait a few seconds and you should see a link at the bottom of the page that says: "Open doc". Click that link to open the document that includes all your notes.


Another option is to use Google Takeout and export all your notes as HTML files. Google Takeout exports all your notes, including archived notes and notes from the Trash.


You'll get a ZIP archive with HTML files for each note. The archive may also includes image and audio files. If a note doesn't have a title, the exported HTML file will use the date in the filename.

Google Docs added a few features that make the product more useful, especially for students. You can now use different headers and footers on the first page of your documents, hide headers and footers on the first page and start page numbering on the second page.

When you add a header or footer, Google Docs now shows this option on the first page: "different first page header/footer". Click the checkbox and you can add a different header or footer.


The "page number" feature from the "Insert" menu lets you start page numbering on the second page.


"This means that you can follow academic formatting guidelines for first page headers and footers (e.g. MLA, CMS, APA)," says Brian Levee, Google Docs Product Manager.

{ Thanks, August Valera. }

You can now add Google Docs, Google Sheets and Google Slides to Google's app launcher from the navigation bar. Just visit each desktop app, click the app launcher and then click "add a shortcut" at the bottom of the pane. Use drag and drop to move the shortcut or hide it by dragging the shortcut to the "more" section. Make sure you are signed in to your Google Account to be able to customize the app launcher.



I added Docs, Sheets and Slides to the app launcher, so I can quickly open the apps from almost any Google service.


To switch between Google's Office apps, you can also use this menu:


{ via +Google Drive }

Google Docs added a cool feature that was already available in Google Slides: you can now change image options. Right click an image, pick "image options" from the menu or click the image and use the "image options" feature from the Format menu. You can change the color of the image using filters in the "Recolor" section and adjust transparency, brightness and contrast.



While the new features are pretty useful, Google Docs should include more powerful image editing tools, like the ones that are available in Google+ Photos. Hopefully, Google manages to build an HTML5 image editing widget that could be added to any Google service, so you can quickly edit Gmail's image attachments, photos uploaded to Blogger, images from Google Docs documents and Google Drive photos.

{ via Google Apps Updates }

There are still basic features that are missing from Google's online office suite. For example, you couldn't merge table cells in a Google Docs document until yesterday, when this feature was added.

Select multiple rows or columns, right click and pick "Merge cells" from the menu. You can also find this feature in the Table menu. If you change your mind, use the "Unmerge cells" menu item.



"Merged table cells can span more than one row and/or column. Merged table cells in Word documents can now be imported as well," informs Google.

When you scroll a document in Google Docs, Google now shows a tooltip that includes the number of the page you're currently reading or editing and the total number of pages. It looks like this: "2 of 3". The tooltip is also displayed when you mouse over the scrollbar.


You can also check the number of pages using print preview or the word count feature. Another option is to insert page number and page count using the features from the Insert menu.

{ Thanks, Daniel Fletcher. }

Google's Drive desktop apps have an updated dialog for inserting special characters. If you open a document, spreadsheet or presentation, go to the Insert menu and click "Special characters", you have many ways to find a special character: use categories, search by keyword (example: arrow), enter the Unicode code point (example: 2195) or draw the character.



"We have launched a new version of the special character picker in Google Docs, Slides, and Drawings, making it easier for people to find characters and symbols — like arrows, shapes, or non-Latin characters — to insert into their content. The new picker now supports keyword search as well as free form input, so editors can draw the symbol that they have in mind and the picker will return available characters that resemble the drawing," informs Google.

Here's another example from Google Drive's Google+ page:

If you go to docs.google.com, you might see this message: "Soon, docs.google.com will start taking you to the Google Docs application, not Google Drive. You can always get to Google Drive by using drive.google.com." Until now, docs.google.com redirected to drive.google.com without displaying this message.


"You may be using docs.google.com to access Google Drive. With the launch of the new Google Docs editors home screens, docs.google.com will redirect to the Docs home screen, where you'll find all of your Google Docs and Word files," explains Google.

Some useful URLs:

* docs.google.com, google.com/docs - Google Docs (the first URL still redirects to Drive for now)
* sheets.google.com, google.com/sheets - Google Sheets
* slides.google.com, google.com/slides - Google Slides

Google already started to roll out the new desktop home screens for Google Docs, Google Sheets and Google Slides. They're available at drive.google.com/document, drive.google.com/spreadsheets, drive.google.com/presentation. If these links create new files, then you can't access the new sites yet.

The goal is to provide a desktop counterpart to the mobile apps. You can quickly switch between the desktop apps using the navigation menu and you don't even have to visit Google Drive to create a document, open a document or remove it. Google shows a grid of recent documents, but you can also switch to the list view and choose a different sorting option. Folders are only available in the file picker dialog.



The new home screens provide few file management options: you can only rename or remove files. They're mostly useful for quickly opening a recent document, spreadsheet or presentation.


All the desktop apps uses a sticky round button at the bottom of the page that lets you create new documents, spreadsheets or presentations. The Material Design button is already used by some of Google's mobile apps and will be added to many other Google apps in the near future.


{ Thanks, Herin. }

Google's office suite has always had an identity problem. Google changed product names multiple times and didn't manage to differentiate its products.

Back in 2006, Google acquired Writely (an online document editor) and XL2Web, which later became Google Spreadsheets. The two products merged and the resulting service was called Google Docs & Spreadsheets.


That worked well until 2007, when Google acquired Tonic Systems and launched a service for editing presentations. Google Docs & Spreadsheets was rebranded as Google Docs.


Back then, the document manager was called Google Docs List. The name was changed to Google Drive in 2012 and Google positioned it as an online storage service. Even though Google offered 1GB of free storage before Google Drive's launch, Google Docs was mainly perceived as a Microsoft Office alternative, not as a Dropbox alternative.


Google Drive added support for third-party apps and Google's online editors finally got names: Docs, Sheets, Slides.


Two months ago, Google Drive's mobile app for Android and iOS was split into 3 apps: Google Drive (file manager, file viewer), Google Docs and Google Sheets. Google Slides for Android was released last week and the iOS version will be released in a few weeks. Desktop apps will have custom URLs and their own dashboards.


Why create so many separate apps? Google's online editors have always been distinct applications. They came from different acquisitions and didn't have a lot in common when they were released. Their best feature was collaboration, but business users kept complaining about Microsoft Office compatibility, so Google bought QuickOffice and added support for native Office editing without conversion using a Chrome extension and the new mobile apps.

To show that Google Drive/Docs still have an identity problem, let's read the Wikipedia page for Google Docs: "Google Docs is a free, web-based office suite offered by Google within its Google Drive service. It was formerly a storage service as well, but has since been replaced by Google Drive." Actually Google Docs is no longer an office suite, it's just an app for editing documents. It's not Google's Office, it's only Google's Words.

Maybe the new mobile apps and the new dashboards for the desktop apps will make it more obvious that Docs, Sheets and Slides are separate apps and have their own identity.

Google Docs and the new version of Google Sheets now support add-ons. Just click the new Add-ons menu, select "Get add-ons" and install some of them. They're not browser extensions, they're just ways to add new features to Google Docs and Sheets. Some of them are developed by Google, while others are developed by third-parties.


"Once you install an add-on it will become available across all of your documents or spreadsheets and you can start using it right away," informs Google. You can always find them in the Add-ons menu.

There are add-ons that translate the selected text, find synonyms, create a table of contents, insert maps, create charts from spreadsheets, generate bibliography, check your writing for consistency, add mail merge to Google Docs, print address labels, remove duplicates, import Google Analytics data and more.



Here's the Translate add-on in action. Select some text, go to the Add-ons menu, click Translate and Start. You can select the destination language in the sidebar that shows up. For some reason, only a few destination languages are supported.

There's a new version of Google Sheets. "It's faster, supports larger spreadsheets, has a number of new features, and works offline," informs Google.

Just in case you're wondering how to enable it, you should go to Google Drive's settings page, enable "Try the new Google Sheets" in the Editing tab and click "Save". You'll get the new version of the application only for the files you create from now on. The existing files will still open in the old Google Sheets.


There are some missing features in the new Google Sheets (protected sheets, spell check, publishing) and this shows that this is an early release.

So what's new? You can create and edit spreadsheets offline in Chrome, just like in Docs and Slides. The new Sheets is designed with performance in mind and handles huge spreadsheets: it supports 2 million cells of data and all of the other limitations have been removed. You're no longer limited to 256 columns per sheet. Other improvements: spreadsheets load faster and scrolling is smoother.



There are some new formula editing tools. "In the new Google Sheets, we've made it easier to build complex formulas in your spreadsheets. For example, you'll now see syntax highlighting, which shows you the argument in your function that you are working on, and you'll get more details on how to fix errors in your formula by hovering over them." Google also added 24 new functions, including SUMIFS, COUNTIFS, and AVERAGEIF.


Another new feature is called filter views and it lets you create, save and share filters, so you can get different views of your data without disrupting how others are viewing your spreadsheet.

"In the new Google Sheets, you can apply conditional formatting using a custom formula. This allows you to apply formatting to a cell or range of cells based on the contents of other cells."


You can also add a color to each of your sheet tabs, paste a rotated version of the copied cells from a column to a row or from a row to a column, restrict find and replace to a range of cells and apply custom formatting for currencies, dates, and numbers.

Now it's easier to check the spelling of a Google Docs document or a Google Slides presentation. Just click the Tools menu, select Spelling and review each spelling suggestion. You can click "change", "change all", "ignore" or "add to dictionary". After performing an action, Google locates the next spelling mistake, so you don't have to manually find it.


Until now, you had to right-click each spelling mistake and select one of the options. Google Docs flags the mistakes with red underlines, so you can still fix them manually.

"The updated spell check lets you check the spelling of your entire document or presentation at once, instead of having to resolve misspellings individually," explains Google.

I've always wanted a tool that lets you highlight a text and quickly link to the top search results for that text. Now this feature is available in Google Docs and Google Slides: select some text, right-click and select "Link". Then you can pick one of top Google search results, one of your other documents or the headings/bookmarks that match the text selection.



Type something in the "link" box and Google will show results for the new text:


You can also use the keyboard shortcut (Ctrl+K) or use the link button from the toolbar.


{ via Google Drive's Google+ page }