Faster Spell Checking in Google Docs

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.

Google Docs Shows Link Suggestions

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 }

Google Docs Templates, Still Available

Google has recently updated the "Create" menu from Google Drive and removed the templates option from the menu. You can still find it if you visit this page.

Another workaround is to create a document, spreadsheet, form, drawing or presentation, click the "File" menu, select "New" and then "From template".

Maybe Google finds a way to integrate the templates section with the Google Drive apps, so that it doesn't open in a new tab.

Offline Google Slides

Google Slides is just another name for Google Presentations, but that's not actually new. The big news is that you can now use Google Slides offline to create, edit and run presentations. "Any new presentations or changes you make will be automatically updated when you get back online. So you can continue polishing slides on your next flight, and head to your upcoming presentation without worrying about whether there's going to be wifi."

The offline functionality is still limited to Chrome and requires the Google Drive app from the Chrome Web Store. If you've already enabled the offline support and use it for documents and spreadsheets, you don't need to do anything.

This table shows which Google Drive features are available when you're offline and you use Chrome for desktop or the mobile apps for iOS and Android. You can sync any file when you use the mobile apps, but the editing support is better in the desktop Chrome. You can also install the Google Drive app for Windows and Mac to sync the files that can't be edited online using Google Docs, Sheets, Slides and Drawings.

Google Sets, Still Available

Missing Google Sets? It's one of the first Google Labs projects and it was discontinued last year. Google Sets allowed you to generate lists of similar items by just typing a few examples.

The good news is that Google Sets is still available as a Google Sheets feature. Create a new spreadsheet in Google Drive, type mazda in A1 and honda in A2 (the first column), highlight the two cells and then press Ctrl (or Option for Mac) while clicking and dragging the small blue box from the lower-right corner to select additional cells where to place the Google Sets results.

Google Sets included 22 new car brands: BMW, Ford, Toyota and many others. You can also use Google Sets to quickly generate lists of dog breeds, U2 songs, French writers, tech sites and more.

{ Thanks, Philipp and Jérôme. }

Share Google Drive Files to Google+

Google Drive added a new feature that lets you share files to Google+, just like you can share them to Facebook and Twitter. Click the "share" button or right-click a file and select "share" twice, then click the Google+ icon.

Google displays thumbnails for documents, spreadsheets, drawings and music files, a player for presentations and videos and the description for archives. It's important to change the visibility options to "anyone with the link" or "public on the web".

You can also paste a Google Drive URL in a Google+ post and you'll the same thumbnails and players.

Google still doesn't do a good job at integrating Google Drive with other Google services. For example, you can't pick a Google Drive file (other than photos) when writing a Google+ post. You can't select a Google Drive file when composing a Gmail message and you can't upload files to Google Drive instead of sending them as attachments.

Microsoft's Hotmail (now called Outlook) has a clever feature that uploads large attachments and Office documents to SkyDrive, so it only sends the links.

{ Thanks, Herin. }

Docs, Sheets, Slides - Short Names for Google Drive Apps

Google Docs meant a lot of things: the service that allowed you to store files online, the online word processing app, the service that included online editors for documents, spreadsheets and presentations. Now Google Drive is the name of the file storage service and Google Docs is only the word processing app. Sheets replaces Google Spreadsheets, while Slides replaces Google Presentations.

The new names are shorter and less generic, so they're better suited for shortcuts. Chrome OS already includes shortcuts to the apps, but you can manually install them in Chrome - Docs, Sheets, Slides. The Chrome apps only create a new document, spreadsheet or presentation. If you're using other browsers, you can simply bookmark: New document, New spreadsheet, New presentation.

	Google	Microsoft	Apple	LibreOffice
documents	Docs	Word	Pages	Writer
spreadsheets	Sheets	Excel	Numbers	Calc
presentations	Slides	PowerPoint	Keynote	Impress

Select Text With Similar Formatting in Google Docs

Google Docs added a cool new feature that lets you select all the text with similar formatting, so you can quickly make some changes. It's like "find and replace" for formatting.

For example, you can right-click a word from a text that uses the "Heading 1" style, click "select all matching text" and change the style to "Heading 2". Unlike Microsoft Word, Google Docs doesn't select the text that has additional formatting applied over a style.

"Clicking Select all matching text will look for parts of your document that match your selection's text style — its font, font weight, size, color, and whether it's been bolded, italicized, or underlined, or struck-through. It will not take into account paragraph styles, such as line spacing or alignment," explains Google.

Now it's time for Google to add "paste and match", which lets you paste some text without having to worry about formatting. Now you need to use the "paint format" button.

{ via Google Drive Blog }

Google Docs No Longer Exports Files in the Old Microsoft Office Formats

Google Docs changed the Microsoft Office format for exporting documents and switched to Office Open XML. "The built-in exporting feature from Google Docs to Microsoft Office will now allow users to download Google documents as modern Office formats (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx), as opposed to the older formats (.doc, .xls, .ppt) that were standard in Office 97-2003. For users who still use Office 97-2003, we recommend installing the free compatibility plugin from Microsoft, which will allow them to open modern Office file types," informs Google. The same feature will be added to Google Apps on October 1st.

Google Docs can still import Office 97-2003 files, so it's not clear why the modern Office formats weren't included as an additional optional in the "download as" menu. For some reason, if you use the "email as attachment" feature and select "Microsoft Word/Excel/Powerpoint", you can still get the old formats.

The Register predicts that a lot of business users will complain. "The move is troublesome not only for stick-in-the-muds who haven't upgraded their Office installs: it's perfectly feasible that much of a large business' corporate memory will be in the old binary formats (along with spreadsheets containing large, custom macros that nobody's rewritten in the newer versions yet)." Google Docs will continue to import existing files and there's a compatibility pack for old Office versions, but that doesn't mean corporate users won't complain.

Find Public Google Docs

Google Docs and Google Drive don't offer the option to find public files, but you can do that using Google search. Now that the Google Docs robots.txt file allows search engines to index most of the public files, you should be able to find them, assuming that there are some links that point to them.

Search engines only index the files that are "public on the Web". By default, files are private, but you can change the visibility from the "Share" box.

Here are some useful queries that let you find public Google Drive/Docs files (you can append some keywords to the queries):

* [site:docs.google.com/document/d] - find text documents

* [site:docs.google.com/presentation/d] - find presentations

* [site:docs.google.com/drawings/d] - find drawings

* [site:docs.google.com/file/d] - find files: images, videos, PDF files, Microsoft Office documents and more (you should click "repeat the search with the omitted results included" since there are many files with similar titles)

* [site:docs.google.com/folder/d] - find folders (collections of files and other folders)

* [site:docs.google.com/open] - find other documents, folders and files (the links redirect to other URLs)

Public spreadsheets and forms can't be indexed by search engines.

Offline Editing, Back in Google Docs

What's old is new again. Back in 2008, Google announced offline support powered by Gears in Google Docs. At that time, you could view and edit text documents offline in Firefox and Internet Explorer.

Four years later, you can once again edit documents offline. Gears has been discontinued in 2010, the Google Docs integration has been removed and now the offline support is native. Unfortunately, it only works in Chrome and you also need to install a Chrome app.

When you're offline, Google shows a message and a link that lets you switch to the offline Google Drive/Docs interface. You can only view documents and spreadsheets and only edit documents. Google Docs features that require an Internet connection are removed when you're offline, but most of the basic features are available. Some of the missing features: sharing files, downloading them, printing files, revision history, inserting images and drawings, the research sidebar and the translation feature.

Once you're online again, Google Docs shows a message and a link for switching to the regular Google Docs interface. The transition is not seamless, since you have to load a new page.

"To start editing offline, first set up offline access from the gear icon at the top of your Documents List. Then, next time you lose your connection you'll be able to either open a document from your list of offline files or create a new one. Any changes you've made while disconnected will sync with the online version in your Documents List when you regain your connection to the Internet," explains Google.

Research Sidebar in Google Docs

Google Docs has a new feature that lets you find more information about some of the words from a document and also add content from the Web. The research sidebar can be enabled from the Tools menu or by using the shortcut Ctrl+Alt+R (Cmd +Opt+R for Mac). You can also select one or more words from the document, right click and select "Research" from the menu.

The sidebar includes the top Google search results, image search results, facts, maps, reviews and famous quotes. Click the icon from the search box to restrict the results to images and quotes.

When you mouse over a Web search results, you can preview it, insert a link or cite it. For example, you can select "Google" from a document, press Ctrl+Alt+R, mouse over the top result and click "insert link" to add a link to Google's homepage.

Restrict the results to images to quickly add an image using drag and drop. Google also has a specialized search engine for quotes and you can also add them to your document.

Search for a famous person, a place, a concept or any other entity and Google will display a list of attributes above the search results.

Maybe Google will also add features like translation and definitions to the research sidebar, so you can quickly find them.

{ Thanks, Scott and Evan. }

Google Docs Experiments With a Font Manager

Google Docs tests another great feature: a font manager that will help you customize the list of fonts and add new fonts from the Google Web Fonts project. You can sort the fonts by popularity, by name or the date added and restrict the fonts to serif, sans serif, display and handwriting.

There's also a search box that lets you find a font. For example, you can use the advanced search tool from the Web Fonts project, find your favorite font, then quickly add it to the Google Docs font list.

You can try the new feature using this template (update: the document has been removed). Just click "use this template" and you'll create a new document that opens in an updated version of the Google Docs editor. To access the font manager, click the font dropdown from the toolbar and select "add fonts" at the bottom of the list.

{ Thanks, abarjames1. }

Google Docs Tests Quick Apply Feature

There's a really cool feature that could be available soon in Google Docs. Just press Alt+/ or click the "?" icon from the toolbar and you can type a few letter from the name of a Google Docs command and select it. For example, you can type "in" and select "increase indent" or "insert row above". It's much faster than finding the command in the Google Docs menus.

You can try the new feature using this template (update: the document has been removed). Just click "use this template" and you'll create a new document that opens in an updated version of the Google Docs editor.

{ Thanks, Jediah. }

Google Drive References in Google Docs for Android

The Google Drive launch is not far away and there's more evidence for this in the Google Docs app for Android.

Daniel Baker noticed that the Google Docs app for Android can handle the links that start with "https://drive.google.com".

The Android app includes many references to Google Drive, which is just a new name for Google Docs. There's a file named GoogleDriveSharedPreferences.xml, a special icon file for Google Drive and there's a modal dialog that's displayed when you migrate to Google Drive.

The Google Drive rebranding could be more about positioning Google Docs as an online file storage service. You can already upload any file to Google Docs and there's an Android app for managing your files, but there's no desktop app for syncing files and there's no integration with third-party services. Another issue is that 1 GB of free storage is not enough.

According to The Next Web, Google Drive could launch next week and offer 5 GB of free storage. There are apps for Windows, Mac, phones and tablets, so you can access files on your computer from anywhere.

{ Thanks, Daniel. }

It's Easier to Organize Files in Google Docs

Google Docs now lets you move a file to a folder without using the Docs list. Just click the "folder" icon next to the title of the file and you can pick one or more folders. This works for documents, spreadsheets, presentations, drawings, PDF files and any other files.

Google uses the word "collection" instead of "folder" and that's confusing for both Google Docs users and Google's engineers. When you mouse over the new icon, the tooltip reads "folders". Google Docs collections are actually hierarchical labels because you can place a file in multiple collections.

{ Thanks, Cougar. }

Google Docs and Clipboard Access

A major annoyance when you use web apps that include a rich text editor is that they don't have access to the clipboard. Browsers prevent web pages from reading the clipboard or replacing its text and that's a security feature, but the downside is that apps like Google Docs can't include functional options for copy, cut or paste in the interface. Of course, you can use the browser's features, including keyboard shortcuts like Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V, but not everyone will do that.

Let's see how Google Docs handles this issue. If you use Internet Explorer, cut/copy/paste are available in the Edit menu and in the contextual menu. When you use these features, a browser dialog asks for permission. Annoyingly, IE will ask for permission again when you open a new document or reload the page.

In Firefox, cut/copy/paste are removed from the contextual menu, but they're still available in the Edit menu. Try to click one of these options and Google Docs will ask you to use keyboard shortcuts. Google Toolbar for Firefox included an option that addressed this issue, but Google Toolbar is no longer available for Firefox 4+. Fortunately, there are some workarounds.

What happens when you use Chrome? Select some text, right-click, choose "copy" and Google Docs shows the following message: "Copying and pasting requires the free Google Docs web app. This lets us access your clipboard so you can cut, copy and paste." To install the app you don't need to open a new page, but you'll have to reload Google Docs to use the new permissions.

While browsers don't allow JavaScript access to the clipboard without permission, there are workarounds that use Flash, but they're limited to copying some text to the clipboard.

For now, the best thing you can do is to use keyboard shortcuts (Ctrl+C for copy, Ctrl+X for cut, Ctrl+V for paste) or install the Google Docs app in Chrome.

Smart Spell Checker in Google Docs

Google's search engine has a great spell checker because it doesn't rely on dictionaries and because it's context-sensitive. The smart spell checker from Google Search is now available in Google Docs.

When you type "its", no English spell checker will ever find a mistake, but a smart spell checker will flag it when you add more words: "its a great idea". While "its" is actually an English word, it should be replaced with "it's" in that particular context.

The updated spell checking feature from Google Docs is more precise and it will usually show a single suggestion when you right-click a word that's highlighted. Another advantage is that it works well when you type proper nouns.

"Suggestions are constantly evolving. As Google crawls the web, we see new words, and if those new words become popular enough they'll automatically be included in our spell checker—even pop culture terms, like Skrillex," explains Google. That's the great thing about web services: they evolve faster and they can become smarter by bringing more data. Just like Gmail's spam filter is better than the spam filter of a desktop mail client and Google's online speech-to-text engine is better than any offline speech recognition software, the smart spell checker from Google Search and Google Docs (originally available in Google Wave) is better than any dictionary-based spell checker. There are some downsides (it doesn't work offline and everything you type is sent to Google's servers), but all Google services and software could be improved by switching to the online spell checker.

Unfortunately, the example I used back in 2009, when Google Wave added a context-sensitive spell checker, no longer works today. When you type: "Their coming too sea if its reel" in Google Docs, only "too" and "sea" are flagged, while no misspelled word is flagged in Google Search.

{ Thanks, Techdows. }

Google Drive Will Support Third Party Apps

Back in November 2010, a comment from the Google Docs source code revealed some new features that will be available: third party apps, Cloud Print integration and sync.

It turns out that the upcoming Google Drive release will add support for third party apps and Google will also include a SDK for developers. This way, you'll be able to open the files stored in Google Drive using non-Google apps. The Google Docs source code mentions "SDK" several times in connection with Google Drive and the "open with" feature.



There's also an interesting message that suggests Google Drive will integrate even more with Gmail: "Say goodbye [to] email attachments and hello to real time collaboration. Drag anything shared with you to My Drive for easy access."

In a recent article, Wall Street Journal reported that GDrive "is expected to launch in the coming weeks or months and will be free for most consumers and businesses. Google will charge a fee to those who want to store a large amount of files."

Most likely, Google Drive is an important upgrade to Google Docs that will detach the online storage service from the Google Docs apps and will make it more useful by offering more free storage, syncing apps and integration with web apps developed by other companies.

Google Docs for Android Adds Real-Time Collaboration

When Google released the Android app for Google Docs, the application didn't include many features that weren't available from the browser. The latest updates made the app more useful: there's a better tablet interface, offline access to your documents and now you can edit documents collaboratively.

The most powerful Google Docs feature (real-time collaboration) is now available on Android devices and you don't have to switch to the desktop interface. You can see the changes in real-time and all you edits are saved almost instantly. While the Android editor lacks many features that are available in the desktop version, you can use rich text formatting: bold the text, change the color, create lists, indent paragraphs, undo and redo the changes.


"We've brought the collaborative experience from Google Docs on the desktop to your Android device. You'll see updates in real time as others type on their computers, tablets and phones, and you can just tap the document to join in. We also updated the interface to make it easier to work with your documents on the go. For example, you can pinch to zoom and focus on a specific paragraph or see the whole document at a glance," informs Google.

Suddenly, the mobile web app pales when compared to the native app and that's probably the reason why the Google Docs mobile site promotes the app every time you go there.