Google Drive Blog
The latest news and updates from the Google Drive team.
Research tool updates: quick access to your stuff in Docs, Slides & Drawings
Tuesday, October 30, 2012
A few months ago, the
research tool
was added to Docs to make it easier for you to search for and add web results, images, quotations, maps, and articles to your document. Starting today, the research pane is also available in Slides and Drawings, and searches now include your stuff in addition to web results.
With the research pane, you can now quickly find and use your stuff: include part of a presentation stored in Drive, insert an image from your Picasa albums, or grab a quote from a friend’s Google+ post. (Google Apps customers will only see web results in their research panes.)
(Previewing and inserting a spreadsheet from Google Drive)
Posted by: Vivek Agarwal, Software Engineer
One click to Docs, Sheets, and Slides
Tuesday, October 23, 2012
Google Drive is a place where you can create, share, collaborate and keep all your stuff. Of course, there are times you want to start a new document right away–say, to take notes in class or prepare a last-minute presentation for your boss.
To make it even easier for you to create stuff quickly, Documents, Spreadsheets, and Presentations–now called
Docs
,
Sheets
, and
Slides
–are available as apps in the
Chrome Web Store
. Once installed, shortcuts to these apps will appear when you open a new tab in Chrome.
If you use a
Chromebook
, you’ll see Docs, Sheets, and Slides in your apps list by default following the next update to Chrome OS in a few weeks.
Posted by Jonathan Rochelle, Director of Product Management
Google Drive is the new home for all your Google Docs and more. Get started.
Monday, September 17, 2012
Several months ago, we
launched Google Drive
: one place to create, collaborate, share and keep all your stuff. If you’ve used Docs in the past, Google Drive is the new home for all your files and folders including your Google documents, spreadsheets, and presentations.
This means all your files that were previously stored in Google Docs will now be available in Google Drive. If you haven’t already started using Google Drive, you’ll see a message to try it out the next time you visit docs.google.com.
With Google Drive, you’ll get access to new features.
Access everywhere, every device.
Drive comes with
desktop and mobile apps
, making it much easier to upload, sync and access your stuff from any device. Get Drive for
Android
and
iOS
and you can create and edit documents, open and share files, and upload photos and videos.
Find your stuff faster.
Look for files by keyword and Drive searches everything — even text within scanned documents or images without any text at all. Drive also comes with a simplified navigation to help you better organize your files, and there's a new grid view to help you see thumbnails at a glance.
Work with more apps in Drive.
Google Drive is integrated with a growing number of
third-party apps
, so you can do things like send faxes, edit videos and create website mockups all in one place.
Just in case you’re not quite ready for change, you can click the “Temporarily use the old look” button on the pop-up message, but eventually all Docs users will be switched to Drive.
You may also have noticed a few other changes in the Docs world. First, you’re reading this post on the brand new googledrive.blogspot.com. But don’t worry--if you were subscribed to googledocs.blogspot.com, you’ll still automatically get all of our updates in your feed.
Our social sites have also made the switch to Drive, so if you aren’t already, follow us on
plus.google.com/+GoogleDrive
and
twitter.com/googledrive
to stay up on the latest news and updates from our team.
Visit the help center to
learn more
.
Posted by Scott Johnston, Group Product Manager
Google Drive: Updates for iOS and Android
Monday, September 10, 2012
(
Cross-posted from the
Official Google Blog
)
Every day, more and more people are choosing to live online and
get things done in the cloud
. Helping to make this experience as seamless as possible,
Google Drive
is one place where you can create, share and keep all your stuff. Drive is available on the web, as well as
Mac
,
Windows
and
Android
and
iOS
.
Updates for iOS
Starting today, if you’re using the
Drive app
on your iOS device you can also
edit
Google documents, just as you can with the
Android app
. From your iPhone or iPad, you can
create a new document, edit an existing one or format text
. And just like on your computer, you’ll be able to see other people’s edits instantly as they’re made.
You’ll also notice other new improvements to the iOS Drive app. For example, you can now view Google
presentations
on your iPhone or iPad, including speaker notes, full-screen mode and the ability to swipe between slides. You can also
create new folders, move files into folders and upload stuff
(like photos and videos) from your device directly in the Drive app.
Updates for Android
We’re also updating the Drive app for Android phones and tablets today. You can now add comments, reply to existing comments and view tables in your Google documents. And you’ll have the same new abilities to view presentations and organize your stuff as your friends with iPhones do.
More to come...
Looking ahead, we have plenty more planned for the Drive mobile apps—including native editing and real-time collaboration for Google spreadsheets. Stay tuned.
Get Drive in the
App Store
for your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch and visit the
Play Store
to get the latest on your Android phone or tablet. To learn more about Google Drive, visit
drive.google.com/start
.
Posted by Anil Sabharwal, Senior Product Manager
450+ new ways to make your Google presentations pop
Wednesday, August 1, 2012
Good design is an important part of getting your point across in a presentation. Over time we’ve added a bunch of features to help you bring a little something extra to your decks, like
slide transitions and animations
,
thousands of free stock photos
, and a
growing collection of templates
.
Today, creating eye-catching presentations gets even easier, with more than 450 new fonts to choose from. (flip through the presentation below to see them in action)
To browse and select new fonts, click on
Add fonts
from the bottom of the fonts dropdown in the toolbar. This will take you to the menu of all available fonts, where you can pick the ones you want to use.
Any fonts that you select will get automatically added to your fonts list so it’s easy to find them later.
Plus, fonts that you’ve already added to
Google documents
will automatically appear in your presentations font list too.
So next time you're working on a presentation, jazz it up with some
Calligrafitti
,
Indie Flower
,
Short Stack
, or hundreds of other new choices.
Posted by Erin Rosenbaum, Software Engineer
Offline updates and a quick look back at June
Friday, July 13, 2012
Summer brings fun in the sun (in our hemisphere, at least) and a bunch of updates to Google Drive. A few weeks ago at Google I/O, we
announced
a couple of highly requested features: the ability to edit Google documents offline and a
Drive app for iOS
.
When you
enable Docs offline
in Google Drive, you can create & edit Google documents and view Google spreadsheets, without being connected to the internet. Today we updated the offline experience so it looks the same as when you’re online - except it’s filtered to show just your offline docs. Here’s an extra tip: if you want to preview which files are available offline, select
More > Offline Docs
in the left navigation pane while you’re still connected to the web. This update will roll out to all Drive users over the next few days.
In the past month we’ve also made several other improvements like:
updates
to Google Apps Script including a
standalone script editor
, the ability to create richer user interfaces, options to easily store your application’s data, and support for publishing scripts to the Chrome Web Store
expanded language support in the
documents and presentations spellchecker
to include German, French and Italian
the ability to print documents, spreadsheets, and presentations to any cloud connected printer with Google Cloud Print from any browser
up to 400pt font support in documents and presentations
copying and pasting images
from your desktop into a document or presentation
an easy way to edit or open links from text by right clicking on them
Posted by Owen Merkling, Software Engineer
Google Docs: May in Review
Wednesday, June 6, 2012
April showers bring May flowers, along with a bunch of new features and updates to Google Docs. In May we launched the
research pane
which makes it easy to look things up and insert quotes, images, and maps into documents without ever having to open a new browser tab. And we also made some other improvements over the last few weeks, like:
the addition of five new themes (Color Strip, Inspiration Board, Lesson Plan, Steps, and Wave) to Google Presentations.
the ability to search for scholarly works in the
research pane
.
making it possible to put a Google Doc in a folder without leaving it by clicking on the folder icon to the right of the star in the toolbar.
teaching the
new spellchecker
a few more languages (Spanish, Dutch, and Finnish).
adding Alt+Enter (Option+Enter on Mac) as a keyboard shortcut for opening links. Simply place your cursor on a link and press the shortcut to open the link in a new tab.
the introduction of
libraries and versions
to Google Apps Script to make it easier for developers to organize, share and reuse their code.
Posted by Jason Ganetsky, Software Engineer
Spell checking powered by the web
Wednesday, March 21, 2012
One of my early projects at Google was to improve the suggestions that are made when a query is misspelled in Google Search. The neat thing about that system is that it’s adaptive: our suggestions get smarter and smarter based on the words
Googlebot
sees as it explores the web.
But search isn’t the only place where I make spelling mistakes! And that got me wondering: could we take this adaptive technology and use it to make spell checking better in other places?
The answer is yes. To prove it, today we’re launching an update to spell checking in documents and presentations that grows and adapts with the web, instead of relying on a fixed dictionary. This update has a few big advantages over traditional spell checkers:
Suggestions are contextual. For example, the spell checker is now smart enough to know what you mean if you type “Icland is an icland.”
Contextual suggestions are made even if the misspelled word is in the dictionary. If you write “Let’s meat tomorrow morning for coffee” you’ll see a suggestion to change “meat” to “meet."
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.
This new spell checker is available for English documents and presentations, but we plan to bring it to more languages soon. We’re really excited to give you a spelling system that continuously gets better. We hope it will make writing more efficient and enjoyable for you.
Posted by Yew Jin Lim, Software Engineer
Improved discussions, search scanned text in PDFs, and more
Tuesday, March 6, 2012
Fresh on the heels of adding
discussions to Google presentations
and the ability to
edit within the Google Docs Android app
, we’ve been hard at work on a few other new features to enhance your Google Docs experience.
All your comments--in one tidy place
We just added the discussions feature to Google
drawings
, and today we’re making it even easier to see a log of all of the comments that have been made whether you’re using drawings, documents, or presentations. Just click on the “Comments” button in the upper right corner of the editor to see a complete history of your discussions. You can reply in line, resolve or re-open comments, link directly to a comment, or change notification settings--without ever leaving the “Comments” menu.
Better text search for PDFs and images
Last month, we launched a feature to let you search for text inside the PDFs in your documents list. Now, using the same
optical character recognition technology
, you can search for and copy highlighted text when you open a scanned PDF, like a fax or hotel receipt.
It’s not just stuff in your documents list: we’ve also made text in PDFs and images uploaded to Google Sites searchable.
And that’s not all...
In addition to the features that were released today, over the last few weeks we’ve also made a bunch of other changes that you may have noticed. Now you can:
Add
custom Javascript and CSS
to your Google Sites
See full names in document and presentation comments (instead of showing email addresses)
Use keyboard shortcuts for navigating between table cells in documents
Cancel running scripts from the Google Apps Script editor
Add
donut charts
and error bars in spreadsheets
Posted by Ian Kilpatrick, Software Engineer
Great presentations start with great discussions
Wednesday, February 22, 2012
Back in October, we released a preview of a
brand new version
of Google presentations, designed to make it easier to share ideas with others. We've been busy polishing the app based on your feedback and today we're excited to enable the new editor for all new presentations.
We’re also introducing a number of performance improvements and making it easier for you to collaborate by bringing the discussion feature you’ve used in
documents
to presentations.
With discussions in presentations, you’ll be able to: Comment on a shape or an entire slide to give context to your discussion. Send an email notification by adding someone to a comment.
Resolve comments to let collaborators know that they’ve been addressed, and to reduce clutter in your presentation. Plus, to make it easy to get feedback without giving up control of who can make changes, you can now give others the ability to comment on (but not edit) your presentation.
If you’d like to convert existing presentations to the new version of the editor, create a new presentation and import your slides by selecting
Import slides
from the
File
menu. To learn more about how to import your old presentations, check out
these instructions
.
With discussions and real time collaboration, we hope you’ll love working together in Google presentations. We’re rolling out these changes slowly over the next several hours. If you’d like to give us your feedback live, we’ll be hosting a Hangout tomorrow at 2:30 EST to talk about the latest updates to presentations. Stop by
our Google+ page
to find out how to participate.
Posted by: Michael Thomas, Software Engineer
Try Google presentations. No login required.
Friday, December 9, 2011
We recently launched a new version of
Google presentations
with many new features to help you create beautiful presentations together. We’ve added the new editor to our
Docs demos
to make it easier to test drive your presentation building skills.
Check out the new animations and transitions, get artsy with drawings, and show off your masterpiece to a friend or colleague. You can share the link in the demo with others and work on the same presentation together. No login required. No Google account needed. Just go to
docs.google.com/demo
to take it for a spin.
The new Google presentations continues to gradually roll out to all users. You can try it in the demo and if you like it, you can
enable it
in your Docs settings.
Posted by: Sarah Cooper, User Experience Designer
A fresh start for Google presentations
Tuesday, October 18, 2011
A year and a half ago, we released completely new
document, spreadsheet and drawing editors
. Google Docs has been picking up speed ever since with more than 60 new features and millions of new users. Today we’re rounding out the suite by previewing a new version of presentations with faster collaboration and more features.
A collaborative approach
Presentations are made to be shared—whether it’s presenting your thesis to your professors or inspiring colleagues at a conference. And the best presentations are made
together
, collaborating with others to build a compelling story that captivates your audience. Creating presentations together is easy because you can:
See exactly what others are working on with colorful presence markers
Edit with your team members simultaneously from different locations
Use revision history to see who made changes or to revert to earlier versions
Say hello, start a conversation or share new ideas using built-in chat
More than 50 new features
In the new presentations, we’ve added many of your most requested features, including:
Transitions
to move between slides with simple fades or spicier 3D effects
Animations
to add emphasis or to make your slides more playful
New themes
to create beautiful presentations with distinct visual styles
Drawings
to build new designs, layouts, and flowcharts within a presentation
Rich tables
with merged cells and more options for adding style to your data
What’s next
We’re gradually rolling out the new presentations. To get an early start, click on the gear icon in your document list, and select
Document settings
. Then, from the
editing tab
, check the box to “Create new presentations using the latest version of the presentation editor.” Learn more about
getting started
with the new presentation editor over at our Help Center.
Many of the new features were built using technologies that are only available in
modern browsers
. If you’re using an older browser you’ll be able to view, but not edit, the new presentations.
With today’s launch, the Google Docs suite is now built on a single, solid foundation. Now that the groundwork is in place, you can expect more useful and collaborative features, delivered faster than ever before.
Posted by:
Steven Saviano, Software Engineer
This week in Docs and Sites: A spreadsheets shortcuts menu, PPTX support and more
Wednesday, July 20, 2011
This week, we’re introducing a number of enhancements to Google Docs and Sites: a spreadsheets shortcuts menu, support for PPTX conversion, a new RSS gadget, and improved mobile rendering for Sites.
Spreadsheets shortcuts
Although shortcuts have long been available in your Google spreadsheets, we've added a shortcuts menu to spreadsheets to make them easier to find -- saving you even more time. Hit
Ctrl
+
/
(or
Cmd
+
/
on a Mac) to pull up the list of shortcuts and learn new ways to sharpen your spreadsheet skills. Remember that shortcuts can vary depend on the operating system and browser you're using -- the example below is the menu you’d see if you were using a Chrome browser on a Mac.
Support for conversion of PPTX files to Google presentations
Starting today, you can convert PPTX files to Google presentations by either uploading the file from your desktop or converting the file from your documents list. Just follow the same
simple steps
as you normally would when converting files to Google Docs formats.
Better customization for your RSS Gadget in Sites
We’ve also added a new RSS gadget for Google Sites to our “Featured” gallery.
The new RSS gadget gives you complete control over the appearance of the gadget: You can customize any aspect of the feed, including font, color, size, number of items to display, and post length.
To set your gadget, go to
Insert > More Gadgets > Featured
, and look for
RSS Feed
.
Improved mobile rendering
After we released our
initial
version of Google Sites automatic mobile rendering, you enabled the option for over 50,000 sites, making it clear that you’re looking for a better way to easily publish content for mobile devices.
Based on what you’ve told us, we’re adding the additional behaviors to make automatic mobile rendering on Google Sites even better, including:
Images and header logos automatically scale in mobile mode
Gadgets and text boxes have widths that fit mobile devices
Pages with multi-column layouts stack columns vertically on mobile
Before
After
Thanks for continuing to let us know what you think about our products -- these changes wouldn’t be possible without you.
Posted by: Rajiv Bammi, Software Engineer
Demo Slam! Epic Docs Animation
Wednesday, December 22, 2010
If you’re reading this post, you’ve probably seen your fair share of
Google Docs videos
featured on this blog. Well, we have one more to show you this year, created entirely with Google Docs, demonstrating the power of nothing but the web -- and it just might be our favorite yet.
Google introduced
Demo Slam
in October 2010 as a way to turn traditionally boring tech demonstrations into out-of-this-world displays of technology. A couple of weeks ago, three animators worked together for three days in three different cities to create a
Google Docs demo slam
using Google presentations and drawings. Take a look:
If you like what you see,
vote for “Epic Docs Animation.”
Let the Slam begin!
Posted by: Tu Uthaisri, Google Creative Lab
Tips & Tricks: Enhancing your Presentations with Incremental Reveal
Monday, August 23, 2010
Today’s blogpost is in a different format, a Google presentation about how incremental reveal can make your presentations better by improving their flow.
Check out the difference by comparing the presentation below with and without incremental reveal. Start by clicking play to view the presentation without incremental reveal. Then click on the "open in new window" button to see the full presentation with incremental reveals in action.
You'll notice how the presentation flows more smoothly and is easier to follow.
Posted by: Bryan Carroll, Consumer Operations Strategist
Tips & Tricks: Enhancing your presentations with Google drawings
Tuesday, June 15, 2010
In April the we
launched
the new Google drawings editor. I use Google drawings to enhance my Google presentations by building dynamic and informative images in drawings and copying them over to the presentation I’m making. Read on for some tips on how to use drawings to make a better presentation.
Expressing ideas using diagrams from the template gallery
Google recently launched the template gallery for drawings. When I need to express an idea with a diagram, this is a great first place to look. Diagrams can express
relationships
,
organizations
,
processes
, and other ideas that are difficult to show in words.
For more information on adding, searching for, and rating templates, check out our
blog post
on the template gallery.
Giving your text boxes some style
Sometimes when I need to get a point across, I find it’s easier to do when I surround it with color. With Google drawings, I encapsulate my thoughts in any number of shapes. Drawings lets me add text to pretty much any shape by double clicking on the shape.
After I type text into the box, I use the formatting palette to make the point stand out.
Enhancing images to highlight a point
Every so often I need to include a chart, screenshot, or image and highlight a specific point that I want to discuss. Using drawings, I add pointers and boxes to overlay a chart, screenshot, or image in order to draw the viewers eye to what I’d like to call out.
To do this I use the
Insert > Image
option and load whatever image I want to work with onto my canvas.
Then I use either the arrow line or a shape to highlight my point. To overlay shapes, I set the background color to transparent so that the image below is still visible.
Copying my drawing into a presentation
Once I’ve finished using drawings to create my visuals, I copy it onto a slide in my presentation. To do this, I go to the
Web Clipboard
in my drawing and select
Copy entire drawing to web clipboard
.
Once the drawing is in my web clipboard, I go to my presentation and select the slide that I want to drop my drawing into. Then, I click on the
Web Clipboard
icon and select the drawing from the list.
Once it’s on the slide I can re-size it to the best fit. I can even make edits to the drawing from within the presentation, by double clicking on the drawing and opening the embedded drawing editor.
Posted by: Bryan Carroll, Consumer Operations Strategist
Template spotlight: Gift tags
Thursday, December 24, 2009
Once you've bought all your gifts and wrapped them, the last step is to label them. The
holiday gift tag (string of lights theme)
and
holiday gift tag (snowflake theme)
templates are perfect for adding that final touch. Simply customize the labels and print them out.
If you're looking for more themes, Avery Dennison also has some
great gift tag templates
to choose from.
Posted by: Peter Harbison, Product Marketing Manager
Template spotlight: Gift shopping list
Tuesday, December 22, 2009
Keeping track of gifts can be overwhelming, especially when you're buying and delivering gifts for people in a lot of different places. If you haven't done all of your holiday shopping or deliveries yet, check out the
holiday gift shopping list template
. You can reference the list on the go from your mobile phone and update it from any computer.
Posted by: Peter Harbison, Product Marketing Manager
Co-editor presence for Google Docs presentation slides and elements
Monday, December 14, 2009
Most of you know that when you co-edit a Google Docs spreadsheet, you can see the cells other people are editing. That presence information helps you simultaneously edit without stepping on each others' toes.
Today, we launched real time presence to Google Docs presentations as well. Now, when editing a presentation with a co-editor, you can see which slides he is editing, and if he is editing the same slide, then you can see which element -- text box, shape, image, video, etc -- he is editing.
Happy collaborating, and we'd love your feedback on
our forum
and
ideas page
.
Posted by: Roshni Malani, Software Engineer
Create and embed presentations on Ning
Monday, September 14, 2009
Last week, Ning launched a new feature that lets any Ning network
add social applications
. Ning Apps include a Google Docs presentation app, which means you're now able to embed a Google Docs presentation on your Ning social network. This makes it easy to add text, images, and even videos to your profile.
For those of you unfamiliar with Ning, it's social network platform that lets users build their own social networks. Who might benefit from an embedded presentation on their profile? A small business owner might want to post an overview of their service, a thought leader might want to post a presentation from a recently delivered talk, or a teacher might want to post a lecture from a class or a lesson plan.
Our Ning application was built on
OpenSocial
, an open standard for building social applications across the web. Last year, we
launched this same app
on LinkedIn.
Posted by: Praveen Vutukuru, Software Engineer, Google Docs
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