Google Drive Blog
The latest news and updates from the Google Drive team.
Edit charts in Google spreadsheets with just a click
Monday, September 17, 2012
Charts tell the story of our data, so we often spend a lot of time getting the formatting just right. That’s why we wanted to make that process quicker and easier in Google spreadsheets. Instead of opening the chart editor dialog to make formatting changes, you can now
click directly
on the part of the chart you want to modify to change things like the colors, legend, and labels.
You can now also resize and move the chart around to make room for other components like axis labels and the legend. To do this, click the background of the chart and choose the
Move and Resize
option. You’ll then be able to drag the edges of the chart and move it around to allow things like the legend labels to all fit on one line, like in the example below.
(Before/After)
Once you’re done editing, you can switch to view mode by clicking the button in the top left corner of the chart, where you can click to see the value of data points and use other helpful interactive features.
We hope to add more charting features to this new quick edit experience over the coming months, so stay tuned.
Posted by: Hillel Maoz, Software Engineer
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
Google spreadsheets, now with discussions
Wednesday, September 5, 2012
Getting things done with others would be much easier if everyone was sitting right next to you. But since that’s rarely the case, we’re always updating Google Drive to make it easier to collaborate with others, no matter where you are or who you’re with.
Today we’re bringing the discussion functionality that’s already in
documents
and
presentations
to spreadsheets. If a cell has a comment in it, you'll see an orange triangle in the upper right corner and when you hover over the cell you'll see the full discussion.
The total number of comments are also tallied up at the bottom of the screen on the sheet tab, and hovering over the comment icon shows all the comments on that sheet.
And just like you’re used to with comments elsewhere, you can
+mention
someone to automatically include them in a discussion and send them a notification via email—and they can even reply to the comment without leaving their inbox.
Any comments that were created in spreadsheets before today are still available and saved as “Notes”. These are shown in your spreadsheet using a black triangle in the corner of the cell to differentiate them from the new discussion-style comments. You can also create new notes from the “Insert” menu if you need to leave a quick annotation on a cell.
We hope discussions makes working in spreadsheets with others more fun and productive, and we look forward to making even more improvements to collaboration in Google Drive.
Posted by Patrick Donelan, Software Engineer
Lock down cells with Protected Ranges in Google spreadsheets
Tuesday, August 7, 2012
Editing with others in real-time makes it easy to get stuff done in Google spreadsheets in only a matter of minutes. But with so many people working in the same space, it’s possible to modify a section that a collaborator didn’t intend to be touched. That’s why, today, we’re updating the
Named Ranges
feature in spreadsheets to let you also protect them.
To get started with Protected Ranges in a shared spreadsheet, highlight the cells you’d like to protect, right-click, and choose
Name and protect range
from the menu.
Click through the presentation below to see the feature in action.
Even more spreadsheet features added this month
Along with the arrival of protected ranges, you can now add colors and patterns when you apply cell borders in Google spreadsheets. We also updated find and replace to make it possible to search using patterns (also called
regular expressions
). For example, “^[A-Z]+” will find all the cells that start with uppercase letters.
As always, Google spreadsheets is getting better every day, so stay tuned for even more features and updates in the coming weeks.
Posted by: Joe Kaptur, Software Engineer
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
Labels
#SafeOnline
accessibility
add-ons
Android
app scripts
apps
attachments
avery
back to school
blind
braille
charts
chat
Chrome
Chrome extensions
chrome web apps
Cloud Connect
collaboration
comments
community
discussions
docs
docs editors
document list
documents
documents list
drawings
Drive
drivebacktoschool
easybib
education
enterprise
Faces of Docs
folders
forms
gmail
gone google
Google Apps Blog
Google Apps Script
Google Cloud Connect
google docs
Google Docs Viewer
google documents
google drive
Google Drive Blog
Google Pack
Google Sites
Google+
googlenew
Guest Post
hangout on air
help
holiday
images
iOS
Keep
letterfeed
low-vision
mailchimp
mobile
nanowrimo
OCR
office compatibility mode
offline
paperless
pdfs
photo
photos
presentations
product ideas
profiles
quickoffice
Reddit
research
save to drive
screen reader
scripts
security
sharing
sheet
sheets
shortcut
slides
spell check
spreadsheets
stock photos
storage
students
suggested edits
tables
teachers
team
templates
videos
Viewer
work
Archive
2016
Sep
May
Apr
Feb
Jan
2015
Dec
Nov
Oct
Jul
Mar
Feb
Jan
2014
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jun
Apr
Mar
Jan
2013
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2012
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
2011
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2010
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2009
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2008
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2007
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2006
Dec
Nov
Oct
Feed
Visit our site
Google Drive
Google Docs, Sheets, Slides
Google
on
Follow @googledrive
Give us feedback in our
Product Forum
.