Google Drive Blog
The latest news and updates from the Google Drive team.
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
Collaborate and edit anywhere with the updated Google Docs for Android
Wednesday, February 22, 2012
As I was sitting on the ferry commuting to Google’s
Sydney office
this morning, two thoughts occurred to me. First, Australia is beautiful. If you’ve never been here, you really should visit. And second, it’s amazing how productive I can be with just my Android phone and an Internet connection. I was responding to email, reading news articles, and editing documents--just like I do at the office. Only the view was better!
We want to give everyone the chance to be productive no matter where they are, so today we’re releasing a new update to the
Google Docs app for Android
. 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. We also added rich text formatting so you can do things like create a quick bullet list, add color to your documents, or just bold
something important
. Watch the new Google Docs app in action:
If you want to hear about the latest Docs news or send us feedback on the new app, visit
Google Docs on Google+
.
Gotta run--I’ve got another ferry to catch!
Posted by:
By Vadim Gerasimov, 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
Our team's new Google+ Page
Wednesday, February 15, 2012
As our product and team have evolved over the past few years, we’ve enjoyed sharing news and notes with you on this blog. In turn, you’ve voiced your experiences with our products via blog comments, forum posts, tweets, and more. Hearing from you every day motivates us to build better products - that’s why we wanted to give you another more interactive place to join in on the conversation.
Starting today, we’re launching a
new Google+ page
dedicated to Google Docs. We’ll share info about feature launches, tips and tricks, behind the scenes snapshots, and more. You’ll have opportunities to Hangout with us, too.
We hope that our Google+ page will give you a fun new environment to share your feedback, learn about our products, and most importantly, connect with our team and our community of Docs users. Later today, I'll be doing our first of five Hangouts with members of the team - visit our page and
add us to your circles
to find out how you can participate.
Posted by: Teresa Wu, Community Manager
January in Review: Styles, Sparklines, Google+ sharing, and more
Tuesday, February 7, 2012
One of the best things about working on web apps like Google Docs is that it gives us the flexibility to frequently bring you new features and improvements. Starting this month, we’re going to make some small changes to how we communicate what’s been happening in the world of Docs. Instead of writing blog posts for each and every minor update, we're going to try bundling them together monthly to give you a detailed overview of our favorite features and a short list of other notable changes to make sure you don't miss out on anything new.
On that note, we’ve got a bunch of new features that launched today, as well as some great things that improved over the month of January.
Customizable styles in documents
Giving your document consistent and beautiful formatting should be easy. Before today, if you wanted to update all the Subtitles in your document to look a particular way, you had to change each of them one at a time. That’s too many steps. Now you can
restyle
all your regular paragraphs, headings, or titles with just a couple clicks. For example, if you want to update all the Subtitles in your document to be a particular size, set one Subtitle to that size, select it, right click and choose
Update Subtitle to match selection
. This will change all the Subtitles already in your document and automatically update the style for any new Subtitles you create. Plus, with the new
Options
menu in the styles dropdown, you can set the current document’s styles as the default for new documents or you can load your default styles into the current document.
Sparklines in spreadsheets and more charting options
In Google spreadsheets, we’ve added more charting options and support for
sparklines
to make it easier to communicate data. The
new options
give you a bunch of tools to create more sophisticated charts including different Y-axes on either side of the chart, formatting options for the axis and title text, and all sorts of other customization for how your lines, bars, or pies are displayed. We’ve also added sparklines, which let you display line or bar charts inside of cells and are handy for presenting and comparing data in a simple, bite-sized way. In the example below, we’ve used sparklines to plot currency exchange rates over a 30-day period.
Sharing forms on Google+
Sharing the forms you create in Google Docs with the right people shouldn’t be a hassle. Today we added a
Google+ share
to the form editor so that you can share your forms directly with your circles with just a couple clicks.
And there’s more…
On top of today’s new features, here are some changes from January that you may have missed:
Adding images to your docs from a high quality stock photo gallery. Simply go to
Insert > Image
, select
Stock photos
, and then search for the images that you want.
A more streamlined format for document discussion notifications that batches multiple discussions into a single email.
Quickly opening and selecting items from specific menus with keyboard accelerators. For example, when using Google Chrome,
Ctrl+Option+E
on a Mac and
Alt+E
on Windows or Linux will open the
Edit
menu.
Copying and pasting via the context (right click) menu in documents when you have the
Chrome App
installed.
Easily adding Google drawings or Google Groups discussions to a Google Site from the
Insert
menu.
Progress bars while uploading files to Google Sites.
Searching for text inside of PDFs in your documents list using
Optical Character Recognition
.
If you’d like to learn more about what we’ve been up to in January, I’ll be doing a
Hangout On Air
later this week this to talk about these changes and listen to your feedback. Stop by our Community Manager
Teresa’s Google+ page
on
Thursday, February 9 at 12 p.m. EST
to tune in.
Posted by: Jeff Harris, Product Manager
Updates to Google Docs app for Android: Offline access and improved tablet experience
Wednesday, February 1, 2012
There may be times when you don’t have an Internet connection on your Android device, but you still want access to a file you’ve saved in Google Docs. Now you can select any file in Google Docs to make it available offline. So regardless of whether you’re connected to the internet, you’re always connected to those files.
Even better, Google Docs automatically updates your offline files when you’re on Wi-Fi. You can also manually update files anytime you have a data connection by opening the file or tapping ‘Update’ from the Offline section of the app.
Make file available offline
Update online file
Make file available offline
Update offline file
For those of you with Android tablets, we’ve also improved the Google Docs reading experience. Now, when you open a Google document on your tablet while online, you’ll get a high-resolution version of the document. Swipe left and right to flip between pages, or use the slider at the bottom to page ahead quickly.
New reading layout on Android tablet
You can learn more about
offline capabilities
and the
new reading layout
in our Help Center.
Whether you’re offline or online, these improvements will make it easier to be productive from anywhere.
Posted by: Freeman Liu, Software Engineer
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