Enterprise Features

HUGE List of Amazing Things You Didn’t Know Google Docs Could Do

by Paul Rudo on 17/01/11 at 9:54 pm

I recently had a chance to speak with the team at Google Docs, and asked them if they had any “insider tips” that I could share with my readers. Their response was much more than I could have ever hoped for.

Who knew you could do so much with these free tools?

In Google documents specifically, there are some great little features beyond the real-time character-by-character collaboration that you mentioned earlier. Here are a few:

• Comments/chat/presence – Comments are made on the right side of the document but you are also able to reply and create threads of comments within comments. In addition, you can chat without having to toggle between windows and know who else is in the document with you in the upper right hand side of the window.
• Translate - You can translate words within a document, or an entire document, into over 40 languages. To translate an entire document, simply click Tools > Translate document, and select the language into which you’d like to translate the document. Google Docs translates the document using Google Translate. Once the translation is ready, you can choose to replace the original document with the translation or create a new document with the translated version.
• Auto-saving – While there is a “save now” button up at the top, you don’t actually have to use it. Google documents automatically save changes into the cloud.
• Mobile editing – Now you can edit that important memo while you’re on the bus or train or create and collaborate on a group proposal from the bleacher seats of the football game. To get started visit docs.google.com in a broswer on your iPhone, iPad or Android device and select the document you want to edit. Then when you’re viewing it, press the Edit button to switch to the mobile editor. Check out this video for more details.
• New charts – The charts editor is designed to help you create the chart you need in just a few clicks by suggesting recommended charts, matches your data labels and headers, auto selects colors, has a full size preview pane and more. Annotated time-lines, organizational charts, gauges, our popular motion chart (which makes it easy to visualize data changing over time) and more to are now available in Google Docs. Give the new charts editor a try at goo.gl/newcharts and check out this video.
• Revision history – In the new revision history interface, changes are color-coded based on each collaborator, making it easy to tell what has been added or deleted.. To see it, go to File > See revision history. Click on a time stamp in the right column to see what changes were made at a given time or use the arrow keys to quickly scan through many revisions. To see a finer-grained list of revisions, click Show more detailed revisions.
• Drawings inserted into presentations – You can use Google drawings to enhance my Google presentations by building dynamic and informative images in drawings and copying them over to the presentation you’re making. Once you’ve finished using drawings to create your visuals, you just go to the Web Clipboard in your drawing and select Copy entire drawing to web clipboard. Once the drawing is in your web clipboard, go to your presentation and select the slide you want to drop your drawing into. Then, click on the Web Clipboard icon and select the drawing from the list.

There are also some other really interesting tricks within the entire Google Docs group that readers may not know about – forms in Google Spreadsheets, OCR through Google DocList and Google Lookup and Google Finance in Google Spreadsheets. Here are the details…

Gather and visualize data with forms in Google Spreadsheets

What is this feature: With Google Docs, you can quickly create a form or survey, email it to your friends or colleagues, and keep track of their answers in one spreadsheet. You can edit the confirmation message that people who fill out your form see after submitting their responses. To quickly see how many users filled out a form and what their responses are, you can check the response summary. This displays graphs and charts summarizing your form responses.

What can it be used for: Sign ups, surveys, gathering data from your team (e.g. sales targets, head count allocations, product feedback).

Use case: Organizing a multi-day management training event for your company. This involves collecting information from dozens of employees (to confirm attendance, what panels each person can attend, guest panel suggestions, etc.). Using traditional spreadsheets, you can send out an email to all the attendees, then wait for replies, and transcribe responses to a spreadsheet. Instead you can create a form on Google Docs, and email the form to your colleagues. They can enter their information from their email and their answers are automatically added to a spreadsheet that you control. You can embed the Summary of Responses page, which contains graphs summarizing the form responses (number of replies, % of respondants who gave a particular answer on each question, etc.) on a team site using an iframe gadget.

How to get started:

You can create a form from the Docs list or from any spreadsheet.

To create a form from your Docs list:

1. Click Create new > Form.
2. In the form template that opens, you can add any questions and options you’d like.
3. Click Email this form once you’ve finished adding your questions.
4. Add the email addresses of the people to whom you want to send this form.
5. Click Send.

To create a form from a spreadsheet:

1. Click the Form drop-down menu and select Create a form.
2. In the form template that opens, you can add any questions and options you’d like.
3. Click Email this form once you’ve finished adding your questions.
4. Add the email addresses of the people to whom you want to send this form.
5. Click Send.

To learn more about forms on Google Spreadsheets, visit http://goo.gl/ewMV.

OCR through the Google Documents List API

What is this feature: The Google Documents List API offers Optical Character Recognition (OCR), giving you the ability to convert high-resolution image files containing typewritten/printed text into editable text.

What can it be used for: Upload scanned letters or faxes and make them editable in Google Docs.

Use case: Processing insurance claims. After you receive an insurance claim fax, you can scan and upload it to Google Docs using the Google Documents List API. This creates a new Google Doc which you can then share for review and commenting by the appropriate parties.

How to get started:

To try out the OCR function on the Google Documents List API, you can upload your own document at http://goo.gl/e4Hw (you can download and then upload a demo PDF file from this site if you don’t have a file handy at the moment).

To perform OCR on a .jpg, .png, or .gif file, include the ocr=true parameter when uploading a file to Google Docs using the Google Documents list API. For more information, visit http://goo.gl/LC1g.

Use Google LookUp and Google Finance in your spreadsheets

What is this feature: Google Spreadsheets can search the web to find the values for straightforward facts about specific things. This information comes from Google search results. Certain sites, like the CIA Factbook or Wikipedia, tend to come up more often than others, but the data can come from any website. You can always tell where the data is coming from by double clicking on a cell. For more information on how Google Lookup works, see the Help Center.

What can it be used for: Using the Google LookUp and Google Finance functions, you can automatically search and add information to your spreadsheets, including:

Stocks: trading price (delayed by up to 20 mins), marketcap, price-to-earnings ratio
Countries (like “Burkina Faso”): capital, GDP
Famous personalities: date of birth, place of birth, nationality
Planets (like “Saturn”): number of moons, distance from sun
Companies (like “Hewlett-Packard”): CEO, ticker symbol
And many more.

Use case: Putting together a competitive brief. Your company is looking to expand its European operations and you’re researching the region. You can use Google LookUp to collect information such as the market capitalization of major competitors, their number of employees, or the population size of the countries in the market.

How to get started:

To use the GoogleLookup function, enter the following formula in the desired spreadsheet cell:

Syntax: =GoogleLookup(“entity”; “attribute”) where “entity” represents the name of the entity that you want to access, like Kuala Lumpur, Audrey Hepburn, or oxygen, and “attribute” is the type of information that you want to retrieve. If you get a wrong value, you can click the cell and it will tell you where the data is coming from. If the data is incorrect, you can click “More Options” and it let you select from other values culled from around the web.

To use the GoogleFinance function, enter the following formula in the desired spreadsheet cell:

Syntax: Syntax: =GoogleFinance(“symbol”; “attribute”);
where “symbol” represents the stock symbol of the company or mutual fund you’re looking for (like GOOG, QQQ, XXXXX, and so on), and “attribute” represents the type of market data that you want (like Price, Volume, and so on). If the attribute is left blank, price is returned by default.

If the data is incorrect, click “More Options” on the bottom right corner of the cell and you can select the right value from other data culled around the web.

To learn more about Google Lookup, visit http://goo.gl/49H2. To learn more about Google Finance, visit http://goo.gl/f3jc.

And thank you so much to Kat Eller, and all of the amazing people over at Google. You’re doing incredible work.