Google is updating its Google Sheets and Slides apps for iOS today with new features that allow changing themes, filters and layouts on the fly from within the mobile apps.
For Google Sheets, the update brings the ability to view and change existing filters applied to a spreadsheet.
Google today updated the Sheets and Slides apps for Android with support for additional file formats.
Google is adding the ability to set expiration dates for access to documents across Google Drive, Docs, Sheets and Slides apps. The idea is that you can limit a contributor’s access to a document for a specific time period, which Google points out will come in handy for companies and organizations that often share files with third-parties temporarily:
Google is today adding new templates to the initial selection it first rolled out to Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides back in September of last year.
A new app called Document Viewer for Android Wear was recently released by appfour, and you’re probably either excited or rolling your eyes. I’m definitely in the latter category. But then again, most times developers have tried to take apps that typically require a decently sized screen and shrink them to the size of teeny tiny Android Wear, the results haven’t been great. I’m looking at you, emulators that are definitely cool–proofs–of–concept-but-completely-impractical.
This one may not be as ridiculous as running a PSP game, but I’d say—and I mean absolutely no offense to appfour—it’s very unlikely to become an app you use daily…
Update: Google says all services are restored!
Seeing Google Drive and other services unresponsive this afternoon? Rest assured that it’s not just you. Google has acknowledged the service disruption on its app status page with this message posted within the hour:
We’re investigating reports of an issue with Google Drive. We will provide more information shortly.
Earlier this year, Google Slides on Android was updated with support for presenting slide shows over both the Chromecast and Apple TV and today the company is expanding on that capability and making it easier for presenters to stay engaged with the audience. With today’s update, presenters can now control their slide shows directly from the lock screen of their Android device.
Update: Two other minor updates targeted to business customers have also been included. Text inside a Sheets cell can now be partially formatted, rather than formatting all the text to one font style (i.e. italics), and Google’s fonts are preserved when opening a Docs or Sheets file in Microsoft Word and PowerPoint.
Google has today pushed a bunch of new features and general improvements to its Docs suite of web-based productivity apps. It’s the beginning of the school year so it’s no surprise that the company’s post on the changes is targeted towards teachers, but anyone using Docs will benefit.
Google Drive for the mobile web has always restricted editing to just Docs files — attempting to edit Sheets or Slides files required downloading the Google Drive app for iOS or Android. That changes today. No, you won’t be able to edit Sheets or Slides files now, but rather Google is also killing off the editing capabilities in Docs for mobile web.
The change makes total sense, if for consistency at the very least. But Google says it’s because the Drive native mobile app is “easier to use and offers more robust functionality.” Native apps typically have more access to the hardware and system-level software capabilities of the devices they’re installed on than web apps, and since they are downloaded directly onto the device, much of the boilerplate user interface doesn’t have to be loaded from the Internet each time the user goes to use them.
From now on, when a Drive user opens a Docs, Sheets, or Slides document from the mobile web, they’ll be presented with one of Google’s new app install banners that make it easy to launch or download the native app, and then be taken directly to the file they were initially viewing in the browser. Tapping the pencil icon in the top right will also trigger the banner to appear.
The user interface across the mobile web viewers for the three aforementioned editing tools have also been cleaned up to create a more consistent experience, which is nice.
Customers of Google’s Internet-based productivity suite, this one’s for you: As an Apps for Business or Education admin, you can now whitelist specific outside domains to share files with people across organizations.
Google is rolling out updates today for its Docs, Sheets, and Slides apps for Android, bringing a few improvements to editing and collaboration features in the process.
First up, Google will now offer quick access to editing titles for documents, spreadsheets, and presentations directly from the app’s overflow menu in the top right corner of the UI across all three apps (as pictured above).
In addition, the Google Slides Android app gains the ability to switch layouts of existing slides: individuals can now change the layout of an existing slide to one of several predefined layouts, allowing them to update presentations on mobile more effectively.
Lastly, the Docs app get improved collaboration features for those using the Office Compatibility Mode:
People can now reply to comments when working in Office Compatibility Mode in the Docs app. In addition, when in OCM, suggestions and comments now appear in the Comments panel in the order they were made—rather than as all comments first and all suggestions second.
All three app updates should be arriving on Google Play for Android users sometime today.
Google has announced today that it is expanding the types of images it supports when converting Microsoft Office files to Google Docs. Previously, supported image file types included JPEG, PNG, EMF, and WMF. Now, a greater number of less common image types are also supported. Google Docs can now convert larger images, more file formats (specifically including TIFF), and images with color profiles other than RGB.
Starting today, larger images, images in less common formats (like TIFF), and images with non-RGB color profiles (like CMYK), can also be imported to and exported from the Google Docs editors on the web successfully. Check out the Help Center for more information on converting files in Docs, Sheets, and Slides.
This is a useful update if you commonly find that your Microsoft Office documents aren’t being properly converted when moving them to Google Docs — or, likewise, when you’re exporting them to use in Word, Excel, or PowerPoint. You can head over to the Google Apps blog to read the original post, and Google sends you to the Help Center if you need more information about importing and exporting documents.
Google is rolling out an update for the Google Drive for Android app today that it says brings a long list of performance improvements and polish.
Google says the update also includes enhancements to PDFs with “the ability to see completed form data.”
The updated Google Drive for Android app, version 2.2.183.15, should be available to all through Google Play over the coming week.
Google released updates to other Android apps today including new features for Google Docs and Slides and improvements for Gmail.
Google is today rolling out updates to its Google Docs and Slides mobile apps bringing the ability to insert images directly from the app on both phones and tablets.
Expand
Expanding
Close
Google’s Update Wednesday routine is in full swing today with a variety of updates rolling out to the company’s apps. Earlier today, Chrome 42 for Android made its was to the Play Store. Now, several other Google apps have been updated. Google has pushed updates to its Docs, Slides, Sheets, and Google My Business apps. The company also today released Android for Work app to the Play Store.
Google tends to push several updates to its apps in the middle of the week, and this week has been a particularly eventful one. Updates have landed over the last 24 hours for several apps in Google’s Android inventory, including Inbox, Google Docs (Sheets and Slides, too), YouTube, Quickoffice, Google Maps, and Google Play Music.
Google has—as it very often does on Wednesdays—released a slew of updates across many of its first-party apps. Today’s updates are hitting the official Google+ Android app as well as the Docs suite of Android and iOS apps.
Expand
Expanding
Close
Google today announced that it’s adding new shortcuts for its Google Drive web apps— Docs, Sheets, and Slides— to the App Launcher feature accessible from the upper right corner of most its web services (pictured right). The new shortcuts join services like Search, Mail, Calendar, and Drive that were previously accessible from the App Launcher.
For regular users, Google is adding Docs to the main section of the App Launcher and making Sheets and Slides shortcuts available by opting in when visiting the apps:
And the next time you visit sheets.google.com or slides.google.com, you’ll see the option to add Sheets and Slides to the launcher as well. Remember that you can always rearrange the icons to your liking by just clicking and dragging them around… One note–if you’ve already customized the arrangement of your icons, you’ll need to visit docs.google.com and click “Add a shortcut” in the App Launcher to get the Docs icon to appear.
For Google Apps users, Google will put Docs, Slides, and Sheets shortcuts in the App Launcher by default and bump Groups and Contacts into the “More” section of the launcher.
Apps users can expect the change to kick in early next month.
Google has announced today that, following a slew of updates that came to the Google Drive collection of iOS apps last week, the company’s Android apps for Drive are also receiving a few updates today:
Docs has some new, handy line spacing controls that let you choose single, double or fractional line spacing, Sheets has scrollbars for faster navigation, and you can now insert, move, resize and rotate text boxes, shapes and lines in the updated Slides app.
All three apps are now even friendlier with Office files with easier file creation and other updates, and we’ve added better accessibility options and squashed some bugs.
The updates coming to this set of apps may seem minor, but there are a few notable additions here. Scrollbars in sheets is going to make that app much more usable, and the ability to create and edit graphics within Slides is going to make it much easier to make presentations that are closer to what you’d be able to do on the desktop.
Google says that the updates should be rolling out today. If you don’t already have them, you can get the Docs, Sheets, and Slides Google Drive apps over on the Play Store for free.
After previously announcing image editing features including cropping and borders for Docs, Slides and other Google Drive apps, Google today announced new options for images in Slides. Now, in addition to cropping and adding borders to images, you can now access recolor, transparency, brightness, and contract settings.
You can now select “Image options…” from the toolbar, format menu, or right-click menu, where you can adjust the opacity, brightness, and contrast of an image, or recolor it to match the theme of your presentation.
Google provided the examples above and below showing off some of the new image editing options. We imagine it wont be long before these features make their way to Docs and the other Google Drive apps that support images.
Today, Google announced a couple of updates for its office software suite that should increase productivity for frequent users. The search giant has added a new formatting feature to Docs, Slides and Drawings that automatically creates bullet points or numbered lists after typing an applicable character at the beginning of a paragraph. For example, if you type an asterisk followed by the spacebar, Docs will automatically add a bullet point to that particular segment.
In an effort to make its office software suite more appealing to business types, Google Drive desktop users can now use Drawings to make elbow and curved connections between items. These new options are ideal for visual projects like flowcharts and instruction manuals.
Google showed off its new “Material” design language alongside Android “L” at Google I/O 2014. And while you can follow our guide to get a glimpse at Android L in its full glory on your Nexus device, you can also simply load up a few new web pages that Google has redesigned in Google Docs.
Way back in 2012, Google announced that it was acquiring the mobile document editing company Quickoffice. At the time, Google said that it had no intentions on shutting the service down, but would also work to integrate the unique features of QuickOffice into its own suite of editing apps. Following the announcements of new features for Google Docs, Slides, and Sheets at I/O, the company has announced that Quickoffice will soon be shutting down (via The Google Operating System Blog).
“With the integration of Quickoffice into the Google Docs, Sheets and Slides apps, the Quickoffice app will be unpublished from Google Play and the App Store in the coming weeks. Existing users with the app can continue to use it, but no features will be added and new users will not be able to install the app.”
Quickoffice for Android was last updated on February 14th of this year, while the iOS client hasn’t seen an update since January 6th. We knew that eventually, Google would be forced to shut down Quickoffice to focus exclusively on the Google Drive suite of apps. Google never promised to keep Quickoffice running forever.
