Three new Google Docs features put the fun in functional

Google Docs, the office productivity suite from everyone’s favorite search provider, has gotten updated with three new tools that Google says “put the fun in functional”. These are the format painter (finally!), fusion tables and drag & drop images. Format painter has been long in the coming and was arguably an important missing feature that probably put off some people from entrusting the cloud with their office productivity.

It’s real simple, just select a chunk of text and press the paintbrush button to copy its style (font, size, color and other formatting features) and apply it to one or more (double click the paintbrush button) blocks of text. Handy shortcuts are also available:

To copy the style of your selected text

• Mac: Ctrl+Option+C
• Windows: Ctrl+Alt+C

To apply any copied styles to whatever text you have selected:

• Mac: Ctrl+Option+V
• Windows: Ctrl+Alt+V

More on fusion tables and drag & drop images after the break.

Fusion tables let you gather, visualize and collaborate on data online. You can save them in your document list and share as .csv, .xls or .kml files. Begin visualizing by choosing Create new > Table. Finally, the drawing editor now allows from dragging an image from your desktop directly in the drawing canvas (requires the latest version of Google’ Chrome, Apple’s Safari or Mozilla’s Firefox), similar to how you can drop attachments directly onto the Gmail window.