Spreadsheets originated from a company bought by Google in June 2005. A year later Spreadsheets launched in Google Labs as a limited test.
In October of 2012, Spreadsheets was rebranded as Sheets and made a part of the Google Drive umbrella. Like Docs, Sheets has full offline support and allows users to work without a connection. Users can collaborate and share with many other people at the same time. Powerful Android and iOS apps allow users to access and work on files on the go.
Google Operating System blog, which has a good track record for leaking upcoming features for Google products, today posted a screenshot that shows a redesigned attachments UI for Gmail being tested internally. In the image above we can see the text “Dogfood confidential – submit feedback on the new attachments experience,” along with what looks to be a simplified interface for attachments in emails.
This is what attachments currently look like in emails:
And this is the new attachment interface:
The report speculates that Google could be dropping the “View” and “Download” options and instead just sending users to Google Drive when clicking an attachment.
First, you’ll notice each editor’s product icon displayed in the header, which doubles as a quick link back to all your files in Drive. Next, you’ll see that the header is more streamlined and compact, helping you to focus on what matters most—your content.
You’ll notice the changes in Docs, Sheets, and Slides (as pictured above), but also in Drawings, Forms and Apps Script.
Google announced today on its Google Drive Blog that it is adding a number of new languages for its Google Drive apps including Drive, Docs, Sheets, and Slides on both mobile and desktop. The new languages include:
Google noted that the majority of the languages are also supported by the built-in spellchecker in Drive and users will also be able to switch back and forth between languages. You’ll also be able to collaborate on Drive files in one language while collaborators use another.
The app’s UI has been overhauled and now displays your Drive files in a familiar grid style view:
You can swipe between files to see large previews that let you quickly review and discover the information you’re looking for. And if you want to keep some Drive files on your Android device, you’ll now be able to “download a copy” from the actions menu inside settings.
Another big update included in the latest version of Drive for Android is the ability to ‘scan’ and store physical documents as PDFs. The new scan option will allow users to snap photos of documents and save them within Drive as a PDF. Thanks to Optical Character Recognition, you’ll also be able to search for the scanned docs using keywords.
The update includes a number of other improvements as well including the ability to download a copy of your files in Drive your device’s local storage, improvements to editing features in Google Sheets, and much more: Expand Expanding Close
Those of you that crunch numbers using Google Docs: The company has just added a cool new feature to the spreadsheets editor – merging cells vertically. In addition to the existing horizontal merging functionality, this new feature allows for some pretty complex layouts. Just drag the set of cells, hit the down arrow next to the merge icon and select Merge vertically. You can also assign headers to sets of rows. Why would anyone want to merge cells vertically? Google offers an example:
In the spirit of the NFL season, let’s say you want to host a football tournament for your friends. To make it easier for them to cast their votes on the winning team, you organize the NFL teams by conference and division in a Google spreadsheet. After applying vertical merges to all of the conference and division headers and horizontal merges across the team names in each conference, you’re ready to share with your friends for the tournament!
