Slides Stories March 24, 2016

You can now change themes, filters & layouts in updated Google Sheets and Slides for iOS

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.

Slides Stories March 23, 2016

Google Sheets and Slides Android apps get support for additional file formats

Google today updated the Sheets and Slides apps for Android with support for additional file formats.

Slides Stories March 15, 2016

Google Drive, Docs, Sheets, & Slides will soon let you set expiration dates for document access

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:

Slides Stories March 2, 2016

Google Docs, Sheets, & Slides get new templates on web & mobile

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.

Slides Stories January 19, 2016

document viewer android wear

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 coolproofsofconcept-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…

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Slides Stories October 9, 2015

Google Drive outage

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.

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Slides Stories September 16, 2015

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.

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Slides Stories September 2, 2015

Screen Shot 2015-09-02 at 1.57.36 PM

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.

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Slides Stories July 27, 2015

Google axes editing of Docs on mobile web, presenting install banners for multiple file types

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.

Slides Stories July 13, 2015

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GoogleAppsForBusiness2Customers 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.

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Slides Stories July 9, 2015

Google Docs, Sheets, & Slides for Android get improved editing, collaboration features

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.

Slides Stories June 22, 2015

Google Docs now supports more image types when converting Microsoft Office files

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.

Slides Stories May 13, 2015

Google Drive for Android gets updated w/ performance improvements, PDF enhancements

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-Slides-insert-photo-2

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 full story

Slides Stories April 15, 2015

nexus2cee_GoogleMyBusiness1

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.

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Slides Stories March 19, 2015

Google Inc. - Android Apps on Google Play 2015-03-19 09-29-00

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.

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Slides Stories January 21, 2015

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 full story

Slides Stories December 17, 2014

Google adds Docs, Sheets, & Slides shortcuts to App Launcher

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.

Slides Stories December 15, 2014

Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides for Android get updated with a slew of new features

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.

Slides Stories October 6, 2014

Google Drive adds new image editing options for Slides

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.

Slides Stories September 18, 2014

listsfinalimage

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.

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Slides Stories September 16, 2014

Google Drive now supports curved and elbow connector lines in Drawings and Slides

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.

Slides Stories July 11, 2014

docs

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.

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Slides Stories June 29, 2014

quickoffice

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.

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Slides Stories June 25, 2014

Google Drive hits 190 million 30-day active users

Along with all of the other numbers and company updates Sundar Pichai shared today, he also just announced during the enterprise portion of the event that Google has now hit 190 million Google Drive users. That’s thanks to strong growth among enterprise customers and includes only active users over a 30-day period. The announcement comes alongside new features announced for the Drive suite of apps across devices.

More stats and numbers from Google’s I/O Keynote today are here.

Slides Stories June 19, 2014

Google Drive Docs, Sheets, and Slides apps now let you delete files right from the editor

A nice little enhancement for Google Drive users started rolling out last night with the ability to delete files directly from within any given app’s editor. For instance, if you’re editing a Google Doc, Sheet, or Slide, you will no longer have to return to your main list of files in Drive to delete it.

The new option is located under File > Move to Trash as pictured below:

Slides Stories May 4, 2014

GoogleDocs

Google’s new take on Docs and Sheets might be the first of many changes for the company’s Drive platform. The folks at Android Police managed to get their hands on a new, unreleased version of Drive and it appears to be missing editing functionality for sheets and documents. If you attempt to open a document while in Drive, it’ll display a view-only version of the item and will prompt you to install Google’s new standalone word processing app. We understand that this change might be frustrating for some users, but unbundling these apps lets people pick and choose the software that they want to use. It also gives Google a chance to focus on each app individually, which will hopefully result in a better user experience for each platform. Our fingers are crossed.

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Slides Stories April 30, 2014

Google-Office-Apps

Google’s mobile office suite isn’t the most refined experience, but it’s there if you need to compose a document or edit a spreadsheet while on the go. Aware of its shortcomings (and competition), the company has released three new mobile apps today that aim to improve the way you handle projects when out and about. First up is Docs, a full-blown word processing application that lets users compose, edit and share documents directly from their mobile devices. The second new piece of software in Google’s big release is Sheets, which focuses specifically on spreadsheets. With similar functionality to Docs, this app lets you edit and manage rows and columns on a spreadsheet from the comfort of your smartphone or tablet.

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Slides Stories November 5, 2013

Google adds real time text cursors & improved themes to Slides

Google is making a few improvements to its Slides presentation tool in Google Drive today. The company announced a few new features for the web app including real-time text cursors and some user requested tweaks for the recently rolled out editable themes feature. 

As you can see in the gif above, much like in Google Docs, you’ll now see contributors’ cursors with names in real-time as they type.

Google is also adding the ability to reuse a theme, add objects to themes and layouts, and update text styles in placeholders:

Reuse custom themes in new presentations 

There may come a time when you want to reuse a theme that you worked hard to create, and now you can—just select “From another presentation…” in the theme chooser.

Add objects to themes and layouts 

While editing a slide, you can now right click on any object and add it to a theme or a specific layout so that the next time you want to use it, it will already be part of the slide template.

Update text styles in placeholders

Let’s say you’re editing a body placeholder, and you change the font of your text (or other style properties, such as bold, color, etc.). You can now easily apply this formatting across slides that use the same layout by right clicking on the placeholder and selecting “Update in theme.”

 

Slides Stories October 9, 2013

Google Slides updated w/ widescreen presentations & editable themes

Google today announced that it’s rolling out a few new features to Slides, the company’s presentations app built into Google Drive. Among the new features is support for widescreen presentations, which will now be enabled by default:

Since the majority of monitors and displays are now widescreen, new presentations will be widescreen by default. You can change the size of your slides using the pull down menu in the theme chooser, or by visiting Page setup in the File menu.

Google is also including another highly requested feature that brings the ability to customize the preset fonts, colors backgrounds and more for themes:

One of your top requests has been to customize these presets throughout your presentation. With editable master slides, you can now easily tailor how content appears on every slide by selecting “Edit master” from the Slide menu. For example, you can set all of your header fonts to Alconica, make all of your first level bullets bold, and add a logo in the bottom right corner.

Google has a support doc available here that will walk you through everything you need to know about editing master slides and layouts for themes.

Slides Stories September 30, 2013

Google rolling out colorful, streamlined design for Docs, Sheets, Slides & more in Google Drive

We already got a new Google Analytics app for Android today and the launch of its new Web Designer HTML5 design tool, and now Google has announced that it’s rolling out a new, cleaner look for Docs, Sheets, Slides and more in Google Drive on the web. Google explained that the new look brings a new streamlined header and more colorful and compact design for its online productivity suite:

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.

Slides Stories August 6, 2013

Google Drive docs now provide automatic suggestions for hyperlinks

Google announced today that it will start offering suggestions for hyperlinks directly in Docs and Slides. When highlighting text and clicking “Insert Link” Google will automatically start generating URL suggestions based on the text:

You can hyperlink text in Docs and Slides when you want to attach related information to a word or sentence — for example, when writing a paper on Athens, you can highlight “Acropolis” and link it to a Google search result, a specific website, a heading or bookmark in your document, or even another file in Drive.

Starting today, the link tool now offers you suggestions based on the text you are hyperlinking just in case you don’t have the URL you need offhand.  To try it out, select the text you want and click the “Insert link” icon from the menu bar (or use Ctrl K).

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