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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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:

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.”

 

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.

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.

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).