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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.

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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:

Google Drive to drop document editing in favor of standalone apps

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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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Google announces Docs, Sheets and Slides mobile apps

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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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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.”

 

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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.

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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.

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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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