Until 2012, any collaborative project – whether a report, an article or even the family Christmas newsletter – involved sending seven versions of the same document back and forth on a long, uninspiring email chain. You’d have to save every version, and at least 50 per cent percent of the time, send the wrong document to the printers.
Then, Google Docs emerged – easy to use, free of charge and crucially, accessible to anyone with a Gmail account, it’s made pretty much anything that involves word processing much easier. But even the smoothest software can be tweaked, and there’s more than a handful of ways to use Google Docs to work better for you. Here’s how to get the most from Google Docs, from organising your files to the tips and tricks to make you more efficient.
Organise your documents within Google Drive
If you get into a document and find that it’s floating around in your Google Drive without a specific folder, you can move its location without leaving your Google Doc. Click on the grey folder icon – near the title of the Google Doc you want to move, and you can move the location of the document within your Drive.
Make collaboration a little less painful
One of the most useful parts of using Google Docs is that there’s levels of access to each document. At the top right, clicking the blue Share button gives you two options – anyone can log in with a unique hyperlink, or you can send it with an email (you can also use this function to send the document to a group of people).
If you change the sharing settings, the hyperlink will change too, so make sure you’ve copied the right one. If you want to send the document to someone without having to add them as a collaborator, you can send it directly as an attachment to an email. Go to File, then click on Email as an attachment.
If you want one of your collaborators to look at a specific part of the Google Doc and not get distracted, you can tag them directly in a comment. Place your cursor in front of the part that you want to highlight, go to Insert, then Comment, and in the pop out box, type in @ or + and the person’s email – anyone with access to the document will pop up as an option. Once you press enter, they’ll get an email notifying them of the specific place in the document that they’ve been tasked to look at.
Use an outline
Occasionally, you’ll find yourself confronted with a huge document with no conceivable structure. Using the inbuilt outline tool for Google Docs is useful for longer documents, particularly if you’re working collaboratively. Go to View, then press show document outline. This will create a document outline on the left hand side of the Google doc, which you can use to navigate through the document. It’ll help you organise your thoughts easier – and can also make the process of writing long reports, articles or letters somewhat less daunting. To add new headings, select the phrase you want as a heading, and use a heading option on the toolbar.
If you’re working on something more formal – such as a dissertation or a report – you can insert a table of contents into the front page of your document. Just place your cursor where you want it, and then go to Insert, then Table of Contents. That will generate a table of contents from the headings in your document – if you want to change these or add numbers, you can edit them within that page.
You can insert bookmarks in Google Docs to make navigating around it slightly easier. Place the cursor at the beginning of the part you want to link to, and then go to Insert, then Bookmark. Right click, or control + click the link which pops up.
Customise your preferences
Even the most convenient software won’t be able to read your mind. If you find yourself using a phrase often – something with quirky spelling, or a trademark – add it to your shortcuts so that Google Docs doesn’t automatically correct it. Go to Tools, then Preferences. It’s also handy for words that are a little tricky, phrases that Google Docs might draw a red line under and brand or place names that don’t need to be capitalised.
Similarly, you can double check that the shortcuts built into Google Docs actually work for you. If you know you use some commands way more often than others, you can remove the inbuilt shortcuts which are more annoying than convenient. Go to Help, then press Keyboard Shortcuts, and edit to your heart’s content.
Double check your text
If there’s a word you don’t recognise, right click and select define – it’ll pop up with a definition of the word, as well as cases where it’s used. If you want to do a little bit more research – or if it seems like an ambiguous case, you can also select explore, which will search the Internet for that word.
Edit your document offline
Sometimes you’re working to a tight deadline and you could really use those extra two minutes on the tube to tighten something up. Turn on offline editing to make sure your changes save and give yourself that extra breathing room – go to File, then press Make document available offline. This means that your edits will save automatically, and when you connect to the internet again, those changes will be automatically applied. You have to turn this on manually in each document.
If you want to extend this to all of your documents – and make it a default setting, go to Google Drive, press the cog symbol in the top left hand corner and tick the necessary box. Your changes will update automatically once you’re connected to the Internet again.
Keep your charts and graphs up to date too
Sometimes there’s no way around it – you have to put a chart or a graph into a Google Doc. But if you’ve made it with Google Sheets, you can insert it directly into the body of the Google Doc itself. Go to Insert, then Chart, and then from Sheets, and pick the one you need. If the figures change in the original chart, they’ll update in the document too.
Make your voice do the work for you
Speech transcription might not be intuitive – and if you’re using Google Docs in a crowded office or in public, it probably won’t work that well. But if your computer or smartphone (Androids only) has an inbuilt microphone, voice typing can be a neat alternative. Go to Tools, then Voice Typing. A pop up window – within the document, will pop up, and you can press the microphone button and go from there. If you want to use a keyboard shortcut, use the Command + Shift (the up arrow on Mac) + S keys to start recording.
If you want to go analogue and use your keyboard again, just say “stop listening”. If you want to start it up again, say resume. There’s more than just basic functionality to this too – check out this list of functions that Voice Typing in Google Docs can do for you. You can move paragraphs around, apply some kinds of basic formatting and get rid of chunks of text that don’t seem quite right anymore.
Navigate the internet without leaving your Google doc
Sometimes you’ve got 30 tabs open and you just need to check one date, or find one link. You can even do so from the comfort of your Google Doc – just go to Tools, then Explore. A search bar will pop up – with your default search engine – and you can do your research from there. If you need to add some generic images in – like clip art, or an icon – you can find those in the explore tab too, and add them in easily. Just make sure you double check the URLs.
Use an add-on
If you’re only using Google Docs for basic document editing and collaboration, add-ons might not be necessary for you. But if there’s something specific missing, try installing an add-on – the Add-ons button on the toolbar, between Tools and Help. Some are best for specific uses – like Google Reports for Google Classroom, which is best suited for teachers, while others like Code Block make copying blocks of code easier. If the add-ons become too cumbersome, just go back to Add-ons and select the option to Manage Add-ons.
Use and create your own templates
A blank page can be intimidating, and sometimes, it’s just not what you need. Google Docs has a fairly comprehensive selection of templates that you can use – from business letters to resumes to proposals, which you can use as a starting point to build exactly what you want. Simply find the template you want in the gallery of templates. You can also save your own templates if there’s a standard you want to keep returning to, in your Google Drive.
Import images – and edit them too
Inserting images into your Google Doc doesn’t have to be a difficult process. You can drag and drop images from your desktop, and if it’s an image with a URL, you don’t even have to save it. Go to Insert, then Image, and then By URL. If you need an image and don’t have one, you can navigate around the Internet to find the right one – go to Insert, then Image, then press, Search the web.
If you have an image you need to use but it just doesn’t look quite right on the page, you can edit it within the document. You can drag and drop images from your desktop, and then double click – a menu will pop up with options to crop, edit and resize your image within the document itself.
Make formatting easier
If there’s a particular kind of formatting that you want to copy – a whole section that needs to be highlighted yellow, or a font – there’s an easy way to do it without having to manually change your settings.
Find an example of the formatting you want, and then find the paint roller icon – which is on the toolbar, just underneath the word View. Then place your cursor on the piece of text you want to be formatted the same way, and the formatting will carry over.
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This article was originally published by WIRED UK
