Google Docs Blog
The official source for news, updates and tips about Docs, Sheets, Slides, Forms, and Keep.
Docs and Slides: add images on the go
May 13, 2015
From company meetings to school reports, pictures play an important part in telling your story. Today’s updates to Docs and Slides for Android and iOS help you work with images more easily, even when you’re on the go.
Insert images
Now you can add pictures to your documents and
presentations
, directly from your phone or tablet. Choose an image from your camera roll, or take a new photo on the spot.
Picture perfect
When you’re creating a presentation away from your desk, double tap any image in Slides to enter crop mode. From there, trim the sides of your image, or tap the
mask image
icon to crop it into a specific shape.
No connection required
Your work doesn’t stop when your data connection does. Today’s improvements to Docs and Slides will remain available when you’re offline. You’ll just need the updated mobile apps.
Give these new tricks a try, and start adding images from just about anywhere—at work, in the air, or on the train ride home. The updated Docs and Slides apps are available now on
Google Play
and the App Store (
Docs
,
Slides
).
Posted by Zack Reneau-Wedeen, Product Manager
Google Docs in the wild: Google Slides and Rentity
March 16, 2015
From college kids to billion-dollar companies, lots of people are using Google Docs to be productive, creative, and collaborative. On this blog, we'll be sharing some of their stories, starting with Rentity, a website that helps people find and rent apartments.
Rentity
recently used a publicly shared
Slides presentation
to spread the word about their work and collect feedback from investors, potential teammates and clients. Here’s their story, as told through an interview with their founder, Daniel Ahmadizadeh.
We want to know how you use the Google Docs family of products, too, so share your own examples at
+GoogleDocs
or
@googledocs
with the hashtag #mygoogledocs. -Ed.
Q: Tell us a little bit about Rentity.
A: Rentity connects people who are moving out with people looking for a new place to live. With Rentity, current tenants make 2.5% of their annual rent back when a new tenant is found for their apartment. We aim to give prospective tenants access to inventory at an earlier point in time, reduce vacancies for landlords, and incentivize the current tenant to be a part of the process.
Q: Why did you decide to share a public Slides presentation?
A: We're looking to build a product that connects people to people. It felt natural to be able to essentially build it in public and allow anyone to help shape our direction to make something people want. And so we created a deck that outlines the problem, solution, business model and team—and shared it publicly, with comments enabled.
Q: How has the presentation been received and impacted your business?
A: The reception has been incredible. People have told us a range of things about what they think about having the deck public. From "bold" and "risky" to "refreshing" and "transparent" and everything in between. It's a huge benefit because the more people know about Rentity and engage with the product, the better. The public deck helped tremendously because people saw the feedback that others were providing and felt more engaged with the vision rather than seeing a non-collaborative deck which would never be able to capture/nurture a sense of community.
The presentation in turn has helped us build core values. Transparency started with Slides. Building community started with Slides. Thousands have seen our presentation to date. We believe that by being open with what we are building, we are better suited to catalyze connections and feedback loops that we otherwise would have never been able to create.
Posted by Michael Bolognino, Product Marketing Manager
Better together: Constitute, Google Docs, & the National Constitution Center
February 11, 2015
This post comes to us from Zachary Elkins, Director of the Constitute Project. The Constitute Project was launched in 2013 as a way for constitution-makers, scholars, and everyday people to explore alternative ideas in constitutional design. -Ed.
Constitutional reform happens more often than you might think. On average, countries around the world replace their constitutions every 19 years and amend them every two years. It’s not an easy task, even if it’s common. Constitutions are often the result of deliberation, discussion and discovery—discovery that often comes from writing together.
But collaborative writing can be challenging. It’s hard to write something with other people and still make it cohesive, harmonic and readable. These pitfalls are particularly salient for constitutions—documents that are supposed to represent the aspirations and principles of a people.
That’s where
Constitute
comes in. A project of the
Comparative Constitutions Project
and seeded by
Google Ideas
, Constitute allows anyone to
read, search and compare
every constitution in the world, indexed by topic. Constitute is built for people to analyze text, but they can move from analysis to drafting by exporting constitutional excerpts directly to
Google Docs
—a shared space to create and debate a new “founding” document.
Today a new set of exhibits at the
National Constitution Center
helps bring this hands-on approach to the general public. Created in 1988, the NCC is an interactive museum in Philadelphia dedicated to the U.S. Constitution.
The Constitute exhibit has two components. The first is an installation of Constitute that invites visitors to view the U.S. Constitution (and other Constitutions) in comparative perspective.
In the second component, select visitors can put this analysis to work in a space we’re calling the “Drafting Lab.” There, people can use Constitute and Google Docs to participate with fellow drafters in each of the stages of Constitution-making—from research to deliberation to drafting.
The Lab might be the first of its kind in the world: a space for citizens and drafters of all kinds to imagine, rethink and rediscover constitutional ideas. We don’t really know what happens when drafters work simultaneously on the same piece of “parchment” (a Google Doc) and share the same workspace. So the sessions in the Drafting Lab may be illuminating for both scholars and for participants.
If you're unable to visit the NCC and do some drafting in person, you can always give it a try at home by visiting
constituteproject.org
.
May the constitution-making begin!
Posted by Zachary Elkins, Director, Constitute Project
Updated mobile apps for Docs, Sheets and Slides
January 21, 2015
With Google Docs we want to help you work better, everywhere you are. So today’s Android and iOS updates for
Docs
,
Sheets
and
Slides
make it easier to get things done while you’re on the go.
Doing, not just viewing
You’ve asked for more editing tools on mobile, so today’s improvements include real-time spell-checking in documents, hiding rows and columns in spreadsheets, and grouping shapes in presentations.
Keeping your content safe
Online security is
really important
, so we offer functionality like
two-step verification
to protect your Google account. Starting today, Google Docs supports Touch ID on iOS, so you can unlock Docs, Sheets and Slides with your unique fingerprint.
Making everything more accessible
If you’re blind or have low vision, we have improved support and performance for
TalkBack
on Android and
VoiceOver
on iOS to create, edit, and share files in Docs, Sheets and Slides. The updated apps also respond well to screen magnification, in case you need to zoom in for a closer look.
These updates are rolling out now, so look for them on
Google Play
and the App Store (
Docs
,
Sheets
,
Slides
), and download the new versions as they become available. For even more news and tips, you can now follow Google Docs on
Google+
,
Twitter
and
Facebook
.
Posted by Jude Flannery, Engineering Director
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