Content & Color: An updated look for Docs, Sheets & Slides

Starting today, things are about to get cleaner—and more colorful—in Docs, Sheets, Slides, Drawings, Forms and Apps Script. 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.

We hope these updates make your creation and collaboration experience just a bit more delightful. Enjoy!

Posted by Sarah Cooper, User Experience Designer

Four new ways to customize your Google Forms

From classroom pop quizzes to RSVPs for your family reunion, you can use Google Forms in tons of different ways -- which is why it's important to be able to customize each form to fit your needs. Starting today, you’ll be able to take advantage of four new features to create your perfect form: progress bars, data validation, embedded YouTube videos, and custom messages.

Guide respondents through your survey with a progress bar
Sometimes it’s helpful to give respondents a sense of how much of a survey still needs to be completed, and now you can by turning on a progress bar in your form.
To turn it on, just check the progress bar box in the Form Settings tab.
Get results the way you want them with data validation
Let’s say you’re using Forms to collect sign ups for an email newsletter. With data validation, you can now ensure that the email addresses are formatted correctly, and consequently avoid those unpleasant bounce-back messages.

To get started, create a new Text question in Forms, then click on the Data validation tab. Click the checkbox and select “Text,” then “Email address,” and voila, the survey taker will see an error message if they don’t enter an email address.
You can also set up data validation for maximum character count, numbers, zip codes, and more.

Embed YouTube videos
You can now embed a YouTube video right inside a form -- perfect if you want to get feedback or ask questions about a video.  

This works really well for quizzes in class, especially if paired with data validation and the progress bar. Embed a video and then use data validation to give hints when students enter incorrect answers, and add a progress bar so they know how far along they are in the quiz.
Add a custom message to closed forms
Sometimes when a form is closed, you still want to make information available for respondents who weren’t able to complete it in time.
After you’ve switched your form to “Not accepting responses,” you can now add your own message and instructions for follow up.

Posted by Elynn Lee, Software Engineer

Head back to school with Drive: Student Edition

Guest posted by Alex Nagourney

Alex Nagourney is a 2013 graduate of Wellesley College. She was a 2011 Google BOLD intern and a Google Student Ambassador from 2011-2013. She currently lives in New York City.

Summer is coming to an end, which for college students usually means the end of a grueling internship, a road-trip or cross-country flight back to campus, embracing friends you have not seen in months, and, oh yeah, that other tiny detail: the start of classes.

With so much else going on — friends, extracurriculars, sports — students today need to be as efficient and productive as possible when they dedicate time to studying and doing homework. In this age of internet transformation, Gen Y is more tech savvy than ever before, and we expect online education to meet our technology standards.

The purpose (and hope) of this blog post is to give a few examples of how I used — and benefitted from — Google Docs, Slides, and Forms in college.

Example 1: Have a group project? Stay calm, cool, and collected. Docs make collaboration easy!

If you have ever had to work on a group paper or project, you know how cumbersome and inefficient the process can be. There are two ways to go about accomplishing this task: (1) your group sends 173 emails trying to coordinate a time at which everyone is available to meet or (2) each person writes a portion of the paper and the group tries to synthesize uncoordinated chunks of different writing styles into one cohesive paper, which always ends with one Type A student editing the entire thing. Luckily, there is now an option 3, and it’s called Google Docs.

To start using Docs, just open a doc, share it with the group members, and write. It’s that simple. Having the ability to work together in the cloud means no coordinating schedules, no wasting time on multiple revisions, and no unequal division of group member contributions.

For example, when I had to complete a group paper for an Economics class, my two groupmates and I decided we would each write one-third of the paper. We put our respective portions into a single document and then went through each other’s writing, adding comments and correcting errors when necessary.
Example 2: Google Slides. Enough Said.

Presentations are an inevitable college assignment. Whether you are a history or physics major, you cannot escape this task. Before using Slides, the process of creating presentations was inefficient, awkward (so...what should we put on this slide…?) and time-consuming.

For one of my physics laboratory experiments, my partner was an exchange student from France. While we understood each other in the lab by scribbling Greek letters and numbers to solve problems, at times it was difficult to communicate since English wasn’t her first language. So when we had to create our presentation, it sounded like a grueling task for both of us.

We decided to use Slides, divide the work, add notes, and edit together from within the presentation. Our communication was clear and efficient when we typed comments to each other since we could take our time to be articulate, which virtually dissolved our language barrier. In the end, creating the presentation was quite enjoyable; we were proud of the final product and our professors were impressed by how well we worked together.

Example 3: Using Forms to organize information and make it universally accessible and useful...sound familiar?

Being a full-time student and an active member of an extracurricular activity (sport, club, fraternity/sorority, etc.) can sometimes feel like a full-time job. It requires teamwork, organization, time-management, and dedication.

Being the leader of a group demands more: writing agendas, scheduling meetings, organizing fundraisers, and sticking to a budget. Keeping track of all of these items can be difficult, as each task requires different resources — email, documents, spreadsheets, polls, and more.

As the house president of a 165-student residence hall for two years, I struggled to keep track of it all, but after switching to Forms, the whole process became seamless.

For our fundraiser, my house sold over 300 t-shirts to the student body. Because of the high quantity, we utilized a pre-order process in which students could order their size/color and pay in advance. Before we had Google Forms, we used a paper form to collect pre-orders (I still try to block out all those hours spent inputting the paper orders into my computer!).

Not only did using a form make it easier to collect pre-orders, it also made it easier to distribute the order form. As a result, our pre-orders increased by 40% in one year! The form did all of the heavy lifting for me. Orders were seamlessly filed into a spreadsheet, and I simply had to click “Show summary of responses” to place the order, making my job easier and freeing up time so that I could focus on other aspects of my role as a leader.
So there you have it, three examples of how using Docs, Slides, and Forms in college made me more efficient, saved me time, and increased my productivity. For those of you about to begin a new semester, good luck!

Head back to school with Drive: Teacher Edition

Posted by guest blogger Wendy Gorton

Wendy Gorton is an education consultant for organizations around the world. She’s a former classroom teacher, Google Certified Teacher and Trainer, and is passionate about creating learner-centered environments using tools like Google Apps for Education

Follow the Drive Google+ page this and next week for daily tips and suggestions for using Drive in the classroom.

Google Drive is the all-in-one tool I wish I had my first year of teaching. It not only keeps all of your lesson plans, activities, and research organized, but it's an outstanding way to engage your students, give them feedback, and give their writing a real audience—like their peers or classrooms around the world.

Here are 3 tips to help teachers prepare for going back to school with Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Forms

1. Use Slides to get to know your students 
A great first-week introductory activity is to create a single slide deck, and then invite each of your students to share a bit about themselves on their own personal slide. It’s a fantastic get-to-know-you activity for the first week of school and you’ll be amazed by the creativity that comes out of your students! 

The screenshot below shows how Google Student Ambassadors from 9 different countries used Slides to introduce themselves before gathering to meet each other at an event in Indonesia this summer.

Want to get this going with your students? Easy—create a new Slides deck on the first week of school, click the blue Share button to invite your students, and give them a little direction for their individual slide by adding comments.

2. Use Docs to create a classroom “Bill of Rights” 
The first week of class is that precious transition from the “honeymoon” period of angelic children to learning the norms of your classroom culture. Help start the year off right by inviting students to co-create their ideas of citizenship and a happy learning environment, Docs style.

Start by creating a copy of this template and then invite students to join in with you to add their ideas, ratify by adding a comment, and use their editing prowess to come up with a final copy to live by for the coming year.

3. Use Forms to get to know your students (and their prior knowledge!) 
Get to know your classroom as soon as possible, using Forms to gather information about their needs, interests, and abilities beforehand. Consider creating a simple Form for a survey for your students (and for your parents!) and have fun showing the data on your projector and learning about your class as a whole.

Forms can be used as a very quick getting started activity before any lesson as well—take this example from a social studies classroom before talking about population. By placing a quick Form on your classroom site or emailing your students the Form, you can quickly grasp your students' prior knowledge—before you start teaching.

In this case, our team was a bit off, but helped us not only talk about population but estimation and numbers in general (answer? 7.1 billion and counting. My favorite answer? One ‘goggle.’)
One last tip: Google Apps for Education
You know this is way easier when your school has its own Google Apps for education set up, right? It’s free, and no technical expertise is needed to get started.

I hope you give one of these ideas a try and let me know how it goes on my Google+ page.

Google Forms, Refreshed

With Google Drive, you can do more than just create, store, and share stuff. A variety of apps can help with everything from editing spreadsheets to signing documents electronically.

Forms let you easily create questionnaires and automatically collect responses in a spreadsheet. Today a new version launches, rebuilt to bring you a faster, cleaner, and more collaborative experience.

Now with collaboration 
Create a form faster than ever. Just as with Docs, Sheets and Slides, you can now collaborate with others in real-time. If you need to work with two colleagues on a survey, all three of you can work on the same form simultaneously and even have a group chat on the side, without leaving the form.

Better editing 
Even if you’re working solo, some new changes will make creating and editing forms easier. All your changes are auto-saved and you can quickly undo/redo edits. Improved copy-and-paste will let you copy a list of bullets from the web or multiple rows of text from a spreadsheet; then, when you paste into a form, each line will be appear as an individual answer. And you can use keyboard shortcuts to get things done more quickly.


Some things unchanged 
With the new Forms editor, you can continue using all the features you’re already familiar with:

  • Scale: Whether you’re collecting responses from ten friends for a baby shower or ten thousand attendees at a conference, you can count on Forms to reliably collect data for any number of responses. 
  • Analyzing: See the responses you’ve received right in Google Forms or collect them neatly in Google Sheets. And you can now download a .csv file for more detailed analysis and reporting. 
  • Sharing: If you share a form directly in Google+, anyone in your circles can respond without leaving their stream. Or if you send a form via email, respondents can submit their answers right from Gmail.

This update to Forms will roll out over the next few days. You can create forms directly from Google Sheets or Drive, or install the Chrome Web App for easy access from your browser. Also check the Google Drive +page all week for tips and tricks.

Posted by: Nick Santos, Software Engineer

Make the most of your holiday gifts and time at home with Google Drive

Chances are that many of you lucky readers will be unwrapping new computers, mobile phones, and tablets this holiday season. Here are a few quick tips on how you can smoothly transition all of your stuff from old devices to new ones using Google Drive.

For laptops & desktops 
First, you’ll want to get all your files from your old computer into Google Drive. To do this, download Drive for Mac or PC on your existing computer. To upload your files to Drive, simply drag-and-drop all your files and folders (up to 5GB free) into the new Drive folder on your desktop. Then you’ll be able to access everything on the web from any computer, including your new one. Or you can download Drive again on your new computer to sync your files and automatically store them on your new computer.
For mobile phones & tablets
Upload all of the photos and videos on your old device with the Drive mobile app for Android or iOS. Install the Drive mobile app on your new device and all your stuff will be there -- and also available to you on the web from any device.

More holiday tips & tricks 
For those of you planning to do any holiday cooking, here are a few other ways Drive can help you in the next few weeks:

  • Scan or snap a photo of a classic family holiday recipe and upload it to Drive for safe keeping and sharing. 
  • Search for recipes that you’ve already stored in Drive. You can even search for keywords inside PDFs and photos
  • Jot down a new delicious recipe right from the kitchen with Docs in the Drive mobile app for Android and iOS. 
  • Use Sheets for your grocery shopping list. Create it on your computer at home, then pull it up on your phone at the grocery store and cross of items as you go. 
  • Create a quick form to invite friends to your holiday get together and figure out who’s coming, what they’re bringing, etc. 
Happy holidays!

Posted by Michael Bolognino, Product Marketing Manager

January in Review: Styles, Sparklines, Google+ sharing, and more

One of the best things about working on web apps like Google Docs is that it gives us the flexibility to frequently bring you new features and improvements. Starting this month, we’re going to make some small changes to how we communicate what’s been happening in the world of Docs. Instead of writing blog posts for each and every minor update, we're going to try bundling them together monthly to give you a detailed overview of our favorite features and a short list of other notable changes to make sure you don't miss out on anything new.

On that note, we’ve got a bunch of new features that launched today, as well as some great things that improved over the month of January.

Customizable styles in documents
Giving your document consistent and beautiful formatting should be easy. Before today, if you wanted to update all the Subtitles in your document to look a particular way, you had to change each of them one at a time. That’s too many steps. Now you can restyle all your regular paragraphs, headings, or titles with just a couple clicks. For example, if you want to update all the Subtitles in your document to be a particular size, set one Subtitle to that size, select it, right click and choose Update Subtitle to match selection. This will change all the Subtitles already in your document and automatically update the style for any new Subtitles you create. Plus, with the new Options menu in the styles dropdown, you can set the current document’s styles as the default for new documents or you can load your default styles into the current document.

Sparklines in spreadsheets and more charting options
In Google spreadsheets, we’ve added more charting options and support for sparklines to make it easier to communicate data. The new options give you a bunch of tools to create more sophisticated charts including different Y-axes on either side of the chart, formatting options for the axis and title text, and all sorts of other customization for how your lines, bars, or pies are displayed. We’ve also added sparklines, which let you display line or bar charts inside of cells and are handy for presenting and comparing data in a simple, bite-sized way. In the example below, we’ve used sparklines to plot currency exchange rates over a 30-day period.


Sharing forms on Google+ 
Sharing the forms you create in Google Docs with the right people shouldn’t be a hassle. Today we added a Google+ share to the form editor so that you can share your forms directly with your circles with just a couple clicks.


And there’s more… 
On top of today’s new features, here are some changes from January that you may have missed:
  • Adding images to your docs from a high quality stock photo gallery. Simply go to Insert > Image, select Stock photos, and then search for the images that you want.
  • A more streamlined format for document discussion notifications that batches multiple discussions into a single email.
  • Quickly opening and selecting items from specific menus with keyboard accelerators. For example, when using Google Chrome, Ctrl+Option+E on a Mac and Alt+E on Windows or Linux will open the Edit menu.
  • Copying and pasting via the context (right click) menu in documents when you have the Chrome App installed.
  • Easily adding Google drawings or Google Groups discussions to a Google Site from the Insert menu.
  • Progress bars while uploading files to Google Sites.
  • Searching for text inside of PDFs in your documents list using Optical Character Recognition
If you’d like to learn more about what we’ve been up to in January, I’ll be doing a Hangout On Air later this week this to talk about these changes and listen to your feedback. Stop by our Community Manager Teresa’s Google+ page on Thursday, February 9 at 12 p.m. EST to tune in.
Posted by: Jeff Harris, Product Manager

Create and celebrate with Google Docs templates for the holidays

This season, brighten up your holiday celebrations with some of our fun and festive Google Docs templates.


If you’re hosting a gift exchange with your friends, family, or colleagues, try our new Secret Santa gift exchange template by following these instructions. This template will allow you to quickly send out a form to collect the necessary information from participating guests. Then, using a Google script, the form will assign Secret Santas and send automated emails to guests with all the details - no folded paper scraps necessary.

Here are a couple of other ways to make your holiday planning easier:
Browse the template gallery for more ideas, or submit and share your own templates for others to use. Wishing you the best this holiday season!

Writing a campaign speech with Google Docs

A few months ago, my colleague Julia and I were at a technology conference for educators. Teachers were very enthusiastic when we demonstrated working together on documents at the same time and were really excited about how they could use it in their classrooms. What surprised us though, was how many of our favorite features - like working together at the same time - were brand new to them.

We knew we wanted to share that same excitement with even more people. Inspired by the Search Stories videos, we set off to tell a story using Google Docs. The result is this video:



We hope you enjoy seeing some of the cool features Google Docs offers in action. And if you think your friends would like it, show it to them too!

Page Navigation in Google forms

Today, we’re excited to announce that we’ve expanded our logic branching capabilities in Google forms. Previously, a form creator had to add an extensive amount of multiple choice questions to the form to ensure that respondents were directed to the correct pages of the form. Form creators can now use a simpler page navigation feature to direct respondents to relevant pages regardless of their answers. Instead of using “dummy” multiple choice questions, form creators can now use “Go to page based on answer” multiple choice questions in conjunction with the new page navigation capabilities to make a simple, easy-to-follow form.

Let’s say you want to write a choose your own adventure story using Google forms (The Hunt for the terrible Dr. von Schneider). First, create a form and give your adventurer a difficult choice to make in a multiple choice question.


Next, check the box next to Go to page based on answer while editing the question. This enables the option for your form respondents to be directed to different pages of your form. In the drop down menu next to each answer, select the corresponding pages they should be directed to based on their answer.


Using page navigation, you can redirect form respondents previously split apart back to the same page. Under the Add Item menu, select Page break. Then, select what page you’d like your form respondents to be directed to under the drop down menu in the page break.


With page navigation selected, form respondents who landed on pages two and four of your form will both be directed to page five, where their adventure ends ... or does it? Find out here.

Try it out using another template we’ve created or share your own in the Google Docs template gallery.