Tag Archives: slides

Now, Docs! Now, Sheets! Now, Slides and Add-ons! Simplify your holidays with Google Docs

The Docs editors don’t just make things easier at work—they’re handy for helping you get stuff done at home too, especially around the holidays. We’ve rounded up five ideas to help you focus on the cheer—we’ll take care of the rest.

1. Sending holiday cards? Refresh your address book first. 
Use Forms to make it easy for friends and family to send you their most recent mailing addresses. Just create a quick form and email it out or post the link on social media. Everyone’s addresses will be neatly added to a private spreadsheet.
2. Now that you’ve got your addresses up to date—print out mailing labels. 
Use the handy Avery Label Merge add-on to pull your holiday card addresses from Sheets into an Avery label template in Docs. Pop your labels into the printer, hit print and start sticking!
3. Send a digital, collaborative holiday letter with Docs. 
 If you’d rather send holiday letters instead of cards, Docs can let everyone in the family contribute, no matter where they are in the country or the world. Just create a doc, give everyone edit access and write your card together (and leave your thoughts and opinions with suggested edits & comments). When it’s ready to go, you can publish it and share a link, or go old school and print and mail it out.
4. Give your documents and presentations a holiday touch with royalty-free images. 
Choose from a bunch of free holiday-themed images in Docs and Slides to make your holiday projects a little more festive. Just click Insert > Image > Search > Stock images to browse.
5. Create visual wishlists to share. 
Have a bit of fun with your family's holiday wish lists by making Slides for Santa. Share these visual wish lists with anyone who’s looking to pick up something for your family.

Smarter sharing in Drive and Docs

Today we're making two updates that make it even easier to work better—together—in Drive and the Docs editors.

After you add an email address to the sharing dialogue, you’ll see profile pictures for everyone you’ve added. This can come in handy when you need to confirm that you’re inviting the right contacts, especially if you work with people that have similar names.

It’s also quicker to find all the people you need to share something with. Once you add two collaborators, you’ll see suggestions for related people who you frequently email or share files with. 
For an overview and tips and tricks about sharing visit the Help Center.

Posted by Lev Epshteyn, Software Engineer

Edit and adjust images from right inside Google Slides

Sometimes to get an image just right in a presentation, you need to make some small tweaks. To help you do this without leaving Slides, a few months ago we made it possible to crop and add borders, and today we’re giving you even more control of your images with a set of new editing options.
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.

Check out some examples of how you can edit images inside Slides in the animated gifs below.
Change the opacity of your image
Recolor your image

Google Drive and the Docs editors: designed with everyone in mind

Cross posted on the Official Google Blog

Imagine trying to keep track of another person’s real-time edits in a document—using only your ears. Or trying to create a table from spreadsheet data—without being able to clearly see the cells. Whether you’re backing up a file in Drive or crunching some numbers in Sheets, it should be easy to bring your ideas to life using Google’s tools. But if you’re blind or have low vision, you may need to rely on assistive technologies such as screen readers and Braille displays—and that can make working in the cloud challenging. While screen readers can parse static webpages (like this blog) relatively easily, it’s much harder for them to know what to say in interactive applications like Google Docs because the actions they need to describe are much more complex.

With these reasons in mind, today we’re announcing some improvements to Drive and all our editors—Docs, Sheets, Slides, Drawings, and Forms—specifically designed with blind and low-vision users in mind.
Improved screen reader support in Drive and Docs 
In June, we introduced a new version of Drive that’s sleeker, easier to navigate and much faster. But just as importantly, the new Drive also includes better keyboard accessibility, support for zoom and high-contrast mode and improved usability with screen readers.

Across Docs, Sheets, Slides, Drawings and Forms, you’ll find that it’s now much easier to use a screen reader, with nicer text-to-voice verbalization and improvements to keyboard navigation. You’ll also notice other updates, including:

  • Support for alt text on images in Docs, so you can tell a screen reader what they should say to describe an image 
  • Better support for using a keyboard to edit charts and pivot tables in Sheets 
  • Additional screen reader improvements specifically for Docs, Sheets and Slides, including support for spelling suggestions, comments and revision history 
  • The ability to quickly search the menus and perform actions in Docs, Slides and Drawings (and soon Sheets and Forms)—even if you don’t know the action’s key sequence 
Collaborating with others is easier too: in Docs, Sheets, Slides or Drawings, screen readers announce when people enter or leave the document, and you’ll now also hear when others are editing alongside you.

Refreshable Braille display support 
If you use a Braille display, you can now use it to read and enter text in Docs, Slides and Drawings. Even if you don't use a Braille display, with Braille support, your screen reader’s settings for character echoing are automatically followed. Enabling Braille also dramatically reduces the lag between when you press a key and when it’s announced by your screen reader, and improves the announcements of punctuation and whitespace. Learn how to enable Braille support in our Help Center.

Get up and going faster
The first time you use a screen reader or a Braille display, getting up to speed can be a daunting task. But it’s simpler with new step-by-step guides for Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Forms and Drawings.
You can also access the in-product “Help” menu at any time without interrupting your work, or use the updated shortcut help dialog to easily search through keyboard shortcuts if you don’t remember them.

Finally, we’re offering phone support for Google Drive accessibility questions. If you get stuck, visit support.google.com/drive to request a phone call and someone from our team will reach out to you.

What’s next
Referring to recent updates to Google Drive, Dr. Marc Maurer, President of the National Federation of the Blind, said at this year’s National Convention: “The progress...during the last few months has just been positively extraordinary.” We’re pleased the community has welcomed these improvements, and will continue to work with organizations like the NFB to make even more progress.

Everyone, regardless of ability, should be able to experience all that the web has to offer. To find out more about our commitment to a fully accessible web, visit the new Google Accessibility site at www.google.com/accessibility.

Posted by: Alan Warren, Vice President, Engineering

Your iPhone & iPad are ready to get to work with new apps for Docs, Sheets, & Slides

You suddenly remember you need to add "buy milk" to your grocery list, but don't have a pen or paper in sight. You’re on the subway with no reception and need to update your soccer club spreadsheet before you get to practice. You desperately need to make edits to your marketing strategy PowerPoint before you present, but you only brought your iPad to the meeting.

We've all been in binds like this before, but the good news is, now there's a way out.

With today’s launch of the Slides app for iPhone & iPad and updates to the Docs and Sheets apps, we’re delivering on our promise to make it possible for you to work with any file, on any device, any time. You can now create that grocery list, edit that spreadsheet, and update that slide deck with no problem.
Here's the lowdown on what you can now do with Docs, Sheets, and Slides:
  1. You can truly get stuff done from any device—your iPhone, iPad, Android phone, Android tablet, laptop or desktop computer. Any change you make on any of these devices is saved automatically, so you can pick up right where you left off any time, anywhere that you can sign in. 
  2. The Docs, Sheets and Slides apps come with offline editing built right in. Just make the files you want to edit available offline. Any changes you make offline get automatically synced when you reconnect, just like when you make offline edits from your computer. 
  3. And while converting Office files to Docs, Sheets and Slides is a cinch, the new iPhone/iPad apps also let you edit Office files directly -- just like on the Android apps and the web. 
Simply put, no matter where you are, how spotty the WiFi is, or what file type you're working with, you can get stuff done your way.

Posted by Li-Wei Lee, Software Engineer

Work with any file, on any device, any time with new Docs, Sheets, and Slides

Odds are, you don't use just one device throughout the day—maybe it's a tablet at home over breakfast, a phone on the train to work, and then a computer or laptop once you're in the office. In other words, you expect to be able to get stuff done no matter where you are, which device you’re using, or what you’re working on.

That’s why today, Docs, Sheets, and Slides are getting major updates on both mobile and desktop. With this release, you can now work on any document, at any time, on any device, both with and without an Internet connection.

Mobile apps for Docs, Sheets and now Slides 
We recently launched mobile apps for Docs and Sheets that allow you to create and edit files on the go, even if you’re offline. We’re rounding out the trio with a new Slides mobile app that’s available starting today on Android and in the coming weeks on iOS.
Edit and share Office files — without Office 
Sometimes people send you files and you need to be able to open them, make some edits, and send them back. If they don’t use Docs, Sheets and Slides it can be a challenge. Starting today, you no longer have to worry, because both the web and mobile apps for Docs, Sheets, and Slides let you edit Office files—without conversion—so you can now edit and send back files in their original format.

The updated mobile apps for Docs, Sheets and Slides come with Office editing built right in, and our new Chrome extension allows you to edit and share files directly from Google Drive, Gmail or from your Chromebook, where the extension is pre-installed. These updates will be available starting today, but may take a couple of days to fully roll out.

Of course, if you want to collaborate seamlessly with others at the same time, simply convert the files to Docs, Sheets or Slides.
Suggested Edits: a new way to collaborate 
People love using Docs because it’s so easy to work together in one place, rather than making edits and giving feedback by emailing multiple versions of the same document.

But sometimes instead of giving your collaborators free reign to edit away, you’d rather they make suggestions that you can accept or reject later. That’s why today we’re excited to add Suggested Edits in Docs. This new feature is now available for anyone with commenting access in Google Docs on the web, and is coming soon to our mobile apps.

Work the way you want 
With today’s updates to Docs, Sheets, and Slides, we’ve got you covered, regardless of how, where, or when you need to get something done. You now have mobile apps for Docs, Sheets and Slides, the ability to edit and share Office files, and a brand new way to collaborate with Suggested edits. It’s a big update, but more importantly, we hope it’s a big improvement for you.

Posted by Ryan Tabone, Director of Product Management