Google Drive Blog
The latest news and updates from the Google Drive team.
Spell checking powered by the web
Wednesday, March 21, 2012
One of my early projects at Google was to improve the suggestions that are made when a query is misspelled in Google Search. The neat thing about that system is that it’s adaptive: our suggestions get smarter and smarter based on the words
Googlebot
sees as it explores the web.
But search isn’t the only place where I make spelling mistakes! And that got me wondering: could we take this adaptive technology and use it to make spell checking better in other places?
The answer is yes. To prove it, today we’re launching an update to spell checking in documents and presentations that grows and adapts with the web, instead of relying on a fixed dictionary. This update has a few big advantages over traditional spell checkers:
Suggestions are contextual. For example, the spell checker is now smart enough to know what you mean if you type “Icland is an icland.”
Contextual suggestions are made even if the misspelled word is in the dictionary. If you write “Let’s meat tomorrow morning for coffee” you’ll see a suggestion to change “meat” to “meet."
Suggestions are constantly evolving. As Google crawls the web, we see new words, and if those new words become popular enough they’ll automatically be included in our spell checker—even pop culture terms, like Skrillex.
This new spell checker is available for English documents and presentations, but we plan to bring it to more languages soon. We’re really excited to give you a spelling system that continuously gets better. We hope it will make writing more efficient and enjoyable for you.
Posted by Yew Jin Lim, Software Engineer
Improved discussions, search scanned text in PDFs, and more
Tuesday, March 6, 2012
Fresh on the heels of adding
discussions to Google presentations
and the ability to
edit within the Google Docs Android app
, we’ve been hard at work on a few other new features to enhance your Google Docs experience.
All your comments--in one tidy place
We just added the discussions feature to Google
drawings
, and today we’re making it even easier to see a log of all of the comments that have been made whether you’re using drawings, documents, or presentations. Just click on the “Comments” button in the upper right corner of the editor to see a complete history of your discussions. You can reply in line, resolve or re-open comments, link directly to a comment, or change notification settings--without ever leaving the “Comments” menu.
Better text search for PDFs and images
Last month, we launched a feature to let you search for text inside the PDFs in your documents list. Now, using the same
optical character recognition technology
, you can search for and copy highlighted text when you open a scanned PDF, like a fax or hotel receipt.
It’s not just stuff in your documents list: we’ve also made text in PDFs and images uploaded to Google Sites searchable.
And that’s not all...
In addition to the features that were released today, over the last few weeks we’ve also made a bunch of other changes that you may have noticed. Now you can:
Add
custom Javascript and CSS
to your Google Sites
See full names in document and presentation comments (instead of showing email addresses)
Use keyboard shortcuts for navigating between table cells in documents
Cancel running scripts from the Google Apps Script editor
Add
donut charts
and error bars in spreadsheets
Posted by Ian Kilpatrick, Software Engineer
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