Google Drive Blog
The latest news and updates from the Google Drive team.
Celebrating National Novel Writing Month: 3 authors, 1 Google Doc, 1 hour, and 1 line provided by YOU!
Thursday, October 30, 2014
Every year on November 1, thousands of people aim to start and finish a 50,000-word novel by 11:59pm on November 30. This fun, seat-of-your pants approach to creative writing is called
National Novel Writing Month
(or NaNoWriMo), and we think it’s pretty awesome. But you know what could make it even more awesome -- doing it together... live!
To celebrate we’ve invited three of our favorite writers to get creative together. They won’t be writing a full novel, but on November 18, they will be collaborating in Google Docs to write a short story in just one hour. You’ll be able to watch the whole thing as they swap sentences in real time. Afterward, we’ll have a Q&A with the authors moderated by NaNoWriMo director (and dedicated participant), Grant Faulkner.
Of course, every great story needs a great beginning, and that’s where we need your help! You’ll tell the authors how the story should begin, whether it’s with the classic “Once upon a time…” or something completely random like “Before he came to Tuberville, Roger Pickens had never seen a chicken.”
To participate,
send us your opening line
ideas until November 12th. Then, on November 18, you can tune in to view the winning prompt, and watch as the writers transform that sentence into a one-of-a-kind story, right in front of your eyes.
One prompt, one Doc, one hour. Three talented writers. And the tale unfolds from there...
Meet the collaborating authors
(Edan Lepucki, Tope Folarin, Mike Curato)
Edan Lepucki
’s debut novel,
California
, debuted at #3 on the New York Times Bestsellers List and has been the #1 bestseller on the Los Angeles Times and San Francisco Chronicle bestseller lists. California was also recently chosen as a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers selection.
Tope Folarin
made his fiction debut in
Transition
with 'Miracle' in 2012, for which he won the Caine Prize for African Writing in 2013. In 2014 he was named to the Africa39 list of the most promising African writers under 40. Tope currently lives in Washington, D.C. where he is at work on his first novel.
Mike Curato
’s debut children's book,
Little Elliot
, Big City (Henry Holt Books for Young Readers, Macmillan), has received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly and Booklist. The first in a series of three, Little Elliot, Big City recently won the 2014 Founders Award from the Society of Illustrators, which is given to the most promising new talent in the field of children’s book illustration. Curato lives and works in Brooklyn.
Posted by Andrea Freund, Communications for Docs, Sheets, & Slides and closet writer
Better ways to find, view, and share in Drive for Android
Wednesday, October 29, 2014
Google Drive makes it easy to keep your stuff safe and accessible from any device, but it doesn’t stop there. We want you to easily find and share your documents, photos, and PDFs with others. So, in addition to a
Material Design
facelift, the latest update for Android gives you new ways to add, locate, and share from Drive.
Improved Search
The search tool makes it even easier to find the content you’re looking for by updating results as you type each letter into the search box.
Better Sharing
Now, you can add a custom message when you share a file so your collaborators know why you sent it—for example, you can add a note asking for feedback. You can also turn on link sharing to make the file “public” and set access to view, comment, or edit. This automatically copies the link to the clipboard and allows you to paste it wherever you want.
Enhanced PDF Viewer
A new PDF viewer lets you find, select and copy text in PDFs, plus, it’s built right into Drive so you don’t need to launch another app.
Look for these updates to roll out over the next several days. If you don't have the Google Drive app, you can
download it from Google Play
.
Posted by Ganesh Shankar, Product Manager, Google Drive for Android
Add-ons for Forms bring a little something extra to your surveys
Thursday, October 23, 2014
Google Forms is a free and simple way to collect information--from quickly polling your friends about who'll be attending your trip to the haunted hayride, to getting thousands of responses to an awareness survey for work.
Over the last few months,
Forms
has been getting a bunch of updates to help you make good looking surveys, like
new theme choices
and the ability to create your own personalized themes.
To give you even more flexibility and options, we’re introducing add-ons for Forms—new tools, created by developer partners, that deliver even more features to your surveys (just like add-ons for
Docs and Sheets
).
Add-ons bring handy extras to your survey building experience, like setting a survey end date, sending custom emails based on responses, storing lists of choices that you frequently add to questions, and more.
You can access add-ons from the “Add-ons” menu in Forms, or by directly visiting the
Forms add-on store
.
Here are just a few of the growing list of add-ons that you can use today with Google Forms:
formLimiter
: Close your survey automatically, after a maximum number of responses is reached, or at a date and time of your choosing.
Ultradox Trigger
: Create custom emails, reports, invoices, newsletters, etc., based on information that people enter into your form.
Form Values
: Store and pull from lists that you use regularly in Forms, like a list of staff, students, rooms, resources or anything you want.
We hope these new tools make your Forms creation process even easier and more useful--and stay tuned for more--our developer partners will be launching even more add-ons in the coming weeks.
PS: If you’re a developer with ideas for creating your own add-on for Forms, here’s
some documentation
to get you started.
Posted by Saurabh Gupta, Product Manager
Edit and adjust images from right inside Google Slides
Monday, October 6, 2014
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
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