Google Drive Blog
The latest news and updates from the Google Drive team.
Introducing Google Drive... yes, really
Tuesday, April 24, 2012
(Cross posted from the
Official Google Blog
)
Just like the
Loch Ness Monster
, you may have heard the rumors about Google Drive. It turns out, one of the two actually does exist. Today, we’re introducing Google Drive—a place where you can create, share, collaborate, and keep all of your stuff. Whether you’re working with a friend on a joint research project, planning a wedding with your fiancé or tracking a budget with roommates, you can do it in Drive. You can upload and access all of your files, including videos, photos, Google Docs, PDFs and beyond.
With Google Drive, you can:
Create and collaborate.
Google Docs is built right into Google Drive, so you can work with others in real time on documents, spreadsheets and presentations. Once you choose to share content with others, you can add and reply to comments on
anything
(PDF, image, video file, etc.) and receive notifications when other people comment on shared items.
Store everything safely and access it anywhere (especially while on the go).
All your stuff is just...
there
. You can access your stuff from anywhere—on the web, in your home, at the office, while running errands and from all of your devices. You can install Drive on your Mac or PC and can download the
Drive app
to your Android phone or tablet. We’re also working hard on a Drive app for your iOS devices. And regardless of platform, blind users can access Drive with a screen reader.
Search everything.
Search by keyword and filter by file type, owner and more. Drive can even recognize text in scanned documents using
Optical Character Recognition
(OCR) technology. Let’s say you upload a scanned image of an old newspaper clipping. You can search for a word from the text of the actual article. We also use image recognition so that if you drag and drop photos from your Grand Canyon trip into Drive, you can later search for [grand canyon] and photos of its gorges should pop up. This
technology
is still in its early stages, and we expect it to get better over time.
You can get started with 5GB of storage for free—that’s enough to store the high-res photos of your trip to the Mt. Everest, scanned copies of your grandparents’ love letters or a career’s worth of business proposals, and still have space for the novel you’re working on. You can choose to upgrade to 25GB for $2.49/month, 100GB for $4.99/month or even 1TB for $49.99/month. When you upgrade to a paid account, your Gmail account storage will also expand to 25GB.
Drive is built to work seamlessly with your
overall Google experience
. You can attach photos from Drive to posts in Google+, and soon you’ll be able to attach stuff from Drive directly to emails in Gmail. Drive is also an open platform, so we’re working with many third-party developers so you can do things like
send faxes
,
edit videos
and
create website mockups
directly from Drive. To install these apps, visit the
Chrome Web Store
—and look out for even more useful apps in the future. This is just the beginning for Google Drive; there’s a lot more to come. Get started with Drive today at
drive.google.com/start
—and keep looking for Nessie...
Posted by Sundar Pichai, SVP, Chrome & Apps
March in Review: Improved charting, expanded language support, and Apps Script updates
Wednesday, April 4, 2012
Another month and another batch of improvements to Google Docs. We recently
debuted a new spell checker
that gets smarter and grows with the web, and we’ve also turned on a few features that let you do more with Docs.
New charting options
We’ve added a bunch of new ways to make richer charts in Google spreadsheets. You can now control the opacity of an area chart, set fonts to be bold or italic, and label sections of your charts along the axis.
These new features bring the number of charting improvements up to 30 since the beginning of the year, which is about 1 new feature every 3 days. Some of our favorite charts updates include
annotations
, error bars,
a second Y axis
,
donut charts
, and loads of formatting options.
OCR and spreadsheets support more languages
With Google Docs, you can upload PDFs and images of scanned text and have them automatically converted into Google documents using our
Optical Character Recognition
(OCR) technology. Starting this week, this is available in four new languages: Hebrew, Hindi, Chinese Traditional, and Cherokee.
Language support got better in Google spreadsheets too. For Hebrew and Arabic speakers, sheets and cells now offer
right-to-left support
.
More ways to use Google Apps Script
Google Apps Script
is a way for developers to customize Google Docs and other Google products. Over the past month, we’ve made some changes which developers may find helpful, including:
Support for adding your own HTML to your script’s dialogues and pages. Let’s say you wrote a script that prompts collaborators to play a game when they open a certain spreadsheet. It’s now possible to include more sophisticated HTML, like a table in the dialog that you built.
The option to
programmatically set sheet protection
in Apps Script. If you’re a teacher, you could add a script that automatically looked at all your spreadsheets and made sure that you’re the only one allowed to edit any sheet named “Grades”.
A redesign to the Apps Script menus. Sometimes when you’re starting a new project you’ll want to use scripts that you’ve already created. The menu changes make it easier for you to reuse scripts that you’ve already built and to share your scripts with other people .
Posted by Michael Schidlowsky, Software Engineer
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
Collaborate and edit anywhere with the updated Google Docs for Android
Wednesday, February 22, 2012
As I was sitting on the ferry commuting to Google’s
Sydney office
this morning, two thoughts occurred to me. First, Australia is beautiful. If you’ve never been here, you really should visit. And second, it’s amazing how productive I can be with just my Android phone and an Internet connection. I was responding to email, reading news articles, and editing documents--just like I do at the office. Only the view was better!
We want to give everyone the chance to be productive no matter where they are, so today we’re releasing a new update to the
Google Docs app for Android
. We've brought the collaborative experience from Google Docs on the desktop to your Android device. You'll see updates in real time as others type on their computers, tablets and phones, and you can just tap the document to join in.
We also updated the interface to make it easier to work with your documents on the go. For example, you can pinch to zoom and focus on a specific paragraph or see the whole document at a glance. We also added rich text formatting so you can do things like create a quick bullet list, add color to your documents, or just bold
something important
. Watch the new Google Docs app in action:
If you want to hear about the latest Docs news or send us feedback on the new app, visit
Google Docs on Google+
.
Gotta run--I’ve got another ferry to catch!
Posted by:
By Vadim Gerasimov, Software Engineer
Great presentations start with great discussions
Wednesday, February 22, 2012
Back in October, we released a preview of a
brand new version
of Google presentations, designed to make it easier to share ideas with others. We've been busy polishing the app based on your feedback and today we're excited to enable the new editor for all new presentations.
We’re also introducing a number of performance improvements and making it easier for you to collaborate by bringing the discussion feature you’ve used in
documents
to presentations.
With discussions in presentations, you’ll be able to: Comment on a shape or an entire slide to give context to your discussion. Send an email notification by adding someone to a comment.
Resolve comments to let collaborators know that they’ve been addressed, and to reduce clutter in your presentation. Plus, to make it easy to get feedback without giving up control of who can make changes, you can now give others the ability to comment on (but not edit) your presentation.
If you’d like to convert existing presentations to the new version of the editor, create a new presentation and import your slides by selecting
Import slides
from the
File
menu. To learn more about how to import your old presentations, check out
these instructions
.
With discussions and real time collaboration, we hope you’ll love working together in Google presentations. We’re rolling out these changes slowly over the next several hours. If you’d like to give us your feedback live, we’ll be hosting a Hangout tomorrow at 2:30 EST to talk about the latest updates to presentations. Stop by
our Google+ page
to find out how to participate.
Posted by: Michael Thomas, Software Engineer
Our team's new Google+ Page
Wednesday, February 15, 2012
As our product and team have evolved over the past few years, we’ve enjoyed sharing news and notes with you on this blog. In turn, you’ve voiced your experiences with our products via blog comments, forum posts, tweets, and more. Hearing from you every day motivates us to build better products - that’s why we wanted to give you another more interactive place to join in on the conversation.
Starting today, we’re launching a
new Google+ page
dedicated to Google Docs. We’ll share info about feature launches, tips and tricks, behind the scenes snapshots, and more. You’ll have opportunities to Hangout with us, too.
We hope that our Google+ page will give you a fun new environment to share your feedback, learn about our products, and most importantly, connect with our team and our community of Docs users. Later today, I'll be doing our first of five Hangouts with members of the team - visit our page and
add us to your circles
to find out how you can participate.
Posted by: Teresa Wu, Community Manager
Labels
#SafeOnline
accessibility
add-ons
Android
app scripts
apps
attachments
avery
back to school
blind
braille
charts
chat
Chrome
Chrome extensions
chrome web apps
Cloud Connect
collaboration
comments
community
discussions
docs
docs editors
document list
documents
documents list
drawings
Drive
drivebacktoschool
easybib
education
enterprise
Faces of Docs
folders
forms
gmail
gone google
Google Apps Blog
Google Apps Script
Google Cloud Connect
google docs
Google Docs Viewer
google documents
google drive
Google Drive Blog
Google Pack
Google Sites
Google+
googlenew
Guest Post
hangout on air
help
holiday
images
iOS
Keep
letterfeed
low-vision
mailchimp
mobile
nanowrimo
OCR
office compatibility mode
offline
paperless
pdfs
photo
photos
presentations
product ideas
profiles
quickoffice
Reddit
research
save to drive
screen reader
scripts
security
sharing
sheet
sheets
shortcut
slides
spell check
spreadsheets
stock photos
storage
students
suggested edits
tables
teachers
team
templates
videos
Viewer
work
Archive
2016
Sep
May
Apr
Feb
Jan
2015
Dec
Nov
Oct
Jul
Mar
Feb
Jan
2014
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jun
Apr
Mar
Jan
2013
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2012
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
2011
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2010
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2009
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2008
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2007
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2006
Dec
Nov
Oct
Feed
Visit our site
Google Drive
Google Docs, Sheets, Slides
Google
on
Follow @googledrive
Give us feedback in our
Product Forum
.
