Edit spreadsheets on the go with the Drive mobile app

You’re making your list, you’re checking it twice—and now you can do it from anywhere.

Just in time for this year’s holiday season, you can edit Google Sheets on your mobile device, just like you can with Google Docs. From the Drive app on your iPhone, iPad or Android device, you can create a new spreadsheet or edit an existing one. You can switch fonts, resize columns, sort data, and more. And just like on your computer, you’ll be able to see other people’s edits in real time as they’re made.
Beyond spreadsheets, you may notice a few other tweaks to the Drive app, including better text formatting when you copy and paste in a Google document. And if you’re using an Android device, you can now edit text within tables in documents and add a shortcut on the homescreen of your device to any specific file in Drive.

Whether it’s holiday recipes, shopping lists, or just your family budget, the Drive app on your mobile device makes it easy to get stuff done wherever you are.

Get the Google Drive app today from Google Play and the Apple App Store.

Posted by Shrikant Shanbhag, Software Engineer

One click to Docs, Sheets, and Slides

Google Drive is a place where you can create, share, collaborate and keep all your stuff. Of course, there are times you want to start a new document right away–say, to take notes in class or prepare a last-minute presentation for your boss.

To make it even easier for you to create stuff quickly, Documents, Spreadsheets, and Presentations–now called DocsSheets, and Slides–are available as apps in the Chrome Web Store. Once installed, shortcuts to these apps will appear when you open a new tab in Chrome.


If you use a Chromebook, you’ll see Docs, Sheets, and Slides in your apps list by default following the next update to Chrome OS in a few weeks.


Posted by Jonathan Rochelle, Director of Product Management

Edit charts in Google spreadsheets with just a click

Charts tell the story of our data, so we often spend a lot of time getting the formatting just right. That’s why we wanted to make that process quicker and easier in Google spreadsheets. Instead of opening the chart editor dialog to make formatting changes, you can now click directly on the part of the chart you want to modify to change things like the colors, legend, and labels.
You can now also resize and move the chart around to make room for other components like axis labels and the legend. To do this, click the background of the chart and choose the Move and Resize option. You’ll then be able to drag the edges of the chart and move it around to allow things like the legend labels to all fit on one line, like in the example below.

(Before/After)

Once you’re done editing, you can switch to view mode by clicking the button in the top left corner of the chart, where you can click to see the value of data points and use other helpful interactive features. 

We hope to add more charting features to this new quick edit experience over the coming months, so stay tuned.

Posted by: Hillel Maoz, Software Engineer

Google Drive is the new home for all your Google Docs and more. Get started.

Several months ago, we launched Google Drive: one place to create, collaborate, share and keep all your stuff. If you’ve used Docs in the past, Google Drive is the new home for all your files and folders including your Google documents, spreadsheets, and presentations.

This means all your files that were previously stored in Google Docs will now be available in Google Drive. If you haven’t already started using Google Drive, you’ll see a message to try it out the next time you visit docs.google.com.


With Google Drive, you’ll get access to new features. 
  • Access everywhere, every device. Drive comes with desktop and mobile apps, making it much easier to upload, sync and access your stuff from any device. Get Drive for Android and iOS and you can create and edit documents, open and share files, and upload photos and videos. 
  • Find your stuff faster. Look for files by keyword and Drive searches everything — even text within scanned documents or images without any text at all. Drive also comes with a simplified navigation to help you better organize your files, and there's a new grid view to help you see thumbnails at a glance. 
  • Work with more apps in Drive. Google Drive is integrated with a growing number of third-party apps, so you can do things like send faxes, edit videos and create website mockups all in one place. 
Just in case you’re not quite ready for change, you can click the “Temporarily use the old look” button on the pop-up message, but eventually all Docs users will be switched to Drive.

You may also have noticed a few other changes in the Docs world. First, you’re reading this post on the brand new googledrive.blogspot.com. But don’t worry--if you were subscribed to googledocs.blogspot.com, you’ll still automatically get all of our updates in your feed.

Our social sites have also made the switch to Drive, so if you aren’t already, follow us on plus.google.com/+GoogleDrive and twitter.com/googledrive to stay up on the latest news and updates from our team.

Visit the help center to learn more.

Posted by Scott Johnston, Group Product Manager

Google Drive: Updates for iOS and Android

(Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog)

Every day, more and more people are choosing to live online and get things done in the cloud. Helping to make this experience as seamless as possible, Google Drive is one place where you can create, share and keep all your stuff. Drive is available on the web, as well as Mac, Windows and Android and iOS.

Updates for iOS
Starting today, if you’re using the Drive app on your iOS device you can also edit Google documents, just as you can with the Android app. From your iPhone or iPad, you can create a new document, edit an existing one or format text. And just like on your computer, you’ll be able to see other people’s edits instantly as they’re made.



You’ll also notice other new improvements to the iOS Drive app. For example, you can now view Google presentations on your iPhone or iPad, including speaker notes, full-screen mode and the ability to swipe between slides. You can also create new folders, move files into folders and upload stuff (like photos and videos) from your device directly in the Drive app.

Updates for Android 
We’re also updating the Drive app for Android phones and tablets today. You can now add comments, reply to existing comments and view tables in your Google documents. And you’ll have the same new abilities to view presentations and organize your stuff as your friends with iPhones do.

More to come... 
Looking ahead, we have plenty more planned for the Drive mobile apps—including native editing and real-time collaboration for Google spreadsheets. Stay tuned.

Get Drive in the App Store for your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch and visit the Play Store to get the latest on your Android phone or tablet. To learn more about Google Drive, visit drive.google.com/start
Posted by Anil Sabharwal, Senior Product Manager

Google spreadsheets, now with discussions

Getting things done with others would be much easier if everyone was sitting right next to you. But since that’s rarely the case, we’re always updating Google Drive to make it easier to collaborate with others, no matter where you are or who you’re with.

Today we’re bringing the discussion functionality that’s already in documents and presentations to spreadsheets. If a cell has a comment in it, you'll see an orange triangle in the upper right corner and when you hover over the cell you'll see the full discussion.


The total number of comments are also tallied up at the bottom of the screen on the sheet tab, and hovering over the comment icon shows all the comments on that sheet.


And just like you’re used to with comments elsewhere, you can +mention someone to automatically include them in a discussion and send them a notification via email—and they can even reply to the comment without leaving their inbox.

Any comments that were created in spreadsheets before today are still available and saved as “Notes”. These are shown in your spreadsheet using a black triangle in the corner of the cell to differentiate them from the new discussion-style comments. You can also create new notes from the “Insert” menu if you need to leave a quick annotation on a cell.

We hope discussions makes working in spreadsheets with others more fun and productive, and we look forward to making even more improvements to collaboration in Google Drive.

Posted by Patrick Donelan, Software Engineer

Lock down cells with Protected Ranges in Google spreadsheets

Editing with others in real-time makes it easy to get stuff done in Google spreadsheets in only a matter of minutes. But with so many people working in the same space, it’s possible to modify a section that a collaborator didn’t intend to be touched. That’s why, today, we’re updating the Named Ranges feature in spreadsheets to let you also protect them.

To get started with Protected Ranges in a shared spreadsheet, highlight the cells you’d like to protect, right-click, and choose Name and protect range from the menu.

Click through the presentation below to see the feature in action.



Even more spreadsheet features added this month 

Along with the arrival of protected ranges, you can now add colors and patterns when you apply cell borders in Google spreadsheets. We also updated find and replace to make it possible to search using patterns (also called regular expressions). For example, “^[A-Z]+” will find all the cells that start with uppercase letters.

As always, Google spreadsheets is getting better every day, so stay tuned for even more features and updates in the coming weeks.

Posted by: Joe Kaptur, Software Engineer

March in Review: Improved charting, expanded language support, and Apps Script updates

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

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

Celebrating VisiCalc's 32nd birthday with the inventors of the spreadsheet

On Wednesday, VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet available for personal computers, turned 32. We invited its inventors, Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston, to Hangout On Air with us to celebrate a product that’s paved the way for much of what the Google Docs team has been able to do today.

Users around the world tuned in to our live public stream as Dan and Bob shared the history of VisiCalc, their thoughts the spreadsheets of today, and their visions for the future. Watch the full video below.



And for you spreadsheets fanatics out there -- you can download and run a working copy of the original IBM PC VisiCalc spreadsheet program from 1981 at Dan Bricklin’s site.