Useful Google Docs Add-On

Clipboard by Diigo for Google Docs

The Clipboard Add-On by Diigo is useful for writers. The tool streamlines the editing process by providing users with a sidebar clipboard for managing content. The content on the clipboard is accessible from any Google Doc. The tool helps users  collect and manage content, and use it again when needed. Just open an existing Google Doc, clip selected content to save it to your clipboard, then use it again when working in any of your Google Docs. Contents on the clipboard remain there until they are deleted by the owner.

Web Fonts in Google Documents

How did I miss this?  Google Web Fonts in Google documents. Often the best way to get your point across is to present your idea in a creative, captivating way. They added over 450 new fonts to Google documents to make it easier for you to add a little something extra to whatever you create.

To use these new fonts, click on the font menu and select “Add fonts” at the very bottom, which will take you to a menu of all the Google Web Fonts available.

Once you’ve selected new fonts, you’ll be able to select them from the font menu.

Whether you’re looking for the perfect font for your first comic book or fancy handwriting for your wedding invitations, they hope you try out the new fonts and create some eye-catching documents.

Google Docs Dumps the Dictionary for the Whole Web

google_docs_150x150Spell checking powered by the web

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:

  1. Suggestions are contextual. For example, the spell checker is now smart enough to know what you mean if you type “Icland is an icland.”

  2. 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."
  3. 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