Google Docs Is Getting Better

Back in the before times, a couple of years before I retired, management at the TSX decided to change the office systems from SharePoint and Microsoft Office to Google Workspace. I fought hard and managed to convince the PTB that I really did need Word and Adobe FrameMaker to do my job, but I still had to use Docs and Sheets for some of my work. 

Since then, I've gradually transitioned most of my personal writing and home accounting to Google Docs and Sheets. I actually prefer Sheets to Excel, mostly because it has far better dark mode support than Excel, and is generally easier to use. As for Docs, I now use it for the few documents I need to create and have even used it to edit a friend's book. I'll probably not renew my Microsoft 365 subscription when it comes up for renewal next year. 

In the eight years since I left the TSX, Google has gradually added features to Docs. Jeremy Caplan at Wonder Tools has published an article listing his 20 favourite Google Docs features. Most were not available when I was at the TSX some duplicate features available in Word. Some require Gemini, which might be a problem in some organizations. 

Here are a few from his list. 

• Match a prior doc's format. This might be easier for some people to use than creating a document from a template.
• Add a quick link to any text. May be easier than Word's linking feature. 
• Create typing shortcuts. Similar to Word's Autotext but probably easier to use.
• Use markdown for formatting. Developers will love this.
• Insert interactive elements. Similar to Word's fields or Quick Parks.

There's more, like tables of contents and sections, which Docs calls tabs. I don't see any support for indexing though, which is something that I needed for some larger documents. 

I think it's clear that Docs is now a suitable tool for many technical writers. Those who are working with large documents, need complex print formats,  or features like footnotes/endnotes or indexes, will probably want to stick to more established tools like Word or FrameMaker. 

Featured Links - November 11, 2025

 Things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

Model of the Edmund Fitzgerald at the Shipwreck Museum in Michigan

A Ghost Fleet of Tankers Is Keeping Russia’s War Machine Afloat. The West Can’t Stop It. "How Putin outsmarted the oil sanctions."

Still Haunted by the Edmund Fitzgerald. "50th Anniversary Tribute". Seems appropriate that we are getting our first winter storm on Sunday. 

 Google Docs Gets Smarter. "Audio narration, AI help, and 40 new templates." Many of the new features require an AI-enabled plan, but there are some, like document tabs, that could be quite useful for longer documents.

The Florentine Diamond Resurfaces After 100 Years in Hiding. "A legendary jewel of the Hapsburg dynasty — not seen since 1919 and thought lost, stolen or recut — has actually been safe in a Canadian bank for decades." This is quite a story. 

‘Frankenstein’: How Close Is Guillermo del Toro’s Film to the Original Novel? A Mary Shelley Expert Answers Our Burning Questions. "So, just how well does del Toro’s version stack up against Mary Shelley’s original novel? We asked Julie Carlson, an English professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara and an expert on the British Romantic period and the Wollstonecraft-Godwin-Shelley family, for her thoughts." I enjoyed the movie, though I did find it hard to watch in places (many very dark scenes). 

Find cancer clinical trials in Canada. "Helping people living with cancer and healthcare professionals navigate cancer trial options." It's good that Canadians have an alternative to looking in the US for information. 

New laser treatment could stop blindness before it starts. "A new laser treatment may halt dry macular degeneration by using controlled warmth to trigger the eye’s self-repair mechanisms." Of course, it will be years before this becomes widespread, assuming it works. 

I’m never going back to Microsoft Word after mastering this open-source self-hosted tool. "Enter HedgeDoc, the open-source web-based collaborative markdown editor that has changed my writing setup. By running it on my server, I achieved true data independence that Word could never offer." Ten or fifteen years ago, I would have jumped on this, but at this point in my life, I just can't be bothered.

Featured Links - October 10, 2023

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

Harmony Bay

• Microsoft’s font substitution for Aptos really sucks. "Microsoft’s alternatives for the new Aptos fonts range are very poor. In some cases, the substitions make no sense at all.  We’ve looked at what happens if a document with Aptos fonts is opened Office 2016 and earlier versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook."
• The Plain View. "The best virtual reality experience I’ve had this year was not with the $500 Quest 3 or the $3,500 Apple VisionPro, and it didn’t even require a headset. Sure, it cost $2.3 billion. But it came with a live soundtrack from an iconic rock band." Attending a concert at The Sphere is now on my bucket list.
• How to add Markdown support to Google Docs. "You have an alternative to keyboard shortcuts." Markdown continues its inexorable march to world domination. 
• Cats first finagled their way into human hearts and homes thousands of years ago – here’s how. If you are a cat person, you will find this article quite interesting.
• Disney+ censoring classic Disney cartoons to reflect modern sensibilities. This is just wrong.
• Adobe and Microsoft break some old files by removing PostScript font support. "PostScript Type 1 fonts are decades old, but apps supported them until recently." This could be a problem if you have old documents that you are trying to open.
• Terry Bisson’s History of the Future. "For more than two decades, one of pulp sci-fi’s masters has delivered headlines from a time line defined by the absurd." Bisson gets profiled in the New Yorker. See my blog post about his novel, Fire on the Mountain. 

Featured Links - January 3rd, 2022

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

• Surprise! The Pandemic Has Made People More Science Literate. This may be just about the only good thing to come out of the pandemic.
• 10 lessons I’ve learned from the Covid–19 pandemic. Everyone in public health and all politicians should read this and be tested annually on the key points.
• ‘The Fuse Has Been Blown,’ and the Doomsday Glacier Is Coming for Us All. New data suggests a massive collapse of the ice shelf in as little as five years. “We are dealing with an event that no human has ever witnessed,” says one scientist. “We have no analog for this”.
• Webb Space Telescope Got a Lucky Boost From Its Christmas Launch. "The mission may have enough fuel to last over a decade, thanks to an ultra-precise launch."
• New ways to customize tables in Google Docs. Tables become a lot more useful in Google Docs.
• The History of the Graphical User Interface -- 1945 to 1980. "A visual, historical tour of the early years of computer GUI's... starting in 1945."
• Texas Scientists Are Sharing the Design for Their New, Cheap Covid-19 Vaccine. "A low-cost, effective vaccine authorized for use in India this week could soon be shared around the world."
• Archaeologists Find Ancient Tsunami Victim on the Turkish Coast. "Human and dog remains at Çeşme-Bağlararası are the latest evidence of the Thera eruption and the ensuing tsunami that roared through the Mediterranean."
• NOVA's top 5 science stories of 2021. "Scientific advancements helped humans push through both the pandemic and the atmosphere this year, and a long-awaited visit from some underground insects set the country abuzz."

Featured Links - October 12, 2021

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

• Kobo's New E Ink Tablet Is a Cheaper, Smaller reMarkable Alternative. The Kobo Sage adds stylus support to an 8-inch E Ink tablet with a glowing screen.
• 5+ Google Docs Apps and Add-Ons to Boost Your Productivity and Efficiency. Several of these look useful and I will probably try them out.
• A Nixon Deepfake, a 'Moon Disaster' Speech and an Information Ecosystem at Risk. "A new video re-creates a history that never happened, showing the power of AI-generated media." 
• It’s Easier for Global Acts to Play in Russia Than in the U.S. Right Now. "Covid-19 has made U.S. visa issues even more of a headache for musicians."
• 11 Google Drive Features Everyone Should Know About. "Are you using the best features of Google Drive yet?"
• Asteroid 2021 SG came from the sun’s direction. That made it almost impossible to spot until just before it passed by the Earth. This is a problem. 

Google Docs Is Getting More Features

When I was working at the TSX, I had to start using Google Docs for some documentation, and it drove me crazy. It was missing basic features, like the ability to change headers and footers from one page to the next and an automatically generated table of contents. Over the last couple of years, Google has added features to the point where Docs is becoming almost usuable.

Now they've announced that Docs will finally get the ability to switch between portrait and landscape pages in the same document. Despite the snarky take of the article, this is a useful and often necessary feature for technical documentation. 

Documents created in Google Docs can now be changed between portrait and landscape orientation on a per-section basis, meaning that you don't have to make every page tall and thin just because the first page looks good that way. Microsoft Word documents that contain a mixture of vertical and horizontal pages will be able to be imported, edited, and exported soon as well.

As well, you will be able to directly edit Microsoft Word documents without having to change the format. Next year, there will be an update that allows to layer text and images and add watermarks to a document.  

It's always easier to start with a template rather than creating everything from scratch. That's especially true in Docs, which lacks som of the features that would make document formatting easier. Here's an article with links to some useful Google Docs templates for both home and business use.

 

Some Google Drive Settings to Look At

Google Drive has become the collaboration platform of choice for many people. So it's wise to have a look at some of the settings, especially since Google keeps updating the product and adding new features.

MakeUsOf has an article that describes some of the settings that you should have a look at. Most of them are tips that might make the tool easier to use or that change how it integrates with other applications. 

A few of the more important ones:

• Use files offline
• Check your app permissions
• Set apps for specific file types

More Tips for Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides

Googles apps, especially Docs, Sheets, and Slides, look simple on the surface, but they have features that might not be immediately obvious. This Gizmodo article has 21 tips for these apps to help you streamline your work and use them to their fullest.

Scanning through the list, I found a few that I wasn't aware of. I ddin't know that Sheets has a macro recorder and that you can use IFTTT (If This Then That) to create automatic feeds and simple dashboards.

Tips on Using PDFs with Google Drive

Google Drive and Google Docs have some useful features for working with PDF files. I never paid much attention to that when I was working at the TSX because I had the full version of Acrobat. Now that I'm a penniless retiree, I have to scrape by with cheaper alternatives, so it's good to see that Uncle Google is looking after me.

This article lists several ways you can work with PDFs using Google Drive and Google Docs. Note that some of the tips involve using third-party add-ins.

Google Docs Live Edits Now Works on Assistive Devices

Google has made an improvement to the Live Edits feature in Google Docs. It now works with assistive devices like screen readers and Braille printers.

Users can access this live edits update by going to Tools under Accessibility settings, turning on screen reader support, and checking “Show live edits” in the same menu. A gradual rollout started on Tuesday, with a full rollout beginning on September 10th.

It's good to see Google paying attention to accessibility features, something that too often gets neglected by developers.

Google Docs Gets Compare Feature

Users of Google's G Suite platform will finally get a compare feature in Google Docs.

The newly added feature lets you compare two documents directly from the web interface. To do so, you need to open the first document in Docs, then click on Tools -> Compare Documents and fetch the version to compare it against. This will create a new file highlighting changes as suggested edits. To make it easier to recognize, you'll be asked who the differences should be attributed to, which will make the changes appear as if they were made by a particular user directly in Docs.

That's a second major feature added to Docs recently; the other being the addition of section breaks. It's nice to see Docs finally getting some (much needed) love.

Google Docs Gets Sections

In May, Google started rolling out an update for Google Docs that adds section breaks to its formatting choices. You'll be able to change margins between sections. Reading their update doc, I haven't been able to figure out if it will allow a change from portrait to landscape orientation.

Insert section breaks and view section breaks in your doc

You can now insert a next page or continuous section break in Google Docs by going to Insert > Break. From here, you can select next or continuous. Note both types of breaks will start at the place of your cursor location.

To easily view where section breaks are located in your document, you can use the new show section breaks tool by going to View > Show section breaks. When Show selection breaks is enabled, you’ll see a blue dotted line where each section break is located.

Adjust margins per section

It’s now possible to use the ruler to adjust the left and right margins by section. Previously, it was only possible to adjust the margins for the entire document.

These updates are for G Suite customers. If you are using the free version of Google Docs, you'll probably have to wait a while for it to roll out.

G Suite Gets Office Editing

The Office Watch Newsletter reports that Google's G Suite customers will soon get the ability to directly edit Microsoft Office documents from Word, Excel, and Powerpoint. This is big news for companies that have users on both platforms.

According to Google document participants will be able to use Microsoft Office or G Suite:

” … where some members of your organization use Office while others use G Suite, this ensures seamless collaboration and eliminates the need to consider or convert file types.”

They imply that real time collaboration is possible.

“Office editing brings everyone the benefits of G Suite’s real time collaboration tools and intelligence features to Office files.”

Anyone who has tried it knows that Microsoft continues to have problems with document collaboration and real-time interaction.  Getting it to work across platforms will be ‘interesting’.

If I were still working, I'd have reservations about letting anyone mess with some of my carefully crafted Word documents, so I'll be quite interested in hearing how this works in practice. Unfortunately, I won't be able to test it myself, since it's currently only rolling out to G Suite customers. 

NYT Releases Information Management Tool

Keeping track of information is critically important for a news organization like the New York Times. To help their reporters, they developed a tool called Library, and are now releasing it as open source on GitHub.

Library is a wiki powered by a Google Docs backend. When you connect Library to a shared folder or team drive, it will traverse the documents in the folders and create your site content. Documents in Library are searchable, taggable, and can be grouped by desks or categories.

To add a page to Library, you simply create a new Google Doc, or move an existing document into the folder or team drive that powers Library. Existing pages feature a convenient link that enables quick access to the Google Docs interface for any particular document, and editing the Google Doc makes changes to the page in Library.

I've read through the documentation on the example Library site, which includes the setup instructions. It looks moderately complex to set up, but the instructions appear detailed and complete, so it might be possible for a non-programmer like me to install it. It might be a good way to create a wiki for home use by my family; once set up, it should be no harder to use than standard Google Docs. I'd have jumped on this in a minute at the TMX.

Ten Google Docs Tips

MakeUseOf.com has published a list of ten Google Docs tips that they claim will make you more productive. I had to use Google  Docs at the TMX and I hated it. But if you have to use it, some of these tips should prove helpful. I'd especially recommend learning how to use the Advanced Search features and trying the integration with Google Keep.

In the future, I will probably publish some posts based on my experience with Google Docs. There are some add-ins that provide some of the features missing from the basic application.