For mobile phones & tablets
Upload all of the photos and videos on your old device with the Drive mobile app for Android or iOS. Install the Drive mobile app on your new device and all your stuff will be there -- and also available to you on the web from any device.
More holiday tips & tricks
For those of you planning to do any holiday cooking, here are a few other ways Drive can help you in the next few weeks:
Scan or snap a photo of a classic family holiday recipe and upload it to Drive for safe keeping and sharing.
Search for recipes that you’ve already stored in Drive. You can even search for keywords inside PDFs and photos.
Jot down a new delicious recipe right from the kitchen with Docs in the Drive mobile app for Android and iOS.
Use Sheets for your grocery shopping list. Create it on your computer at home, then pull it up on your phone at the grocery store and cross of items as you go.
Create a quick form to invite friends to your holiday get together and figure out who’s coming, what they’re bringing, etc.
Happy holidays!
Posted by Michael Bolognino, Product Marketing Manager
WeVideo: Make a video (fancy editing skills not required).
Make a recap video of the highlights of 2012 with the photos, videos, and other files that you keep in Drive. Then add a personal touch with text, effects, music, and voiceovers. Get the app
UJam: Create new holiday tunes.
Grab some sleigh bells and write your own full track with a variety of backing instruments, beats, and styles from scratch, or start with a song template. Get the app
Check out many more apps that work with Google Drive to spread some of your own holiday cheer.
After you save using the extension, you’ll see options to immediately open the file in Drive, rename it, or view it in your Drive list, where you can do things like add it to a folder or share it with others.
There are also a few new ways to work with images you’re already storing in Drive. You can now zoom by scrolling or using the new ‘fit to page’ and 100% buttons. And if you have something to say about a specific part of an image, you can select a region and add a comment to it.
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.
View Google Earth map files: You can now open, preview, and interact with Google Earth files (.kml and .kmz) right inside Google Drive on the web.
Create new folders while organizing files: Now when you select files in your Drive list, in addition to adding them to an existing folder, you can add them directly to a new folder.
Drag and drop folders in Chrome: If you’re using Chrome, you can drag and drop entire folders from your desktop to Drive on the web.
Search includes your trash: Sometimes files you are looking for accidentally ended up in your trash, so now search results include files there too.
Now, anyone can create their own story about collaboration with the Gone Google Story Builder. Make your own personalized video featuring the characters, story, and even music of your choosing and then share it with everyone you know (or maybe just a few of your closest friends).
If you feel up to it, post your best creation to Google+ with the tag #gonegoogle - we’ll feature a few favorites next week on our Google+ page. Posted by Preston Hershorn, Product Marketing Manager
(click the image above to view a presentation in the stream)
To get started, simply click the Google+ icon when you're sharing from Drive, or copy-and-paste a link to a file from Google Drive into one of your Google+ posts.
You can also now quickly take menu actions by typing in the new search box. For example, if you type in “Picture,” you’ll see different options for adding graphics to your document.
Copy-and-paste of table cells is also improved. For example, you can copy a single word into many cells simply by highlighting those cells before you paste.
Or if you copy multiple cells from one table to another, the copied text will be pasted without creating a table in a table.
Finally, if you want to make changes to a series of similarly formatted text (like changing every blue and underlined link) throughout your document at once, right click on text with the formatting you want to change, choose “Select all matching text,” and apply new formatting in bulk, instead of individually updating each occurrence.
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.
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.
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
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.
With the Drive app, you can open PDFs, photos, videos, documents and anything else stored in your Drive while you're on the go. You can also search all your files, add collaborators to documents, and make files available offline to view them even without an internet connection. For blind and low-vision users, the app also works great in VoiceOver mode. Learn more about what you can do with the app in our Help Center.
Get Drive in the App Store for your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch running iOS 5.0+ and visit the Play Store to get the latest on your Android phone or tablet.
the ability to search for scholarly works in the research pane.
making it possible to put a Google Doc in a folder without leaving it by clicking on the folder icon to the right of the star in the toolbar.
teaching the new spellchecker a few more languages (Spanish, Dutch, and Finnish).
adding Alt+Enter (Option+Enter on Mac) as a keyboard shortcut for opening links. Simply place your cursor on a link and press the shortcut to open the link in a new tab.
the introduction of libraries and versions to Google Apps Script to make it easier for developers to organize, share and reuse their code.
If you find something you like, you can add it by clicking the insert button or, for images, by dragging them directly into your document. If appropriate we’ll automatically add a footnote citation so there’s a record of where you found the info.
Hopefully bringing knowledge from the web to Google documents will make your writing process just a little bit more efficient.
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.
In addition to hundreds of new fonts, we have a lot of other exciting updates to report:
Google Drive launched as a place where you can create, share, collaborate, and keep all your stuff.
There are now a few more options for inserting images in Docs, including inserting from Google Drive, searching for images from the LIFE Photo archive, or taking a snapshot with your webcam.
Charts in spreadsheets now has support for minor gridlines and options to customize the formats of axis labels
From File > Page setup... you can now set the default page size for your new documents.
It's now easier for speakers of right-to-left languages by automatically showing bidirectional controls when you type in a language that might use them.
Apps Script had many improvements, including
A new ScriptService for programmatically publishing your scripts and controlling when they run.
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
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 .
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.
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:
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.
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