Mountain View, California — While we might be squabbling whether or not Google Buzz is dead, Google Docs is alive and well. For those of you who rely on Google Docs to organize their works, share files or simply process their thoughts, now have the reason to rejoice! In a blog post, the Google Docs team just added several new features that should come in handy in special circumstances, those are: auto-corrections, LaTex in equations, and images in spreadsheet cells.
For those whose fingers move faster than their brains, but if you are prone to typos and are constantly slowed down by having to go back and correct your mistakes you will love the newly released Google Docs Auto-correct system that will now help you to avoid mistakes. In fact today Google unleashed a bunch of pretty helpful features on us:
- Autocorrect mis-spellings
- LaTex shortcuts in the equations editor
- Images in spreadsheet cells
“If you are looking for numerous ways to speed up your typing or have been craving images in your spreadsheets, we have something for you this week,” Lindsay Hall, Software Engineering Intern at Google, wrote.
If you type a work in Google Docs and it does not looks perfect, the program will now automatically correct the mistake for you. Also, Spreadsheet users can now use LaTex in the equation editor and they can add images to a cell.
Auto-corrections are now available in the Docs document editor. Any word you have misspelled or which the built-in spell checker does not recognized can now be added to an auto-correction list. This way, the word will be automatically replaced with the correct version every time.
“Auto-corrections and LaTeX shortcuts to equations speed up typing and reduce editing while images to cells make it easy to add color to your spreadsheets. These features are rolling out over the next couple of days,” she announced.
Auto-Corrections:
The auto-corrections platform now allows text to be substituted, and has also added a default where Google Docs will automatically convert (c) to the copyright sign ©. Several other shortcuts are already built in, for example 1/2 will be replaced by ½ and ‘tm’ with ™. You can also add other rules to
make your word processing experiences more pleasant through the “Text substitution” section of the preferences dialog. Custom auto-corrections are also possible.
This process can be a real time-saver especially for lenghty documents or if you are the type that makes several mistakes constantly. You can just continue to type while Docs sorts things out behind you.
To activate this function, simply right-click on the word, select “AutoCorrect” and pick the most appropriate correction. You can also add more yourself through Tools > Preferences. One caveat though is that all the words you have chosen to auto-correct will be listed in the Preferences dialog in one long list which could become unwieldy over time.
Google Docs auto-corrections preferences (Click to enlarge…)
LaTex Support:
If you have been using the LaTex system in other spreadsheet editors, you will certainly relish this new feature. It enables you to type shortcuts for various mathematical formulas in the equation editor.
To take the usefulness of this platform one step further, Google Docs has also added LaTeX shortcuts to the equation editor. For example, typing ‘\frac’ while editing an equation will convert it into an equation fraction automatically. A full list of LaTex shortcuts can be found here.
Images In Spreadsheet Cells:
As for spreadsheets (also far from dead) you can now insert images into a cell in the spreadsheet editor and then resize it any way you see fit. Docs introduced better support for images in the documents editor when it launched earlier this year and is now expanding the feature.
Google Docs takes it to a new height — which is pretty cool. The ability to insert images is definitely meeting a demand, but there is a catch. You can only pull images from Google Images or a URL; you can not upload an image from your computer, so that limits your capabilities somewhat.
Google says it will provide a more detailed description of all these features and it also plans to unveil another one later today.