Google Docs tips that will save your time and make your day

by Bradley Nice, Content Manager at ClickHelp.com — online documentation tool

It’s not necessary to type in your document’s name manually

Google Docs will do it for you. It will take whatever you’ve written in the first line and convert it to the document name when you click on the name edit field.

Your first line doesn’t have to be formatted as Title, it can be normal text as well:

This is very useful, as you can start writing your document, and when it’s time to give it a meaningful name — just click in the empty document name section, and voilà!

Use version history

It may seem that google docs didn’t change a bit in the past few years. But it actually evolved quite a bit. One of the coolest features they introduced is a version history, which was called ‘revision history’ initially, but with the name change came a couple of interesting additions.

For the quickest access to this feature, just click the “All changes saved in Drive” link above your toolbar:

This will open up version history UI. To the right is the actual history you can browse through and see which changes were made and by whom. And you can name any revision, so it will have a coherent name, instead of just date and time.

This can help you collaborate on documents in a more efficient way, and even allow restoring previous versions without tapping Ctrl+Z like crazy.

Define & Explore

Google Docs has a useful tool called Dictionary. With its help, you can get a definition of any word without leaving Docs interface:

Just right click on the word (or selected phrase) and choose “Define”. You’ll be given plenty of info for understanding a word you may not know.

And if you stumble upon something unknown in your colleague’s document (like, what the heck is “Super Meat Boy”?!), you can use the other neighbouring option — Explore. It will open the Google search window in Google Docs:

But explore lets you get some insight into the document as well. If you haven’t selected anything, click the Explore button in the bottom-right corner of the screen

or select Tools -> Explore from the toolbar. It will bring up this nifty window, that analyzes which topics you’re writing about and suggest images you can insert into your document. As you can see, it’s not 100% perfect (I didn’t write about any songs), but still is an interesting feature.

Style it the way you want

Did you know you’re not tied to Arial font in Google Docs? I bet you did. But they recently (not sure when, but it wasn’t there few years ago) added a small button in the top of the font selection dropdown:

MOAR FONTS! Yes, now you can add ANY google font from their ever-expanding library. Once you added one, it stays in your font list, so no need to re-add every time.

So, okay, you’ve added a bunch of fonts, styled your text the way you wanted… And then you decided to add a bit of information. What do you see? Arial all over again.

So the first useful thing about styles — you can make them document-wide, so you won’t have to restyle every header, every paragraph, etc:

So just choose the element you have already styled, select the corresponding style in the drop-down, and click “Update ‘X’ to match”, and all elements of the same level will be updated. And this doesn’t apply only to font family and font size — you can change, for example, header indent, alignment — pretty much anything Google Docs allow you, and it will be saved with your style.

But what if you found your style? What if you want all of your documents look like the one you just created? No problemo!

Just click “Save as my default styles”, as shown above — and now all of your new Google Docs will feature your styles. And if you want to change the old ones, just open up one and click “Use my default styles”.

Footnote citation

What if you needed one? What if you want to include a link to information source? Well, “Explore” helps once again. It’s done super-easy: just click “explore”, google whatever you want to know about, and, once the source is found, just click little citation button near the source in Google Docs:

Easy PDF/Image to Google Doc conversion

There’s another post about this by one of my colleagues. Go and have a read, it’s pretty short and the process itself is very simple. 😉

Learn some hotkeys

There are A LOT of keyboard shortcuts, but most of them you won’t need for most of the time. But do yourself a favor, learn some of those you’ll be using from time to time — it will save your time. I won’t talk about obvious stuff here like Ctrl+B for bold, Ctrl+V for paste and others, okay? So here is a couple of shortcuts I personally use:

• Ctrl+Space — clear formatting. Helps you cleanse your text from any ugly formatting it may have gotten somewhere.
• Ctrl+K — insert a link. Let’s you “attach” a link to any selected piece of your content, be it text or image
• Ctrl+Alt+C/Ctrl+Alt+V — copy/paste formatting — very useful for quickly transfer formatting from one piece of content to another.
• Ctrl+Shift+V — paste text without formatting. This one here is a life-saver. Too many times I’ve had to paste text in google docs, and this helps me avoid bringing any unnecessary formatting with it.

You can type faster by creating substitutes

It’s kind of like iOS auto-correct. These preferences are found in Tool menu on your toolbar.

Now, instead of typing “Rolling on the floor laughing biting the carpet dancing in circles and jumping through the window almost dying by smashing into HP who’s then running horrified into the street being killed accidentally by a yellow bulldozer” every time, or searching for it in your document so you can copy-paste it, you can just add a substitute. And you only gotta write “ROTFLBTCDICAJTTWADBSIHPWTRHITSBKABAYB” and Google Docs will automatically substitute this handy acronym with the actual phrase.

Have a nice day!

Bradley Nice,
Content Manager at ClickHelp.com — best online documentation tool for SaaS vendors