One of the benefits to using Google on the cloud is its suite of document editors, which are completely free to use and accessible anywhere online. One of these editors is Google Docs, which is a web-based word document and text editor. If you've ever used Microsoft Word to create and edit documents, then you can think of Google Docs as an online version of Word, since it has many of the same capabilities. In fact, it is compatible with Microsoft Word files (.docx and older) as well as plain text files (.txt). A major benefit of Google Docs over Microsoft Word, however, is the cloud capability. Because documents are edited online, multiple users can format and edit a word document at the same time.
Google Docs can be accessed from within Google Drive. To create a new document through Drive, simply click the "New" button in the top left corner of the Google Drive home page and then select "Google Docs."
Alternatively, you can go directly to the Google Docs URL https://docs.google.com to create a new document. What's the difference? Google Drive contains all of the files you have stored on the cloud, including images, spreadsheets, and presentations. Google Docs will contain only your word and text documents, so it can be useful when you only want to work with those types of files. Here's an example of Jane's Google Docs page. You can see her recent documents in the bottom part of the screen. The top part, below "Start a new document" is called the TEMPLATE GALLERY, which allows you to quickly create a new document. To create a new document you can choose the blank option or any of the templates available.
Clicking on the "TEMPLATE GALLERY" link will expand the template options to include "Resumes," "Letters," "Personal," "Work," and "Education" templates.
Assuming that you are logged into your Google account, underneath the templates you will see the past documents that are saved on your Google Drive under the "Recent documents". In Jane's account, we see only one. Each of them can be opened and edited by clicking on them, which will redirect the current window to the old word document. You can sort by date modified or by title by clicking on the "A-Z" button.
One of the most convenient aspects of Google Docs (and all document editors on Google Drive) is its auto-save feature. As soon as the application detects a change in the file, it will automatically save without any prompt from the user. This means you don't need to remember to save your progress as you work. You do not need to worry about losing progress when the power goes out, the internet disconnects, or even when a computer breaks down.
If a stable internet connection is an issue or if you plan to work offline, Google Docs offers an offline mode that saves the word documents to the local computer. Even in offline mode, Google Docs will automatically save changes.
To turn on offline mode, click on the menu button in Google Docs and then click on "Settings."
Toggle the "Offline" switch to on.
Offline mode for Google Docs will also be applied to Google Sheets and Google Slides.
Now that we've covered how to access Google Docs and where to find Google Docs you've previously created, we'll discuss a few features that you can use within Google Docs. Additionally, many of these features can be used across Google products, so once you master them in Google Docs, you can also apply them in Google Sheets and Google Slides.
If you've worked in Google Docs or Microsoft Word previously, this will likely be a review. However, we want to make sure that all the features within Google Docs that you'll use regularly are covered in this lesson. To get started, again, you'll want to go to Google Docs and click on Blank to open up a blank document.
You will then see a blank document, as shown here. In addition to the document itself, there are many formatting options available through menus in the document editor.
Within Google Docs, once you start typing information into your document, you may want to change the way that your text looks. This is called "formatting" your text. You can format the text by:
- changing the font
- changing the size of the font
- making the font bold, italicized, or underlined
- changing the color of the font
All of these changes to text can be accomplished using the options on the toolbar within Google Docs.
To use these options from the toolbar, you'll begin typing within Google Docs. Then, for any text you want to format, you will simply highlight the text, and click on the appropriate option from the toolbar. In this example, we would type "Document Title" into the Google Doc.
To make the title bold, underlined, and larger, we would just highlight the text, click on the bold symbol and the underline symbol. While the text is still highlighted you would click on the drop down "Font size" menu, and click on a larger number (here, we've selected '24'). Now your text will be just as you want it. The same process can be used to change the font and to change the color of the font.
What if, in addition to formatting the text itself you wanted to alter where the text was on the page? To change this, you can use other options from the toolbar. These buttons can be used to alter the alignment in four different ways:
- left-aligned - aligned on the left side of the page
- center-aligned - aligned in the center of the page
- right-aligned - aligned on the right side of the page
- justified - aligned so that the text is flush with both the left- and right-sides of the page
To use these options, again, you'll highlight the text you would like to align and then click on the appropriate alignment option:
In addition to changing how some text is formatted or where it is on the page, you'll often find the need to include lists in your Google Docs. There are two primary types of lists in documents:
- bulleted lists - lists where each item starts with a bullet
- numbered lists - lists where each item starts with a number
To create either type of list, you can type the list out, with each item on a separate line. You'll then highlight the text you want to be a list, and click on either the numbered list icon in the toolbar or the bulleted list icon in the toolbar to create the type of list you want to create.
We previously covered this briefly; however, we'll cover how to insert an image into your Google Doc in more detail now.
To insert an image, you'll make sure the cursor is in your document where you would like to insert the image, and then you'll click on the insert an image icon in the toolbar to display a drop-down menu with options:
There are a number of ways in which you can insert an image that will appear on this menu. Most frequently, you'll likely be including images that are either on your computer or from a URL. We'll discuss those in detail now, but feel free to play around with the other options to understand them as well.
If there's an image on the Internet that you would like to insert into your Google Doc, Google makes this simple for you. For example if you were on Google and searched for "R language image", you'd likely get results looking something similar to this:
If you were to click on 'Images for R language', you'd see lots of images from which to choose. If you were to scroll through these, you could select your favorite image, and right-click on it.
From the drop-down menu, click on "Copy Image Address." This copies the image address (the URL) for this image. This enables you to paste it in your Google Doc.
You would then return to your Google Doc, ensure that your cursor is where you would like to insert the image and click on the image icon in the toolbar, and select "By URL" from the drop-down menu
In the box that pops up, you'll then paste the URL that you just copied by using the keyboard shortcut ctrl + v.
The image you selected will automatically appear in that box. Now, you just have to click "INSERT."
The image will now appear in your Google Doc!
Whenever you're using an image that is not your own, whether in a Google Doc, a Google Sheet presentation, or anywhere else, it's important to include the source information, to give credit to the people whose image it is and to allow others to find the image if they want to.
Note: If an image you select does not work with these instructions, there is a chance that you do not have permission to use that image. In that case, it's likely best to search for an alternate image.
In addition to inserting images from URL, you may need to insert images that are on your computer locally. We previously discussed that there is not much local storage on your Chromebook; however, if you have saved an image to that space, you can insert it in your Google Doc using the following procedure.
First, you'll click on Insert Image Icon and click on the "Upload from computer" from the drop-down menu. On your Chromebook, this will give you access to your Downloads folder.
If the file you want to insert has been recently downloaded, it will appear first in the list that appears. Click on the image you want to insert and then click "OPEN" at the bottom right-hand of the screen.
Your image will now be inserted in your Google Doc! As mentioned in the previous section, don't forget to include your source!
In addition to inserting lists and images, you may find the need to insert tables into your Google Docs. To do so, you'll make sure your cursor is in your Google Doc where you'd like to insert the table and then click on "Insert" from the menu along the top of your Google Doc. From the drop-down menu, you'll click on Table.
This will expose an additional menu from which you'll select how many columns and rows you want the table to have. For example, if you want a table with 4 columns and two rows, you'll highlight that in the squares that pop up and click once.
In this case, a 4x2 (meaning 4 columns and 2 rows) has been inserted in your document.
You can then click in the squares of the table to add text to your table. Note that all of the formatting discussed earlier in this lesson still applies within a table. You can change the font, font size, and color of text within a table.
Finally, to change additional things within your table, you can always put your cursor in the table and right-click to expose a drop-down menu, and make a selection from that list. If you need additional columns or rows or to delete columns or rows, that can be accomplished in this manner.
"Untitled document" is not a great name for your Google Doc. To change the name of your document, simply click in the "Untitled document" box at the top of the Google Doc and type in what you would like your filename to be. In this case, we chose "google_doc_intro." We'll cover how to best name files in a later course; however, for now, make sure you change the name of your Google Docs to something more informative than "Untitled document", and very briefly, it's best not to use spaces in your filenames but rather to use an underscore anywhere you would otherwise put a space.
You can also download Google Docs documents in most common formats. You should click on "File" in the top menu and then select "Download as." You can then choose the format you want among the options including .pdf, .docx, .rtf, etc.
For sharing documents you can follow the procedure we learned in the lesson on Google Drive.
This lesson has covered a number of helpful features within Google Docs. There are many more capabilities within this application, so feel free to play around and check out additional resources here and on the web. For example, there are many tutorials for using Drive on YouTube.com.
Google also has extensive information on getting started with Drive on their G Suite Learning Center, which can be found at the following web address: https://gsuite.google.com/learning-center/products/docs/get-started/#!/
If you're already familiar with Microsoft Word, Google Docs also operates very similarly without a couple of Word's more advanced features. However, most tasks can be done with Google Docs, from simple text editing to importing images and graphs to exporting documents as PDFs. There are more in-depth guides on creating documents and downloading and printing.