14 DAY TRIAL // It may not have seemed like it, but January was a busy month for the Docs team. Several new features have been introduced, from the hard to miss customizable paragraph styles to more subtle changes such as progress bars for Google Sites uploads.
Earlier this week, the Google Docs document editor got a much welcomed update, customizable paragraph styles. One big benefit is that you can now change the look of your documents simply by changing the paragraph style, the entire document will be updated.
The second benefit is that the customized styles can be made the default and used in future documents as well.
"Before today, if you wanted to update all the Subtitles in your document to look a particular way, you had to change each of them one at a time. That’s too many steps. Now you can restyle all your regular paragraphs, headings, or titles with just a couple clicks," Google explained.
Another recent improvement is a new set of tools for charts. There are more options when creating a chart from a spreadsheet and more tools for customizing them.
"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," Google wrote.
Another big addition is support for sparklines in spreadsheets. This should make it easier to visualize data inside the cells of a spreadsheet document.
"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," Google added.
Google Docs has also gotten more social since it now supports Google+ sharing for forms. Any form you create in Docs can be shared over Google+ with just the people or circles that need to see it.
There's a long list of smaller changes as well. There is now a new stock photo gallery to make finding the right picture for your documents, presentations and so on, much easier.