Google Docs Gets New Themes and Several Tweaks and Improvements

Drive is swallowing Google Docs, though it's probably more of an evolution and name change. Still, while that happens, Google continues to improve Docs. In the last month alone it introduced several new features, some small some bigger, some not worthy of a full announcement.

"April showers bring May flowers, along with a bunch of new features and updates to Google Docs. In May we launched the research pane which makes it easy to look things up and insert quotes, images, and maps into documents without ever having to open a new browser tab. And we also made some other improvements over the last few weeks," Google wrote.

There are now five brand new themes for Google Presentations in case the existing ones just didn't cover everything you had in mind. The five new themes should breathe some life into your presentations, though it will not help viewers too much in the boredom department.

Another small improvement is to the new, just introduced research pane. Now, along with searching on the entire web or for images or quotes, you can also search through scholarly works alone. This will limit your results to those from science journals, papers and so on.

Also in the small but important improvement department is the ability to move a document to a folder from the document itself without going to the Google Docs homepage. This saves you several trips back and forth between the document editor and file list.

The new smart spellchecker, which uses Google's auto-correct technology and all the knowledge of the web, now works with Spanish, Dutch and Finnish. More people will be able to benefit from the greatly improved spellchecker over the older one that simply used a dictionary and was prone to false alarms.