Introduces co-editor presence for presentations

Dec 15, 2009 16:57 GMT  ·  By

Google is always updating its products but it has seen a flurry of activity lately as engineers are working on finishing their work before the holidays. Google Docs is no exception and the team has introduced a couple of new features, the co-editor presence notification for presentations being one of them, and a bunch of holiday-related themes and templates.

“Today, we launched real time presence to Google Docs presentations as well. Now, when editing a presentation with a co-editor, you can see which slides he is editing, and if he is editing the same slide, then you can see which element -- text box, shape, image, video, etc. -- he is editing,” Roshni Malani, software engineer at Google Docs, wrote.

The new feature is rather self-evident and certainly welcomed as the Docs bills itself as a collaboration suite and touts this as one of its main selling points. The feature had been available for the spreadsheet editor in Docs, where it was crucial to ensure that users didn’t write over each other. Now presentations get the same treatment allowing users to work together remotely without interfering with each other's work.

“The Google Docs team is celebrating the holiday season with holiday themes in Google forms and holiday templates in the Google Docs template gallery,” Eric Bogs and Bob Rose, software engineers, Google Docs, wrote. “Whether you are planning a recipe swap, family potluck, ski trip, a charity trip or need a party RSVP form, the new holiday themes in forms can make this season a little brighter.”

The second announcement from the Docs team consists of the new themes and templates just in time for the holiday season. Several Docs form themes are now available in the Theme menu when creating a new form, six to be precise. There are a lot more Docs templates in the Template Gallery to choose from though it may be a bit trickier sifting through all the not-so-great ones to find the one you like.

Finally, the Google Operating System blog has noticed that Docs is now indexing the PDF files you have stored and allows you to search through them. This was previously unavailable though it's not exactly clear when Google has introduced the new functionality.

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Google Docs introduces co-editor presence for presentations
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