14 DAY TRIAL // Google has launched a completely revamped Google Docs. The underlying technology has been rewritten from scratch and the two biggest apps in the suite have also been replaced with new, improved versions. There is a brand-new Google Docs document editor, probably the most used app in the suite, which adds a number of interesting features and significant updates. The new editor is now in ‘preview’ mode and hasn’t been rolled out yet.
It has a revamped UI, though the changes aren’t that visible unless you have the old editor opened in another tab and you switch between them. The buttons in the main toolbar are mostly the same, with the only changes being the addition of an Insert image button, more on that later, and the removal of the redundant save button (a new save button above the main toolbar was introduced a while back).
The editor also got a ruler to edit the layout and margins of your document and also tab stops. Document export and import fidelity has also improved, so documents written in Microsoft Office Word, for example, stay truer to their original layout. Adding and editing images in documents is now much easier. The images are easier to reposition and the text just wraps around them without breaking the formatting.
The collaboration features, arguably one of the most important parts of Google Docs, are a lot more solid. The biggest updates are the real-time features. If you have multiple people working on the same document, you’ll see their inputs as they are typing, just like in Google Wave, and not after a few seconds like it has been the case until now. The comment system has also been improved and the document editor has a chat sidebar like the one in the spreadsheet editor.
One feature that Google doesn’t tout, but that, in practice, proves a great improvement, is the spell checker. Google Docs has always had spell checking, but the feature had to be manually activated. It would then analyze the text and point out any mistakes you might have made, but you had to do this manually every once in a while. Since most modern browsers already have a spell checker, it was rarely used.
The new editor brings real-time spell checking. It supersedes the browser spell-checker and does a much better job than either the Google Chrome or the Mozilla Firefox tool. The browser-based ones would only analyze a small portion of the text near the area you were editing. If you didn’t rectify the mistake in time, the underlining would disappear after a while. The integrated spell-checker looks at the entire document, so this problem is gone. However, it may be a little less responsive, as it takes a couple of seconds to check if a word is spelled correctly.
The are plenty of other improvements and changes and, unfortunately, not all of them are for the better. It was to be expected with a full rewrite, but some things are gone or work differently from the previous editor. One feature that proved useful, the ability to go into Full-Screen mode and hide all the toolbars, is now gone. Still, this is just the first release and it is still in testing. To check out the new editor, you need to go to the Google Docs settings page and check “New version of Google documents“ under the Editing tab.
