14 DAY TRIAL // Google teams regularly hold 'feedback sessions' to find out what new features users want the most. The Google Docs team in particular does this and the latest session revealed the biggest changes users want the team to implement.
Some of them are obvious, offline access for example, which Google is already working on, but some are a bit more specific, like the ability to merge cells vertically in the spreadsheet editor.
"Recently we opened our Product Ideas page to gather your feedback about what you’d like to see next in Google Docs," Teresa Wu, community manager at Google Docs, wrote.
"Over a two-week period, nearly 4,000 of you participated, submitting close to 2,000 ideas and casting over 50,000 votes," she announced.
Based on the feedback, Google picked three features that it will focus on and which should be becoming available soon.
One of the most popular idea was to add better functionality to the headers and footers in documents, for example page numbering.
Google recently introduced pagination for documents and the team was probably working on expanding the functionality, now that you can split Google Docs documents into individual pages.
Another feature that was highly requested and which Google promised to implement is offline support. Of course, Google has been working on this for a year now, it is actually in the final stages.
So the fact that a lot of people requested it probably hasn't made any change to the plans, just reinstate the idea that many users would love the feature.
Finally, a manageable new feature that a lot of people voted for is the ability to create vertical merge in spreadsheets. This will not take the team too much to implement, most likely.
Google is also acknowledging other features that users want but which it won't start working on just yet, like the ability to add Docs files as attachments in Gmail natively, or access to the entire Google Fonts library.