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Spreadsheets originated from a company bought by Google in June 2005. A year later Spreadsheets launched in Google Labs as a limited test.

In October of 2012, Spreadsheets was rebranded as Sheets and made a part of the Google Drive umbrella. Like Docs, Sheets has full offline support and allows users to work without a connection. Users can collaborate and share with many other people at the same time. Powerful Android and iOS apps allow users to access and work on files on the go.

Google Material Theme revamp rolls out to Docs, Sheets, and Slides for Android

Google Drive

Google Drive on the web was one of the very first services to get the Material Theme treatment in 2018, with the Android and iOS clients following this April. The homepages for Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides were updated in February, with a similar Google Material Theme revamp now available for the Android apps.


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Ability to download individual Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides for offline editing now rolling out

In 2013, Google Drive addressed one of the biggest advantages of Microsoft Office: offline access and editing. With this feature enabled, Docs, Slides, and Sheets effectively becomes a native application. An update starting today will allow users to select specific files to store and edit without an internet connection.


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You can now change themes, filters & layouts in updated Google Sheets and Slides for iOS

Google is updating its Google Sheets and Slides apps for iOS today with new features that allow changing themes, filters and layouts on the fly from within the mobile apps.

For Google Sheets, the update brings the ability to view and change existing filters applied to a spreadsheet.


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Google Drive, Docs, Sheets, & Slides will soon let you set expiration dates for document access

Google is adding the ability to set expiration dates for access to documents across Google Drive, Docs, Sheets and Slides apps. The idea is that you can limit a contributor’s access to a  document for a specific time period, which Google points out will come in handy for companies and organizations that often share files with third-parties temporarily:


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Google Docs apps add much-needed iPad Pro support, but still lack iOS 9 multitasking

Google is on a roll lately with readying its iOS apps for the 12.9-inch iPad Pro announced last September and released last November.

Google’s YouTube app gained native resolution two weeks ago, but lacked iOS 9 multitasking features like Split View and Picture-in-Picture, then yesterday we saw Google Photos update with iPad Pro support in an update that actually includes Split View and Slide Over features.

Now it’s the Google Docs apps turn, at least to start, as the latest version of Google Docs for iOS adds native resolution support for the iPad Pro.


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Updates arrive for Google Docs & Sheets for Android, Drive on the web

Google is rolling out updates this week for Google Docs and Sheets for Android as well as Google Drive on the web, the company announced in two separate blog posts today.

For Sheets, the update brings the ability to “add new and reply to existing comments,” while the updated Google Docs for Android app gets the ability to see suggestions and comments when in the app’s Print Layout view. “resolve, close, accept, or reject those comments and suggestions—making it simpler to move between their desktop and mobile devices.”

Google also highlighted improvements to editing charts in the Sheets app on Android:

…if a user a selects a single cell and inserts a chart, we’ll automatically expand that data selection to include the immediately surrounding cells. This will make it easier for users to create robust charts with relevant information. In addition, when an employee creates a new chart, they’ll now see three recommended chart types, which we’ll suggest based on the data they’ve selected.

And lastly for Sheets, users will start to notice the 400 new fonts Google began rolling out to Sheets on the web this week.

As for Google Drive, the web app gets improved organization with new smarter sorting in the app’s ‘Recent’ view:

The new sorting experience removes the existing sorting dropdown options (‘Last modified,’ ‘Last modified by me,’ and ‘Last opened by me’) and replaces them with a dynamically-generated view based on the actions of the person using Drive. Items will continue to be segmented into time-based sections (‘Today,’ ‘Earlier this week,’ etc), and will now indicate whether each item was opened, modified, or uploaded by the user directly in the UI. The smarter sorting ensures that items acted upon by the user are more likely to be shown than items acted upon by other collaborators.

The updated Google Sheets and Docs apps are rolling out now.

Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Keep get new features on Android

Google is today rolling out updates to its Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Keep apps that add a handful of new features for Android users.

First up, the Sheets app now allows users to view more content on the screen by automatically hiding “toolbars and headers so that you can see more of your content on the screen at one time.” And you’ll notice the toolbars and headers reappear when you sign to scroll up or zoom out.


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Google Drive clocks out early, service disruption impacts Docs + other apps [Updated]

Update: Google says all services are restored!

Seeing Google Drive and other services unresponsive this afternoon? Rest assured that it’s not just you. Google has acknowledged the service disruption on its app status page with this message posted within the hour:

We’re investigating reports of an issue with Google Drive. We will provide more information shortly.


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Google Slides on Android updated w/ interactive lock screen notifications

Earlier this year, Google Slides on Android was updated with support for presenting slide shows over both the Chromecast and Apple TV and today the company is expanding on that capability and making it easier for presenters to stay engaged with the audience. With today’s update, presenters can now control their slide shows directly from the lock screen of their Android device.


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Google Docs gains speech to text, new templates, smart sheets, more

Update: Two other minor updates targeted to business customers have also been included. Text inside a Sheets cell can now be partially formatted, rather than formatting all the text to one font style (i.e. italics), and Google’s fonts are preserved when opening a Docs or Sheets file in Microsoft Word and PowerPoint.

Google has today pushed a bunch of new features and general improvements to its Docs suite of web-based productivity apps. It’s the beginning of the school year so it’s no surprise that the company’s post on the changes is targeted towards teachers, but anyone using Docs will benefit.


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Google Docs & Sheets for Android learn a few new useful tricks

Update: This post has been updated to include an APKMirror link to the Docs update which includes Print Layout.

Google Docs and Sheets, two of products that make up Google’s suite of online productivity tools, have received some small updates on Android that will come in handy for mobile warriors (sorry, had to say it).

Let’s start with Docs. Now from the overflow menu of a document you’ll find a new Print Layout option that, when selected, will show you a fully paginated (each page labeled with its order in the document), read-only version of your document. This is what your document will look like printed on paper. Print Layout will continue to update in real-time as collaborators make changes. The ability to edit from within the Print Layout view will come in the future.

The other new updates today come for Google Sheets. The first is a new “intuitive keyboard functionality.” Now when you tap a cell in a Sheets spreadsheet, either the alphabetic or numeric will open depending on which type of characters are in the cell. Tap a cell with only numbers in it, Sheets will open the numeric keypad so you don’t have to make another tap to switch to it. Nice touch.

The final update to hit Sheets is autofill. As you can see in the GIF above, autofill makes it easy to complete a pattern without the tedium of going cell-by-cell and doing it yourself. Select the data you want to repeat and drag to the cells you’d like to repeat it in, and Sheets will fill in the cells using the pattern of your selected data.

The latter two updates for Sheets can be found in the latest update to the app for Android in Google Play, while an APK download of Docs including Print Layout can be found on APKMirror.