Your feedback makes a difference: Product Ideas

Many of you have visited our Product Ideas page to let us know what features you’d like to see in Google Docs or what you think we’re missing. Your participation was astounding: we received over 165,000 votes on over 5,000 ideas from thousands of people around the world over the course of a year. Here are just a few of the things we launched in the last year that accomplish many of the things you’ve been asking for:

• Real-time collaboration. While we’ve had real-time collaboration in spreadsheets since 2006, we enhanced our collaboration in documents in April 2010 to be truly real-time. Now you can follow along character-by-character with your friends, family and colleagues.
• Google Docs on mobile devices. You can now view and edit on your Google Docs on the go.
• Convert more file types to Google Docs format. You can convert a variety of file types - from .doc to .txt to .pdf - to Google Docs format and vice versa.
• Optical Character Recognition (OCR). This new feature interprets scanned files and PDF files and converts them to Google documents format.
• A stand-alone drawings editor. You requested a mind mapping tool, and we delivered Google drawings. And to make your mind maps and drawings even better, we just added connectors.
• Chat in documents, presentations and spreadsheets. Now you can ask fellow collaborators a question right in the document.
• A more consistent look for all Google Docs editors. Documents, presentations and spreadsheets used to have different interfaces and varying menus.
• Advanced sorting rules and in-cell drop down lists. These two features in Google spreadsheets now make your spreadsheet editing and organization more streamlined.

We’re starting a new process with the Product Ideas page to make sure we keep it fresh and avoid favoring older posts. We’ve temporarily closed the page to new posts to gather a comprehensive look at your ideas thus far and to restructure our Product Ideas sessions.

In order to get the most precise feedback possible, the new Product Ideas sessions will be targeted at a specific feature, product or idea. These sessions will happen every three months or so for a few weeks at a time. As we receive new ideas on the Product Ideas page, we’ll keep working hard to implement the top requests and ideas that are posted. We’ll let you all know when the ideas page is open and post ongoing updates here on the blog and in the help forum.

Posted by: Julia Harter, Consumer Operations Associate