Improved discussions, search scanned text in PDFs, and more

Fresh on the heels of adding discussions to Google presentations and the ability to edit within the Google Docs Android app, we’ve been hard at work on a few other new features to enhance your Google Docs experience.

All your comments--in one tidy place
We just added the discussions feature to Google drawings, and today we’re making it even easier to see a log of all of the comments that have been made whether you’re using drawings, documents, or presentations. Just click on the “Comments” button in the upper right corner of the editor to see a complete history of your discussions. You can reply in line, resolve or re-open comments, link directly to a comment, or change notification settings--without ever leaving the “Comments” menu.

Better text search for PDFs and images 
Last month, we launched a feature to let you search for text inside the PDFs in your documents list. Now, using the same optical character recognition technology, you can search for and copy highlighted text when you open a scanned PDF, like a fax or hotel receipt.

It’s not just stuff in your documents list: we’ve also made text in PDFs and images uploaded to Google Sites searchable.

And that’s not all... 
In addition to the features that were released today, over the last few weeks we’ve also made a bunch of other changes that you may have noticed. Now you can:

• Add custom Javascript and CSS to your Google Sites 
• See full names in document and presentation comments (instead of showing email addresses) 
• Use keyboard shortcuts for navigating between table cells in documents 
• Cancel running scripts from the Google Apps Script editor 
• Add donut charts and error bars in spreadsheets 

Posted by Ian Kilpatrick, Software Engineer