Share your stuff from Google Drive to Google+

With Google+, you can share what you want with just the right people. That might be pictures from your weekend apple picking adventure or an article from your favorite new blog. Starting today, you can also share the stuff you create and store in Google Drive, and people will be able to flip through presentations, open PDFs, play videos and more, directly in the Google+ stream.

(click the image above to view a presentation in the stream) 

To get started, simply click the Google+ icon when you're sharing from Drive, or copy-and-paste a link to a file from Google Drive into one of your Google+ posts.

Posted by Li-Wei Lee, Software Engineer

Research pane updates: quick access to your stuff in Docs, Slides & Drawings

A few months ago, the research pane was added to Docs to make it easier for you to search for and add web results, images, quotations, maps, and articles to your document. Starting today, the research pane is also available in Slides and Drawings, and searches now include your stuff in addition to web results.

With the research pane, you can now quickly find and use your stuff: include part of a presentation stored in Drive, insert an image from your Picasa albums, or grab a quote from a friend’s Google+ post. (Google Apps customers will only see web results in their research panes.)

(Previewing and inserting a spreadsheet from Google Drive) 

 Posted by: Vivek Agarwal, Software Engineer

One click to Docs, Sheets, and Slides

Google Drive is a place where you can create, share, collaborate and keep all your stuff. Of course, there are times you want to start a new document right away–say, to take notes in class or prepare a last-minute presentation for your boss.

To make it even easier for you to create stuff quickly, Documents, Spreadsheets, and Presentations–now called Docs, Sheets, and Slides–are available as apps in the Chrome Web Store. Once installed, shortcuts to these apps will appear when you open a new tab in Chrome.

If you use a Chromebook, you’ll see Docs, Sheets, and Slides in your apps list by default following the next update to Chrome OS in a few weeks.

Posted by Jonathan Rochelle, Director of Product Management

Less is more

Ever wanted more room to get stuff done in Google documents? Click the new button in the upper right corner of your screen to enter Compact Mode, and everything above the formatting menu will collapse and give you another inch or so to work with.

You can also now quickly take menu actions by typing in the new search box. For example, if you type in “Picture,” you’ll see different options for adding graphics to your document.

Posted by Arnav Shah, Software Engineer

Table improvements and easier formatting in documents

Starting today, it’s easier to work with tables and to make formatting changes in Google documents.

You can now select any grid of cells in a table, which makes it much easier to make table formatting changes, like bolding just a single column.

Copy-and-paste of table cells is also improved. For example, you can copy a single word into many cells simply by highlighting those cells before you paste.

Or if you copy multiple cells from one table to another, the copied text will be pasted without creating a table in a table.

Finally, if you want to make changes to a series of similarly formatted text (like changing every blue and underlined link) throughout your document at once, right click on text with the formatting you want to change, choose “Select all matching text,” and apply new formatting in bulk, instead of individually updating each occurrence.

Posted by Isabella Ip, Software Engineer