Google Docs is, together with Word, the most widely used platform in the world to create text documents. By working directly on the cloud, it is not necessary to worry about periodically saving the documents that we are creating since they are stored automatically, even if we do not assign them a name, however, Google’s solution still has a long way to go to resemble Word .
While Word is more focused on use in work environments, Google’s solution is ideal for home users and students mainly. If we want to spend less time creating documents in Google Docs, we can use a series of functions, functions that very few users know about and that will allow us to increase our productivity in front of the computer.
customize the design
If we don’t want to fight over bold, font colors and size, the best we can do is use the available styles. Thanks to the styles, we can use certain preset types of formatting to correctly format any document in a quick and easy way that will allow us to visually recognize all the available content.
Sign your documents
If we do not have a printer and we need to sign the document that we have created or any other, we can use the Drawing function available in the Insert menu and use the touch screen of our device, the touchpad or the mouse to sign, although not the result leave something to be desired. If we have the signature scanned and stored in Google Drive, we can insert it into the document through the Insert – Image menu.
Use your voice to write
If it’s hard for us to write in front of the computer, or our keyboard skills are conspicuous by their absence, we can make use of the dictation function available in Google Docs. This function is responsible for automatically transcribing our voice to text.
Google Docs is able to correctly recognize and interpret “period”, “comma”, “new paragraph” and so on, just like teachers do at school when they give dictations at school. We can directly activate this function using the keyboard shortcut Control + Shift + S or from the Tools – Voice typing menu.
Show total words
If, when creating a document, one of the requirements is to write a certain number of words, we must pay attention to a certain number, a number that is accessible from the application menus, forcing us to interrupt our work to know where we are going. The solution to this problem is to use the keyboard shortcut Control + Shift + C to access this information. If we check the box, Show count when writing, this will be displayed on the left side of the browser in a fixed way.
Version history
Thanks to the version history, we can review and restore any changes we have made to the document. This function is especially useful when we work collaboratively on a document or if we want to recover part that we have deleted by mistake or that we want to recover after having changed our mind. To access the history of a file, we just have to select the file and, with the right mouse button, select the Revision history option.
