Google Docs gains 450 new fonts, reviews April as a big month

Rick

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Google's cloud-based office suite, Google Docs, has gained a whopping 450 choices to its once scarce selection of font types. The new fonts include Ubuntu, Android's Ice Cream Sandwich "Droid" font and a wide variety of others ranging from monospaced to cursive. The addition of 450 fonts is certainly a welcome extension of Docs, although Google may have performed a great public disservice by keeping Comic Sans on the list of available type faces -- just saying.

Although changes to Docs have been mostly gradual and incremental, Google has continued to improve the Google Docs experience over the years. Some recent examples of those improvements include Google Drive integration, pagination, cloud printing and support for additional file formats

Google also takes some time to look back at April, outlining a number of improvements that were made in just the past month. Amongst some of the April changes was improved screenreader compatibility, a default page size setting and improved scripting support. Additionally, Docs allows documents up to 50MB (as opposed to 2MB prior to this change), more image insertion features and a total of 60 templates for users to choose from. Google has even added OCR (optical character recognition) for many types of documents, including PDFs and images. Sorry, no handwriting recognition -- yet.

For users who haven't visted  Google Docs in awhile, the service took on a new layout courtesy of Google Drive. Gone is the "home page" which provided an uncategorized list of recently modified documents. Rather, Docs now displays your files in a hierarchical fashion relative to a root "folder" when you first load it up, much like you might expect your files to appear on your own computer.

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I consider myself a 'old/knowledgeable' user of MS office, and going to Google Docs from a fully fledged office is like if someone asks you to swap your M3 for a Nissan Micro ....... even Office 365 feels much more polished IMO.
 
going to Google Docs from a fully fledged office is like if someone asks you to swap your M3 for a Nissan Micro ....... even Office 365 feels much more polished IMO.
I totally agree with that. I think in context to the features of Microsoft Office and so on, Google Docs fails. One clear example of that is the table functionality -- absolutely horrendous.

Not being able to adjust row heights or enable "word wrap" for cells while creating spreadsheets is another example of, "Uhhh, why not???".

I have to admit that Google Docs gets some things right though. Live, real-time editing between multiple people and the simple sharing functionality provided is really good. I'm also kind of amazed at what Google does with Docs through just HTML and JavaScript.

Despite that though, that doesn't change the fact it kind of sucks in comparison to something like MSO for banging out anything more than a basic, simple document.
 
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