Category: Google Sheets

The Google Docs team has started the new month with some great new features in the suite for those in education and in business.  The biggest change is a new research function which allows you to harness the power of Google search all from within the app.

Now we’re taking the first steps to incorporate the power and intelligence of Google into Docs. We hope to make analyzing your data more intuitive, editing more accessible and document styling more dynamic – now your documents can be as beautiful as your ideas are bold.

The biggest and boldest new feature is the Research function in the Google Docs apps for Android.  Now you can research information from within the app leveraging Google.  To do this you will need the latest builds of the Google Docs (build 1.4.352.09.34) and Google Sheets (1.4.352.09.34) which are now rolling out to the Google Play Store.  As with most updates like this, you could see this update in a matter of hours or a few days.

Last month I began a series of four articles on my migration from Microsoft Office to Google Docs. In part one of the series I covered the foundations for making Google Docs work the best for you both online and offline. In part 2 I focused on Google Docs, the document editing app that is most analogous to Microsoft Word.

In part 3 I am going to focus on Google Sheets, the spreadsheet application that is part of the suite. Like I did in part 2, I am going to cover the app from the perspective of working with it from a desktop, from a Chromebook and from the Android app.

If you have not had the opportunity to read part 1 and part 2, you can find the links below for your reference.

My Migration to Google Docs Part 1 – The Setup

My Migration to Google Docs Part 2 – Google Docs on All The Toys

As a reminder to everyone who is thinking of making this migration, a word of advice-meets-warning I posted as part of the first article.

Take your time.  You will find that the majority of features in Microsoft Office are in the Google apps but they will be in different places.  It may take you a few menu clicks to sort it out.  Be patient.  Give it a chance.  Sure it may turn out that it isn’t right for you and your needs but I would suggest trying the experiment over a week or two before you make a final verdict.  It isn’t as big a migration from say a PC to a Mac but it is similar to moving from Internet Explorer to Chrome in many ways.  Same thing, but bits in different places and this process or that process may be a little different.

Rome wasn’t built in a day and your migration to Google Docs won’t happen that fast either.  Patience is the word of the day.

Over the course of the past month I have been in the process of trying and slowly migrating to the Google suite of Office apps:  Google Docs, Google Sheets and Google Slides.  It started as an experiment to see if it would hold up to the compared to Office 2013, up until now, my main Office suite.  I have to say, for my work and what I need out of these applications, they work amazingly well and the transition has not been nearly as painful as I expected it would when I started this little science fair project.  In fact, it’s to the point now that I probably won’t go back for 99% of what I need to do.  Indeed this weekend I plan on uninstalling Office 2013 from my laptop because for that 1% of the time where I need something extraordinary, I can simply use Office online.

Is it the right thing to do for you?  That’s a personal decision but here is how the migration has gone for me.

This will be the first of a multi-part series I’m writing on migrating to the Google suite of Office apps.  This first part is going to cover the setup and foundation of getting your files migrated to Google Drive, setting up for offline work and using Chrome extensions.  Part 2 is going to cover Google Docs on a desktop PC, a Chromebook and the mobile apps.  Part 3 will do the same for Google Sheets while the final part will cover Google Slides.