Google has been busy. Updating its logo was a big deal, but there are some pretty cool new things in Google Drive.

I have been creating a ton of new docs, sheets, slides, forms, etc for the new school year and I noticed several new things popped up as I was working.

Templates
So, I go to start a new Doc and a pop-up message asks me about templates, so I clicked on it. There are now bunch of professionally made templates that you can use. The templates have a very clean look with placeholders for text and images. Sheets and Slides have Templates too!

Sheets and Slides have Templates too!

Voice Typing
Under the Tools menu they now have “VoiceTyping.”

A big microphone icon pops up and turns red when you click on it to talk.

(Parts of this post were written with voice typing. It did get a little glitchy so I had to start and stop it to work a little better.) If you want punctuation you just say that punctuation. For example “period”, it will place a period at the end of the sentence and start a new sentence with a capital letter. If you want to start a new line, you just say “new line.”

***Google Support Blog Post with punctuation, languages, and trouble-shooting.***

Sharing
When you open up a shared  document, you might see this blue icon that says “See new changes”. Click it and it will walk you through the most recent changes.

Sheets
When I opened up a spreadsheet a green explore symbol came up and charts were created on the right side window.

You can click on the charts and either make them bigger or bring them into the document to edit them.  You have to mouse over to get the symbols on the left of the graph below.

Now I know those items are brand new, but also played with the new changes below and they are pretty awesome too.

Forms
 I absolutely love the fact you can really customize forms. You can add image to the background, change colors for the form background, and have all sorts of fun with fonts. This was such a needed an update.

File Types
I noticed that every document now has an icon in the upper left corner that shows its filetype.

If you click on the icon it takes you to a page that just shows all the items you have that file type. for example I click on the Docs icon  and it took me to a page with all of my docs. (This is very similar to the apps I have on my mobile devices.)   

If you click on the upper left hand corner again, you will get a drop-down menu that takes you to the other file types as well as a link back to Drive.

I can’t wait to see what else I discover over the next few days.