Every Student Should Know These Google Docs Tips

Throughout my academic and professional journey, there has been one constant ally: Google Docs. Not only will all your documents be accessible no matter where you will be very useful, but the software itself is surprisingly versatile and sophisticated. I’ve never encountered anything I couldn’t do with Google Docs, from signing a contract to working seamlessly with huge groups of employees. However, there are other, smaller hacks for this tool that you may not even know about. Its business applications are many, but let’s focus on what Google Docs can do especially for students.

Google Docs hacks for essays and notes

Much of school is focused on writing, from essays to notes and memos, so here are the hacks that will serve you best when you’re in the spotlight with paper:

• It’s easy to change the capitalization formatting of a document by selecting it and choosing Format, then Text. At the bottom of the menu you will see “Capital Case” and when you hover over it you will see three options: “lowercase”, “CAPITAL” and “Capital case”. If you accidentally typed in all caps or need to create a title but don’t want to rewrite what you already have, this is a little-known quick fix that will save a lot of time.

• Make taking notes easier in class by selecting Voice Typing from the Tools menu. Once you click on the little microphone icon that appears, all the images captured by your computer’s microphone will be placed into the document. It won’t be perfect , but it will be editable, so you can simply write down everything your professor says and then edit it later to add notes relevant to your lecture.

• Check the dictionary in your document by going to Tools in the top menu and then clicking Dictionary. You can even highlight a word in your document and press Command + Shift + Y to find it instantly. The dictionary appears in the sidebar of the screen, so you don’t have to leave the document to look up your word on Google. Perhaps best of all, the bottom of the panel shows synonyms that you can replace in your document to improve your vocabulary, which is useful when you’re writing an essay. (Another dictionary tip: add any technical terms to your “personal dictionary” so that the spell checker stops flagging them by right-clicking the word and adding it. This works great for those of us with weird last names, too.)

• Find and replace text in Google Docs by pressing Command + F. A regular search bar will appear in the top right corner of the window, but if you click the three-dot menu, you’ll get the option to not only Find, but Replace. If you misspell someone’s name over and over again throughout your essay or use a word too many times, you can quickly change it. You even have the option to do a full “Replace All” or switch from instance to instance and decide if you only want to replace some of them.

• Insert a table of contents from the Insert menu if you need to organize a long document. This only works if you format section headings by highlighting them, selecting the Format button from the menu, hovering over Paragraph Styles, and then selecting the heading option, but it creates a great table of contents that updates automatically. If the information you had on page two ends up on page three after you insert a paragraph of text above it, the table of contents will update on its own so you don’t have to do it manually. You can also click headings in the table of contents to quickly jump to the relevant section of the document.

• Find older versions of your document by clicking “Version History” in the File menu. I didn’t know about this for a long time and thought that since Google Docs updated automatically, any changes I made would be permanent. Not this way! I’m writing this in Google Docs right now, and in the 45 minutes I’ve been working, the program has saved two different versions.

Google Docs hacks for everything else

You can (and definitely do) use Google Docs for more than just essay writing. Here are some of the most convenient things I’ve been able to do using Google Docs that would typically require multiple programs when using other software.

• Turn your PDFs into editable text documents by uploading them to Google Drive and then clicking Google Docs in the Open With… menu. I didn’t know you could do this until my Adobe subscription expired a few months ago and I basically refused to pay for it again since I only really needed to edit one document. There may be some formatting issues involved, but for the most part I’ve found that Google Docs easily turns the PDF into editable text, making it easy to make changes before saving again as a PDF.

• Sign your documents by adding “doodles” in Google Docs. I find Word extensions too complicated and online document editors too expensive, so before I realized it could be done right in Google Docs for free, I was printing out all my signing documents, signing them in pen, and uploading photos of them wherever they didn’t need to go. Humiliating. To enter Google Docs, select Insert, then Draw, then Create. A box will appear in which you can draw. Simply go to the menu option that says “Select Line” and click “Write.” Now write your signature in the box, click “Save” and you can paste it directly into the document. Again, it’s free .

• Add “tasks” to your text to help you stay on track. This is useful if you are working with a group or just need to complete a large task within a certain time frame. By typing @task into a document, you’ll open a dialog box where you can name the task, delegate it to someone (even yourself), and set a due date for it to be completed so you receive reminders. . It is helpful to place a blank page at the beginning or end of a full document and add all the tasks there. Google Docs also puts a little checkbox next to all tasks so you can check them off as you go.

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