Google Docs Adds Thumbnails and Spell-check

Google has made a few updates to Google Docs recently that could have a major effect on how you use it. A couple were just added today: Thumbnail view has been added to the Document list and spelling correction was added to the search feature.

Thumbnails View and Search Spell-check

The thumbnails view will help in quickly scanning your documents to find what you want. To switch to this view, simply click the Thumbnails button on the top right of your Document list. Each document will become a small preview of the documents content in a grid view. From here, you can still favorite a document, click the thumbnail to open it, and mark it for bulk actions.

Thumbnails view becomes especially useful when you factor in Google’s sort by relevance feature, which intelligently augments your search. Execute a search for the document you’re looking for and switch to thumbnails view. Switch the sort mode to “Relevance” if it’s not already set there and you should be able to easily scan the results and find the exact document you want. The automatic spell check also comes into play here in making it easier to find your stuff even if you spelling-challenged or just fat-fingered.

Upload Any File

A little while ago, Google announced the ability to store any file in Docs. They have now completed the roll-out of this new feature for all users. Originally, you could only upload files up to 250MB but, after getting a lot of user feedback, they decided to up this limit to 1GB. All users start of with a maximum storage capacity of 1GB. Keep in mind that files that can actually be converted for editing with Google Docs have smaller limits than 1GB and also don’t count against your storage limit:

Documents (up to 500KB of text)

• HTML files and plain text (.txt).
• Microsoft Word (.doc, .docx), Rich Text (.rtf), OpenDocument Text (.odt) and StarOffice (.sxw).

Presentations (up to 10MB)

• Microsoft PowerPoint (.ppt, .pps).

Spreadsheets (up to 1MB)

• Comma Separated Value (.csv).
• Microsoft Excel (.xls, .xlsx) files and OpenDocument Spreadsheet (.ods).

If you need more than 1GB of storage, you can always buy additional storage for $0.25 per GB per year, which is pretty reasonable. No more fumbling with with a memory stick or trying to email large files. Simply upload to Google Docs and use the existing document sharing feature. Of course, you could also use a service like Dropbox for this, who might lose some steam given Google’s new feature. The simple fact that Google has integrated their storage in the cloud solution directly with Docs may make it a more attractive solution for business types.

What do you think?