Docs research panel beats Zemanta gadget

Google Docs now has a research pane available while you're writing.   Basically this is a quick way to access google-search results.

To use it:

• Select a word
• Right-click the word
• Choose Research from the tools menu.

Or just select the word and hit the key-combo ( Ctrl+Alt+R on Windows or Cmd+Alt+R on Mac) if you think mice are evil time-wasters.

This is a far better than the Zemanta gadget that was offered to Blogger users back in 2010; research is done only on the words you want researched, not everything that you're writing. My experience was that the latter approach  slowed my machine down horribly, and mostly added no value because it just distracted me from what I wanted to write. Other people seemed to feel the same way, and for a while How to disable Zemanata in blogger was popular reading.

Personally, I'm not sure research-pane will be enough to convince me to write my posts in Docs and load them to Blogger from there: a lot of my research is about "how does Blogger handle this", which I can only find out my testing it.  But it will be a very handy tool for bloggers in some niches.

A couple of things to be aware of:  the pane  offers you imagees that you can "drag into your document", and it add footnotes saying where the image has come from. But the last time I loooked, documents loaded from Docs to Blogger didn't maintain footnotes. And even so, if the image is copyright, you can't get permission to use it in your blog just by linking to the source.

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Putting scripts behind Google Docs

I'd never really thought about whether there was a scripting language with Google Docs spreadsheets (the same way that there's VB scripting with Excel).   But really it makes sense for there to be Javascript there.  (I have no idea if it's a new-ish feature, or has been there all along.)

This article from Blogger Xpertise not only got me thinking about the possibilities, but also has a useful script for making embeddable custom forms created in Docs a good deal more useful

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Google Drive will eventually replace Docs - but not yet for most of us.

If you use Google Docs as a file-hosting option, then the recent announcement of Google Drive probably has you wondering how Docs will be affected: there's a marketing announcement on the Docs Blog, but it has a distinct lack of detail on how it will work.

But this announcement on the to Google Apps blog has more info.  Key points:

• Initial access is "on an opt-in basis via invite at drive.google.com/start"
• It's being released to Google Apps users first: It will be made available to all domains over the next 4-8 weeks.
• But [eventually] Google Drive will become the default andwill replace the documents list as the way to access files and documents.

It is introducing many changes and new features to Google Docs, including:

1. A Google Drive desktop application, available from the Chrome Web Store
2. A mobile application for your iPhone or iPad
3. Sync files between all of your devices with Google Drive for your Mac/PC
4. A different kind of search tool across your own files
5. In Google document, spreadsheet, or presentation editors, you can add a file to a folder by clicking the folder icon
6. Collections are called folders
7. More options on the Settings menu
8. More views on the left navigation: "My Drive", "Shared with me", "Activity"
9. My Drive (instead of home) to organize all of your files, folders and Google Docs.

Note that you will not see any of these changes until Drive is available to you.   In the meantime, Docs continues to work as it has been working.

If you are a domain administrator, notice that Google Docs has been renamed to "Drive and Docs" in the Google Apps control panel, and that there are new settings in this service.

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Customizable styles in Google Docs

Google Docs now have Customizable styles in documents.

This is a feature that MS Word has had for a long time, which makes a huge productivity difference to anyone who is writing long documents.

Basically, instead of formattting each sub-heading individually (eg making it bold, 12 pt and underlined), you just say once what the rules for that "heading2" is (eg bold, 12 pt and underlined), and then apply "heading2" to any text that you want to look like this. The time-saving comes when make a change.  For example, when you realise that underlining is for typewriters, instead of having to change each sub-heading individually, you just change heading2 to be (say) bold and 14 point - and all the same change is made to every place where you've used "heading2".

I don't know the the addition of Styles to Docs means they will be added to Blogger's Post-editor anytime soon.   But it may affect loading Word documents to Blogger via Google Docs. I haven't tested yet, so don't know if Word's styles will be kept when the document is converted - but I'd hope that they would, given that it's a very mature feature in Word.

The interesting part will come when you either copy-and-paste or publish from Docs to Blogger: is the formatting itself transferred over, or just the style name?

My guess, without testing, is that for copy-and-paste, it might just be the style name. If that's right, then to make the Word-to-Docs-to-Blogger conversion work, you will need to add CSS rules to your blog, using the same style names used in Docs.

And if you have a lot of email subscribers, remember mind that the messages they receive do not have your blog's stylesheet applied to them.   (I experimented with various header style options in BloggerHAT, but eventually gave us and followed the example of other big-time bloggers and applied the formatting manually, for just this reason:  no matter what I tried, my email-subscription messages looked bad,)

(BTW: If you know a way to apply a stylesheet to emails sent by Feedburner, or even by Blogger, then I'd love to hear about it.)

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