The toolbar, located across the top of each document, contains icons representing most of the features you’ll use while editing your document. If you are unsure of an icon’s meaning, place your mouse over the icon without clicking and a pop-up appears that tells you the function performed by clicking the icon.

In Figure 18.2, the Edit tab toolbar icons from left to right across the top of the page are as follows:

Figure 18.2. The Edit toolbar is similar to other word processors.

Most of the editing tools can be applied by clicking the icon and typing. Click the icon again when you no longer want that feature or formatting applied to your text. You can also select the text by first dragging across it with your mouse and then clicking the icon one time to apply that text enhancement.

To remove the formatting, you can select the formatted text and click the formatting icon of the feature you want removed, and the formatting is reversed. You can also select the formatted text and click the special Remove Formatting icon to the far right side of the toolbar to removes all formatting. For example, if the text is bold, italicized, and underlined, one click on the Remove Formatting icon returns the text to its standard, unembellished appearance.

The toolbar also contains two drop-down menus. The Style drop-down menu allows you to select preset styles to your text for fast and consistent formatting. The Change drop-down menu allows you to restore or remove blank lines and manage bookmarks.

Styles are named, preconfigured formatting that you can apply to your document text. For example, if you want huge bold text to appear as a page heading or paragraph heading, you no longer need to apply both the Font Size and Bold formatting. Click anywhere in the line of text you want formatted, and then click the Style drop-down menu next to the toolbar and select a style. In this example, Header 1 (Huge) is used.

You can apply styles to entire documents, paragraphs, words, or characters. Clicking anywhere in a paragraph and applying a style changes the style for the entire paragraph. Be aware that although most of the formatting you’ve already applied within the paragraph will be preserved, some may be changed by the new style. You can also select text by highlighting it applying the style only to the selected text.

Google Docs offers five Paragraph formatting styles and five Page Spacing styles that control line spacing, such as single space, space and a half, double-space, and triple-space. There are also four Text formatting styles that include strikeout, superscript, subscript, and a special menu selection to remove formatting with a function identical to the Remove Formatting icon in the toolbar.

The Google Docs document editor includes a menu consisting of a drop-down File menu and three tabs: Edit, Insert, and Revisions. The Edit tab is normally active when you edit your document. You can edit your document in the Insert tab, but the toolbar is replaced by selections you can insert into your document, such as:

Here’s something difficult to do in other word-processing software programs. You can review your document’s revision history and roll back to a previous version. Click the Revisions tab. Your document with revisions highlighted appears. Select a revision from the drop-down list to view a previous revision of your document. This is a great feature if you carefully format your document and then suddenly, you accidentally apply formatting that affects the entire document, deleted half of the text, or turned it all blue. You can easily step backward and restore your document to its former state.

The File drop-down menu in Figure 18.3 contains selections that let you create a new document, save the current document in a number of different formats, copy the document, rename it, print it, count the number of words (useful for homework assignments), and use Find & Replace functions.

Figure 18.3. The File menu is available in all the tabs.

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One of the great things about Google Docs is the ability to share your documents with other people without compromising the security of your own computer. You can invite collaborators to edit or merely view your document, whether it’s a completed work or a work in progress.

A notice that no one else is editing the document appears in very light print at the bottom of the document. When you add others to collaborate with you, an orange bar appears at the bottom of the document containing the names of the other people who are working on your document. To add collaborators follow these steps:

When you choose to invite either a collaborator or a viewer, an e-mail message is sent to each person containing a link to the document, an invitation to view or collaborate on the document, and a personal message you can include before the e-mail is sent, as shown in Figure 18.4.

Figure 18.4. Send a personal message to people you invite to view or edit your document.

Collaborators can view and make changes to your document. They can also add and remove other collaborators, except for the document owner. They can also add additional viewers to the document. Viewers are people who can see the document but cannot make changes. Viewers cannot add collaborators or other viewers.

Click the Publish tab on the far right of the document editor to publish a copy of the document on the Internet for anyone to view. Google gives you a unique URL that points to this document. You can then send this link to others in e-mail or create a link from another Web page—perhaps your home page—to this published document.

Next, click Publish document as shown in Figure 18.5. Your document is made available on the Web with a unique URL displayed for you. Make note of this URL because in the future, when you click Publish, your changes to this document will be published to this URL address. You can also send this link to others to view or edit your document.

Figure 18.5. Publish your document to the Web or post it to your blog.

You can also publish documents directly to your blog. Click the set your blog site settings link to tell Google Docs how to post to your blog. If you don’t have a blog yet, you can create one on Google’s Blogger by clicking the Blogger link at the bottom of the page.

In the top-right corner of the Google Docs editor are three buttons: Save, Save & close, and Discard changes. These buttons allow you to immediately save changes to your document or disregard all the changes and revert to the previous saved version. The following sections describe the differences between the three options.

Right-clicking within the document launches a context menu. All the menu selections in the context menu are availably by clicking icons in the toolbar. Sometimes it’s just faster to use the context menu, rather than mousing up to the toolbar. The context menu choices are listed in Table 18.1.

You can mark blocks of text and name them, creating future links. Technically, in HTML-speak, this is an anchor. Bookmarks are handy ways to identify places in large documents that are referred to often, contain important quotes, need to be edited, or are just interesting enough to deserve a name of their own. Use bookmarks for creating an electronic table of contents (TOC) to your document. Clicking the TOC item takes you to that place in the document.

To create a bookmark:

Use the bookmarks you create by creating links to them. When you insert a link into your document, select the Bookmark radio button from the list of items to which you can link. Type a descriptive phrase for your link—any flyover text you want—and click OK. Clicking this link causes your document to scroll to the bookmark.

The spreadsheet editor, like the document editor, has a toolbar along the top of the sheet as shown in Figure 18.7. The items in the toolbar, from left to right, are:

Figure 18.7. Use the toolbar items to easily edit your spreadsheet.

You can sort data in your sheet by selecting the columns of data (you can sort columns of information, not rows) and clicking the Sort tab. Choose whether you want data sorted from lowest to highest (ascending) (A Z) or highest to lowest (descending) (Z A) by clicking the corresponding button in the toolbar. Numeric data is sorted in ascending or descending order also be clicking these same buttons. Determine which column is used to sort the data by clicking on any cell in that column. You will see the Sort sheet by Column message along the top of the sheet change as you click in different columns.

To identify and freeze column headers so they are not sorted along with the data, click the Freeze header row drop-down list and select how many rows of data to freeze. You can choose from 0 rows to 5.

Like other spreadsheet programs, the Google Docs spreadsheet enables you to enter formulas that perform functions on your data. The types of functions include:

Each formula type accepts a particular type of data. For example, the Info formula (ISEVEN()) can be entered into a cell preceded by the equal sign and with a value or cell address entered in the parentheses as a parameter like =ISEVEN(7). The value included in the parens is evaluated to determine whether it is even. The result is TRUE or FALSE. This, of course, displays the word FALSE in the cell. This is not a text entry, but a Boolean entry that can be used in Boolean calculations using the Logical formulas.

The Text formulas operate on textual data. For example, when cell D5 contains the text “My country tis of thee” using the LEFT() text formula, entering the cell address and the number of characters from the left to extract =LEFT(D5,2) returns “My.”

Click the More link to see a list of all the formulas. Selecting a formula from the Insert a Function dialog box inserts the function into the cell identified by the mouse cursor and displays the syntax of the formula in the bottom of the dialog box. For help on that formula or all formulas, click the more link at the bottom of the dialog box. This launches a page with a complete description of all the supported formulas.

Like documents, spreadsheets are automatically saved on a regular basis. The Save button in the upper right only becomes active when an auto-save has not already taken place. Otherwise, the button is disabled and reads Automatically Saved.

To close the spreadsheet and save it at the same time, click Save & close in the upper-right corner.

Spreadsheets can be saved to your local hard drive by exporting the data you’re your files in Google Docs. Export them as CSV, HTML, ODS, PDF, or XLS files. You can then use applications on your computer, such as Excel, Acrobat reader, or your Web browser to read or edit the files depending on the file type you’ve selected.

Invite collaborators or viewers of your spreadsheet just as described in the document section. Click the Collaborate tab (see Figure 18.8) and type the e-mail addresses of new collaborators and viewers, or select existing people from the list. Click Invite these people to launch a dialog box allowing you to personalize the e-mail that you send to your invitees.

Figure 18.8. Collaborate with others while building your spreadsheet.

You can see a list of collaborators at the bottom of the Collaborate tab. Click the Turn off link to keep your invited collaborators from inviting other collaborators.

You can take actions, which are processes such as saving and copying, on one or more selected files. Select a file in the list by clicking the checkbox next to the file icon. Click the Actions menu drop-down. The actions you can take differ between documents and spreadsheets. The only allowed actions for spreadsheets are Star and Un-star. Placing a star on a document merely calls attention to it for your sake. It does not change the file in any manner. Sometimes it’s easy to place a star in front of files that need your attention or to call attention to files for collaborators.

Documents have a larger number of allowed actions. You can save the documents to your local computer by selecting Save as, and a document type. You can select Copy document, Star, Un-star, and Un-collaborate me to remove all collaborator access to this document.

You can quickly organize your documents and spreadsheets by giving them a tag, a descriptive word or phrase attached to the file description. Because your files are not organized into folders, tagging them is the best way of viewing all related files. For example, perhaps you are working on a proposal that involves multiple documents and spreadsheets. Label them all with the name of the proposal you are working on. This places a green link with the tag name next to each filename. Clicking on any of the links changes the file display to only files matching that tag. You can easily return to the view of all active files by clicking the Back to Active documents link at the top of the page.

To tag a file, first select a file from the list of files. Then, select New Tag from the Tag drop-down menu that appears above or below the file list. Type a new tag name or select a previously created tag name from the list, and click OK.

When you finish working with a file and no longer need to see it in your list of active files, archive it. This is not the same as deleting it. Instead, archived files no longer appear in the list of active files. Here’s how you archive a file:

To view archived files, click the View all link to the right of the page. All files are displayed. You can browse them by type by clicking Browse Docs & Spreadsheets. Once you click the View all link, the Archive button changes to Unarchive. Select an archived file and click Unarchive to return the file to your list of Active files.

You can delete both documents and spreadsheets in the Google Docs main page. Select the document or spreadsheet to be deleted by selecting the checkbox to the left of the file icon. Next, click Delete in the bar across the top or bottom of the page.

Deleted documents are transferred to the Deleted Docs and Spreadsheet folder. Published versions of the file also disappear. You can view the list of deleted items by clicking the Browse Docs & Spreadsheets drop-down menu and then selecting Deleted. Undelete files by selecting them from the list and clicking Undelete.

To permanently remove all deleted files, click Empty Trash. This button is found in the bottom bar when viewing deleted files. Permanently removed files are removed from Google Docs and no longer available for collaborative editing.