Get the most from Google Docs with these tips: Talking Tech podcast
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Hey, they're listeners. It's Brett Molina. Welcome back to Talking Tech. Happy, sweet 16 to Google Docs. Hard to believe, but 16 years ago, 2006, Google's free-to-use word processor was launched. And honestly, ever since then, it has been a delight. It lets you create and edit documents. You can do it for free as long as you have a Google account. Super handy, super useful. I use it often. My colleague and Talking Tech's favorite Canadian, Mark Saltzman, writes about this in a column you can read on tech.usatoday.com. His column focuses on six cool Google Doc's tricks in honor of the app's 16th birthday. We'll go through a couple here, and you can read the rest in his column.
Let's start with talking instead of typing. This can be very handy. You can actually voice type with Google Docs. And sometimes it's faster, not to mention the microphone in Google Docs works really well. So if you're just looking to get some notes down and you just want to speak them instead of typing them down, you can do that with voice typing. You go to the Tools menu. You enable voice typing. Excuse me. It might ask you if the app can use your microphone. And then, once you do that, you can get rolling. It's really great. It's super useful. Also, it can come in handy if you want to record certain things as well. Something to keep in mind though, if you're leaving it on and you're just kind of freely talking, make sure that your computer doesn't time out because then it'll stop recording. So just keep that in mind. You don't want it to go to sleep and then lose whatever it is you're recording.
The other big thing, and this is a really good one, too. If you're working and you're wanting to do some drafts, is draft an email in Google Docs. So basically, what you do is you'll type in someone's name. You'll go to your contacts, pick who it is, and then you can just start drafting the email. It's very cool if you're thinking kind of longer-term. You're just thinking of a longer-term email that you need to pull together. And it allows you to do it freely because here's the thing that scares everybody, no matter what. You're in Outlook or Gmail or whatever it is, and you're crafting an email, and you're just prepping it, and then you accidentally hit send. No fun at all. Right?
So this is a nice way to do it without worrying about that. When you are ready to send, though, you click the Gmail logo on the left, and the Compose window pops up. You double-check everything, and then you can send it. It's super useful, super convenient if you use Gmail and Google Docs and you're wanting a different way to draft your email. It's very cool. Mark has some more suggestions that you can read by going to tech.usatoday.com.
Listeners, let's hear from you. Do you have any comments, questions, or show ideas, any tech problems you want us to try to address? You can find me on Twitter @brettmolina23. Please don't forget to subscribe and rate us or leave a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, anywhere you get your podcasts. You've been listening to Talking Tech. We'll be back tomorrow with another quick kick.... Let me do that again. Sorry. Yikes. You've been listening to Talking Tech. We'll be back tomorrow with another quick hit from the world of tech.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Get the most from Google Docs with these tips: Talking Tech podcast
