Google Tutor

4 New Google Docs Features Rock Document Management!

Posted: 29 Oct 2009 06:00 AM PDT

Using Google Docs is getting easier and easier as more features are added. At this point, I could completely imagine using Google Docs pretty much exclusively, and having it replace my regular word processing software. The benefits are simple: Google docs lives online, so hard drive space is saved, features are constantly added, it is more than adequate for standard document creating and editing, you can translate documents into other languages, and documents can be shared very easily with anyone who has an email address.

The one thing that used to keep me from using Google Docs for all my files is just that getting them on there required either creating them straight in Google Docs, or copying and pasting the documents into a new file unless I wanted to upload files one by one. I’d only do it with documents I would really need to use on the road.

This week, Google Docs introduced a cool new way to download a large number of documents out of Google Docs, onto your hard drive. Whether you just want to back them up, or use them offline as well, you can get up to about 20,000 files in one go. That’s right, 500MB of content can be downloaded in one single .zip file, which according to Google is about 20,000 typical files.

Three other cool new features in Google Docs

Google Docs has a few more new improvements in store, which are especially handy when you have a large number of files in your Google Docs, and are sharing files with other users:

Viewed items: Google Docs will indicate whether or not your have viewed a document. Items you have not opened yet are bolded, while viewed files are not. Files you are sharing with others will also be bolded again once someone else has made changes to it.
New! files are will be marked with a bright red “New!” label right next to them, and of course bolded because they will also be ‘unviewed’.
Easy uploading: Before Google made it easy to download your files from Google Docs, they made it very easy to upload them with a multi-file uploader.