Google Docs - 4 Terrific Time-Saving Tips!

hi there I'm J M and welcome to Four tips for Google Docs use the menu on the right hand side to help navigate around this video at any time hit the home button to get back to this main screen if you like what you see Please Subscribe in a previous video I've talked about how to add comments to Google Docs so very simply you could be uh making a comment on a certain section just by highlighting or moving your mouse uh cursor to a point and then just hitting comments and comments again and you write away whatever you want as your comment in this video I just want to uh quickly go over the View mode and Under The View if you go mode when you open a Google Docs what happens is that it opens an editing mode you can change uh this into a different mode so editing uh is just your normal typing mode what you see is when you turn it on but if I go into suggesting mode this is a little different way to comment on somebody's work so for inance uh if you're working in a collaborative group uh and you want to make comments on certain areas or if you're marking a student's paper you can make comments this way too so this is how it would work if I look at the second paragraph and I wanted uh to tell the student maybe they should take out then Jake uh all I have to do so I'm just highlighting it and then deleting it and but it didn't delete it just did the strike through and on the side they're going to get this um this suggestion that uh maybe you should delete then Jake and at this point they have a choice that they can either hit the check mark or the X uh so I'll give it I'll just hit the check mark and you can see that it uh deleted it from it I'm just going to hit my back if they hit the X it just stays the original way so it gives them the final Choice what they choose uh to do with it so the last one is uh if you're under there was one more View and it's just under viewing and this is just for straight view doing it doesn't allow you to do uh any editing so but the suggestion mode different way to comment on um if you're working together in a group making suggestions or if you're even marking a student's

paper image masking is a way to get away from your normal rectangular pictures and it's very simple to do inside Google Docs let me show you how so I'm going to insert a picture here that I have saved on my hard drive but I'm instead of inserting image I'm going to go to insert drawing so once my drawing opens up here I can insert an image into this by just clicking the little image here at the end and I get the option again take a snapshot uh but in this case I'm going to put choose uh to upload here and I'm just going to grab the pictures or the one picture of my twins here let this get uploaded here it's about a 3 Meg uh file so it takes a second or so once it's uploaded what I can do now to mask it is beside the cropping tool you can see it says image mask if I drop down I can choose different shapes and uh so for example I'm going to choose let's choose I'll choose the heart one so you can see the uh the heart shape it took the picture and put that inside the heart shape so I'm just going to hit save and close here give it a second and you can see I have that inserted to my uh Google Document here I can still change the size of it here I can even go back and edit it still so just by selecting it hitting edit uh I can go back to it make sure you select the picture again go back to my mask image and I could even change it let's say this time I'm going to go to a circle or in this case it looks like an egg or oval uh so I'm going to hit save and close and you can still see it can still change so this is just a simple way if you want to get away from that rectangular picture all the time uh to change up your Google doc this is called image

masking you've probably noticed that there's no simple click to turn your page into a columns format so I'm just going to show you kind of a workaround uh way without using tables so uh very easily all you have to do is go up to your tables insert you know if in this case I'm just going to use my uh two columns in this one I'm going to insert uh cells like this so I'm just going to uh paste some uh text in these that I've copied already and I'll just paste again on this side so uh what you notice right away is so it does have the columns format but you can see there's the table but at this point all you have to do is uh just go up to your table properties and you have a couple different choices you can hit uh make it go to zero or choose your white background I'm just going to hit zero and hit okay and you notice right away you have columns showing so this is just a little uh trick to give you columns if you want to your two column format on a Google Docs

page don't forget about the optical character recognition or OCR that Google has built into it so I'm just going to show you how to open up a PDF or a image inside Google Docs and have it convert over into text so this is how you do it so I'm inside my Google Drive right now and I'm just going to upload um two different things so I'm just going to go to new file upload and just from my desktop here I'm going to take a PDF uh business letter that I have here and I'm also going to upload a uh image that I took with my uh phone just a few moments ago of a book that I had and I just cropped out a certain section so I'm going to upload this so I have here's my image and this is my PDF all I have to do is to use the OCR is open up these documents inside Google Docs and this is how I do it so I'll start with the business letter one if I right click on this one all I have to go is open with I'm going to select Google Docs and you will see it won't just automatically open to Google Docs it takes a few seconds to convert it so what happens is the picture here's the image that of the PDF is still inserted but below it you can see if I need to edit it now I have all the text from uh from the image put into here down even with the same color there's a little bit of formatting that changed but very easy uh to quickly edit that uh and know all the typing is exactly the same so I could delete the picture and have an editing uh work that I could use so I'm just going to close this one out and go to the image and just show you again and Clarity of the image makes a difference uh with light levels and how good the image is uh makes a difference on how well the um OCR works so let me open this again with my Google Docs you can see it processes it and then the image is going to be still there at the top of the Google Docs and when this opens it's thinking a little bit longer this time uh so the image is here but you can see below all the words uh from the image are here so I could quickly go through change the font size um delete this image like this and I have all the words with some little editing to do so that's how you use OCR inside Google doc for Google Docs or if you're using it into different a different way Google has it built in