GoogleDocs Tips

You can create documents, presentations, and spreadsheets at GoogleDocs. The following tips will help in using GoogleDocs to create documents.

Start by using the create a new document option:

Since you will be cutting and pasting from your GoogleDocument into some kind of other format (email, blog or webpage), don't do any formatting in GoogleDocs! No links, no text formatting - just type, check your word count, and spellcheck. You can do all the formatting in  your blog or webpage later.

The word count is under the Tools menu - be careful not to get the word count mixed up with the character count! There is also a keyboard shortcut to get to the word count even more quickly:

You can toggle the spellchecker on and off under the View menu; by default it is turned on. This means that misspelled words are underlined in red and you can right-click on the word to see suggested spellings.

There is also a dictionary you can use to look up a word - after all, most of the spelling mistakes that people make are not outright errors, but homonyms, words that sound the same but which are spelled differently. So, if even if there is not a red squiggle from the spellchecker and you think something does not look right somehow, use the Tool: Define option to find out what the word means: