⏬ OMG you can have dropdown menus in Google Docs now—and that’s just the tip of the iceberg!
📺 Check it out in video form on TikTok, Instagram Reels, or YouTube Shorts. 📺
These additions primarily relate to the Google Docs smart chips menu that pops up when you type in an “@” symbol. Well, it now features a boatload of goodies. Many of them are just quick access to things we already had access to within the regular toolbar menus, but some surprises popped up recently.
Let’s run through all of the stuff that’s in there—
- People – tag people in your doc
- Building blocks – insert templates that Google provides for things like meeting notes and email drafts
- Files – add links to Google Drive files
- Checklists, numbered lists, and bulleted lists
- Images, drawings, and charts
- Dates – easily jump to your calendar
- Text formatting selections – normal text, heading, title, etc.
- Calendar events
- Page components like page numbers, page counts, headers, footers, page breaks, and watermarks—by the way, it’s crazy easy to add watermarks to Google docs now, have you tried it?
- A table, plus some slick table templates that Google provides
- Horizontal line, table of contents, bookmarks, footnotes, equations, special characters, and links.
Most of that is not that big of news, and almost all of it can be accessed from one of the normal menus at the top of the screen.
The big one is the last option in that “@” menu, which I left out in that list— Dropdowns!
You can select one of their pre-made dropdown sets or, the big news for teachers, you can make your own set.
You can put in as many options as you want (at least as far as I can tell—I added 30 in my test).
You add the text and then select the color for each option. If this is a dropdown you’ll use regularly, you can even save it to use in the future! Plus if you copy the dropdown, you can then paste it elsewhere with the same options! It’s really rad.
Dropdown is also in the Insert menu at the top of the screen, so you can get to it from there too.
There are lots of potential applications in the classroom from multiple choice questions, to a work feedback cycle, to the management of student-paced or personalized learning setups, and more!
These dropdowns and the smart chips are available to ALL GOOGLE USERS.
📺 Check it out in video form on TikTok, Instagram Reels, or YouTube Shorts. 📺
[GIF Source: https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2022/05/table-templates-and-dropdown-chips-for-google-docs.html ]
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