U-M Google Updates

Explore in Docs, Sheets and Slides makes work a breeze

10/13/2016

Today Google launches Explore in Docs and Slides (Explore is already available in Sheets). It is designed to bring you insights, design tools, and research recommendations. Explore uses Google smarts to help you create presentations, spreadsheets, and documents. It’s like having your own researcher, analyst, and designer.

Sheets

Explore in Sheets helps you decipher your data, whether you’re new to spreadsheets or a formula pro. Just ask Explore—with words, not formulas—to get answers about your data. You can ask questions like “how many students are registered for chemistry?,” “what are the top three careers by income?,” or “what was the total cost of employee benefits last fiscal year?” Explore in Sheets is available on the web, Android, and iOS.

Slides

Explore in Slides helps you polish the design of presentations. As you work, Explore generates design suggestions, based on the content of your slide. Pick a recommendation and apply it with a single click—no cropping, resizing, or reformatting required.

Docs

Explore in Docs helps with researching and writing reports. Whether you’re writing about molecular biology or planning your next team lunch, you’ll get suggestions based on the content in your document. It recommends related topics to learn about, images to insert, and more content to check out. You can also find a related document from Drive or search Google in Explore. It is available on Android, iPhone, or the web.  

Explore is gradually rolling out to the UMICH domain over the next week.

U-M Google September Updates

10/4/2016

The monthly U-M Google Updates informs campus about what is happening with Google releases for both Core Apps (Google applications that fall under the G Suite* for Education agreement and do NOT require separate terms of service or privacy policy), as well as the Non-Core Apps (those that are not part of the G Suite for Education agreement). We will continue to communicate important information on Core Apps throughout the month as well. For a list of Core and Non-Core Apps, see the U-M Google List of Services page.

*Google has recently renamed their Google Apps services G Suite.

Core Apps:

  • What you love about Google Search - now for Drive! New features include:

    • Searching faster and with greater ease. Now you can search using Natural Language Processing (NLP), which is a way of saying “search like you talk.” You can type things like “find my budget sheet from last December” and Drive will understand what you mean and give you the option to click for those specific search results. Each query improves Drive’s NLP.

  • Help with spelling. Drive has a new autocorrect feature that suggests corrections to misspelled search items.

  • Updates based on your feedback:

    • You can now split your document into multiple columns in Google Docs. Select Columns in the Format drop-down menu.

    • When you open, convert, and edit non-Google files in Docs, Sheets, and Slides, a copy will be automatically saved for you. View or download the non-google source file in its original format directly from Revision History in Docs, Sheets, and Slides on the web.

  • Your emails are optimized for every screen with responsive design. You will be able to use CSS media queries with Gmail and Inbox by Gmail to check that your message is formatted the way you intended, whether it's viewed on a computer, a phone in portrait mode, or a tablet in landscape mode.

  • Historical GOOGLEFINANCE data is no longer accessible outside of Google Sheets. It will no longer be possible to download or access historical data outside of Sheets using Apps Script or an API.

Previously Communicated:

Note: Keep in mind that even when non-core apps are found in a core app (like Google Drive), they are not covered by the G Suite for Education agreement.

The Collaboration Services Team

Improving Deduplication Flow in Google Drive

9/28/2016

In Google Drive you can download a non-native Google file (e.g. MS Office, PDFs, etc) to edit locally, and then re-upload the new version. In the past, this would result in duplicate files (the original and the new one), and finding the latest version was challenging. This is why Google introduced a change in Drive to deduplicate files which were uploaded in this way.

With this new feature, files that have the same filename as an existing file, will be deduplicated, and the old file will be placed in the revision history. This is so that if any mistakes are made, the previous version can be restored. Uploaded folders are merged with folders of the same name.

To prevent the files from being deduplicated, click Keep as separate file once it’s uploaded.