A Quick Look at Google's New Add-Ons for Documents

3/12/2014

There is a lot of buzz about Google's recent unveiling of its Add-Ons for Documents and Sheets. While Google's online applications have a lot going for them, especially in regards to sharing and collaborative writing, people often miss many of the features of the vastly more powerful Microsoft Word and Excel programs. This is now partly balanced with Google's new add-ons - third party, use-specific apps that can be selected and installed from a "Google Play" like collection and then triggered directly within a Google Doc or Spreadsheet.

They are easy to install. The new "Add-ons" menu item appears automatically now. Click on it, then on "Get add-ons" to open a window with multiple apps to choose from. Simply follow the directions for the particular add-on (they vary slightly) and the new add-on will then appear in the drop-down menu.

While this sounds great, it should be noted that these add-on offer some free features but often require purchase or subscriptions to activate the full set. They also demand access to varying degrees to your documents and account information. I always get a bit nervous reading the long list of permissions I must sign over in order to get a little added functionality. Proceed with caution...

Here is a quick, initial take on some of the add-ons that seem most useful to educators:

Document Editing and Markup:

Track Changes

Track Changes color codes edits to let you see your own modifications or to know who is making revisions in shared documents. You can easily accept or reject the changes - vastly superior to Google’s native “Revision History” feature. Excellent for teachers wanting to see who is contributing to collaborative student writing projects.

Highlighting Tools

This free add-on allows you to highlight text in four colors. The highlighted segments can then be extracted to a new document. Students can use it to highlight claims/evidence, main ideas/supporting details, key points, difficult words, etc. The extractions can be shared with the teacher for quick check of student progress or to display to the class during discussion or analysis of text. Nice tool.

Pro Writing Aid

This one looks appealing, but you have to pay for it to be really usable. It does check grammar and spelling for free and offers to improve the general readability of your document by looking for clichés, overused words, repeated words or phrases, and vague or abstract phrases. It claims to check for unoriginal content and plagiarism. It’s free acronym checker wasn't very useful: it incorrectly found lots of acronyms lacking introduction, such as the common words “the”, “in”, and some state abbreviations.

It's a teaser: The add-on is "free" and will run various checks, but to see the results of most of the tests, you must purchase credits or have a subscription. The free version was only somewhat useful and I wasn't prepared to pay to test the full app.

Document Content:

Vertex42 Template Gallery:

Template Gallery provides dozens of templates for both Google documents and spreadsheets. They are organized by type and are easy to preview and select. It is more focused on business than education: It has 20 templates of letters and resumes, many with detailed suggestions, examples and information on best practices. But there are no graphic organizers or academic writing aids. Nonetheless, it’s useful if you need a calendar, planner, budget or loan calculator, donation request letter, or other common types of documents

Easy Bib

This free add-on allows creation of bibliographies for research papers. Simply enter the URL of the source and it extracts the citation in MLA, APA or Chicago styles. As with all automated citation builders, you need to carefully review what it creates. Citations can be very confusing and complex, especially in the internet age of multiple formats and copies of source material.

Document/Mail Merge:

DocumentMerge by Panda & Merge by MailChimp

Both of these add-on allow you to select a Google spreadsheet source that contains a list of details (names, addresses, student grades, attendance records, message text, email addresses, etc.) and insert the various fields anywhere in a Google document. When you preview or start the merge, multiple individualized documents are created. These can be used, for example, to send information to parents or create individualized assignments.

Document Merge by Panda merges the information and puts the set of new documents in a folder in your Google Drive. These are then added to the emails as attachments and sent to the recipients (if desired). The merged documents are retained in the folder.

In contrast, MailChimp creates the actual body of the emails during the merge and sends these to the recipients. It has a few additional advanced features related to this task as well. It does not, though, produce independent documents. If you need merged documents to hand out to students, use Document Merge by Panda.

Document Merge is a simple add-on to the Google Doc and is easy to setup. MailChimp asks a lot of questions during the setup of the mandatory account that you have to create independently with MailChimp itself.

Charts and Diagrams:

LucidChart Diagrams & Gliffy Diagrams

Diagramming tools can be used to collaboratively create mind-maps, Venn diagrams, unit maps, flow charts, organizational charts, or other visual representation of the relationships between elements. Both add-ons are fairly flexible with hundreds of shapes from which to choose and are extremely easy to use.

Lucidchart automatically draws connecting arrows and even has shapes that are configurable as internal or external links. The resulting diagram can be inserted into a document, embedded in a website or exported as a PDF, PNG or JPG. The free version allows a maximum of 60 objects and has some limitations on export formats and chart templates - for example, mind-maps, useful in teaching, are only available in the paid version. Here are more details.

Gliffy provides more diagram types in its free version, notably mind-maps and timelines. While you maintain the full functionality, Gliffy requires purchasing one of its plans if you want to keep more than five finished documents.

A third contender, MindMap, sounds good, but it is actually only a tool to convert a bullet list into a diagram with the same structure. Nice to create visual representation of a preset list, but not fluid and flexible.

And more on the way...

Undoubtedly, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Expect to see more creative add-on, along with a lot of questionable value. Already there are many more than those listed here: add-ons to help embed charts, tools to import header and footers, Avery label makers, Thesaurus look-ups, table of contents tools, and social network management apps, to name only a few. Hopefully this list will help get you started.

PLEASE share your feedback as you explore these on your own!
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