Another in my occasional series, Holy Crap, This Is So Cool.

I like Google Docs, don’t you? It’s a great place for light word processing, spreadsheets, simple presentations, even for doing forms and drawings.

A Few Basics

If you have a document in almost any format, you can upload it to Docs and work on it there. There are 2 options, save it as a Google Doc and work on it online, or store it in it’s original format.

There is no limit for stuff in Google Docs format. Docs does have a limit for files you upload and keep in their original format (Word, XLS, Powerpoint, etc) but it’s 2gb. That’s a lot. It’s 2000mb, and my 235 page novel is less than 1mb in Word.

When you’re ready to save your document to your computer in a native application such as Word, Excel, Powerpoint, etc., Docs can do that quickly and very well.

The very cool thing I learned today.

You can hide the controls bar across the top of your document! In other words, Google Docs has a Full Screen mode. Who knew? 

This is great because I like to zoom in – make text larger – while I type. If you leave the controls at the top, they get bigger too, which sucks.

Note: Don’t know how to zoom? Scroll the wheel on your mouse while holding Ctrl. Or use View > Zoom on your toolbar.

To Hide the controls, Select View > Hide Controls on the Google Docs controls bar.

Or press Ctrl + Shift + F.

Press Esc to return to normal view.

Now you can zoom and out in to your heart’s content, and all that changes is the text and the page, just like any word processor on your hard drive.

If you press F11 on your keyboard also, you’re looking at nothing but your document. F11 takes your browser to Full Screen mode. Press F11 again to return to normal.

Very cool! See, you gotta stick with Metaphor to learn good stuff.