New features for drawings in Google Docs

Friday, October 09, 2009 10:00 AM

We'd like to let you know about a few new features we added to drawings in Google Docs. Choose 'Insert Drawing' in any document, spreadsheet, or presentation to check them out.

Custom shapes and lines
You can now draw lines with multiple segments and create your own custom filled shapes. To try this, select 'Polyline' from the toolbar (to the right of the scribble tool). You can close shapes, fill them, and even move around points on a line by double-clicking the line.

We know many of you may be frustrated by the lack of ninja-related clip art in Google Docs presentations. Check out this example built with polylines:

Here is another example of a polyline.

And another.

Snap to Guides

When creating complex diagrams, drawings, and workflows, you usually want shapes to line up well, even when they're not right next to one another. Unfortunately, it's tricky to line up shapes by hand. Snap to Guides helps you align shapes with the canvas and with other shapes. This feature can be enabled by selecting 'Snap to Guides' from the edit menu.

Draw multiple lines

Finally, we made it easier to quickly draw a sequence of related lines. Now when you finish drawing a line, arrow, or scribble, you stay in line drawing mode so you can start a new line immediately. This new mode is always on, but you can return to the select tool by hitting escape or clicking the arrow on the toolbar.

Please let us know what you think on the help forum.

Posted by: Chris Nokleberg, Katie McGrath, and Steve Kobes, Software Engineers