This post was published 10 years, 4 months ago. Due to the rapidly evolving world of technology, some material it contains may no longer be applicable.
At long last Google has finished clearing up their mess of office applications which had serious identity issues and a large and confusing overlap in functionality. They’ve also brought some almost-material-still-really-holo design improvements.
All document editing was removed from the Drive app a few weeks back and new Slides, Docs and Sheets apps were launched. This was the first stage of cleaning up Google’s apps for document creation as it removed bloat and confusion about functionality. Drive is now focused on file storage / management as it should be and each more suitably named office application can be installed independently depending on the users needs.
However, until now these new apps could not edit local versions of the latest documents like QuickOffice could but otherwise had a huge overlap in functionally. Today that has changed.
Google has scrapped QuickOffice and pushed out big updates to their other office apps. They now have a whole range of new features and UI improvements.
These visual changes are not full on material design but they do have some of new UI elements such as the floating new button and a more card-centric interface. I suspect the fully updated design will “materialise” in the autumn when Android L launches. Yes, that was an awful pun, I’ll show myself out! But first, here is a quick look at the updated design and what’s new feature-wise.
What’s New
- Fewer items in the action bar
- New account selection drop-down style
- Create, edit and local files in Microsoft Office format
- Share files as Microsoft Office format or PDF
- New details page
- File list differentiates between different file formats
- Floating new document button
- New editor UI
- Create and edit charts (Sheets)
- Formula lists (Sheets)
- Selection dragging (like we showed you here)
- Support for auto-fill
- New dictionary permissions for easier corrections and better spellcheck
The updates are already live but if they don’t show for you yet just wait a little while for the update to propagate the Play Store, it should not take long. If you don’t yet have any of these apps you can install them from the widgets below.