Documents, sheets & slides (Office suite)

Full-page documents, spreadsheets and presentations are included from the Pro plan (Pro, Enterprise and White-label); on the Free plan, Drive still stores, shares, previews and downloads every file, and opening a document shows which plan includes editing. Drive documents, spreadsheets and presentations are full editors, not previews. Everything auto-saves as you type (watch the “Saving… / Saved” indicator), several people can edit the same file at the same time and see each other’s cursors, and every file can open three ways: in a quick popup, as a full page with its own web address you can bookmark or paste to a teammate, or popped out into a separate browser window for a second monitor. Opening a file tucks the sidebar away so the document gets the whole screen; it comes back the way you had it when you leave. Any open file can also be minimised to a taskbar at the bottom of the screen and picked up again later. The editors are laid out like Microsoft Office: a ribbon with stacked button groups, each app in its own colour (blue documents, green spreadsheets, orange presentations, red PDFs), and a status bar along the bottom - spreadsheets show live Average, Count and Sum for the numbers you have selected, documents show the page and word count, presentations the slide position, and all of them have zoom controls there.

1. 1

   Documents (like Word)

   Fonts, sizes, colours and highlights, headings, lists, alignment, line spacing, links, tables and more, laid out on real pages (A4, Letter or Legal). Headers, footers and page numbers now live on the Insert tab the way Word places them, with a page-number gallery (top or bottom, left, centre or right), a different-first-page option for title pages, and the codes {PAGE}, {PAGES} and {TITLE} that resolve on screen, in print and as real fields in the Word download. Insert a table of contents built from your headings, with dotted leaders, page numbers and an Update button; it refreshes itself before printing. Review > Track Changes turns your edits into suggestions - underlined in your colour, with deletions struck through rather than removed - which anyone can accept or reject one at a time or all at once, with a Reviewing Pane listing every suggestion by author (filter it to one reviewer and accept just theirs), a bar in the margin marking changed lines, and a Word download that carries the suggestions as real Word tracked changes. A References tab adds footnotes and endnotes that number themselves (and arrive in the Word download as real Word footnotes), citations with a source list and a bibliography that updates itself, and Review > Compare shows the differences against another document. Insert > Equation writes real maths - fractions, powers, roots, sums - which exports as a live Word equation. Layout > Columns gives two or three columns. Import a Word file to keep editing it here, export your document as a Word file, print it, or use Find & replace. A live word count sits in the status bar. Watermarks (DRAFT, CONFIDENTIAL or your own text), page borders, draggable ruler handles for margins and indents (nudge them with the arrow keys too), and a Modify Style panel to restyle every heading at once. View > Navigation Pane lists every heading down the side: click one to jump to it, collapse a section to fold its text away, and DRAG a heading to move its whole section, body text included, even the parts that are collapsed out of sight. With Track Changes on, moving a section is recorded as a proper suggestion (struck through where it was, marked new where it landed), so rejecting it puts the document back exactly as it was. View > Split gives you two views of the same document side by side, scrolling independently, both editable, so you can write in one place while reading another; Remove Split closes it. Opening a Word file that contains tracked changes now keeps them: until recently every suggestion in an imported document was silently accepted, deletions included, and nothing told you - now each one arrives with the name and date of the person who made it, ready to accept or reject, and the import tells you plainly if anything could not be carried across. The change bars in the margin mark individual lines rather than whole paragraphs. Layout > Line Numbers numbers the lines down the margin, continuously or restarting each page or section, every line or every fifth, and you can switch them off for chosen paragraphs. Layout > Hyphenation breaks long words at the margin so justified text has fewer gaps, with a limit on how many lines in a row may end in a hyphen, and the language belongs to the document rather than to your workspace, so everyone working on it hyphenates it the same way (the menu names the sixteen languages available). Insert > Cross-reference points at a heading, a numbered item, a footnote, a bookmark or a table, as its text, its number or simply "above"/"below"; references update when the thing they point at moves, and say so in the document if it is deleted.

2. 2

   Spreadsheets (like Excel)

   A real formula engine with well over a hundred Excel functions (SUM, IF, VLOOKUP, XLOOKUP, SUMIFS, COUNTIFS, TEXTJOIN and many more). Type = in any cell and matching functions are suggested as you type, with a hint showing what each one needs - and formulas tidy themselves on Enter (missing closing brackets added, stray commas removed). Click cells or use the arrow keys while typing a formula to point at the ranges you mean, just like Excel. Conditional formatting (highlight rules, data bars, colour scales), charts (bar, line, pie) drawn from any selected range, Remove Duplicates, Text to Columns and list-based Data Validation. Cell formatting, number/currency/percent/date formats, multiple sheet tabs, freeze panes, sort and filter, merged cells, and drag-to-fill. Name a range on the Formulas tab (Name Manager) and use the name in formulas, =SUM(Sales) instead of cell addresses. Data > What-If Analysis > Goal Seek works backwards from the answer you want (make this total come to 100 by changing this cell), and says in plain English when it cannot. Conditional formatting adds icon sets, data bars that handle negative numbers, and rules you can reorder. Select a chart for options - switch its type, move the legend, show data labels, name the axes or change the source cells. Formulas > Trace Precedents and Trace Dependents draw arrows showing which cells feed a formula and which formulas read a cell. Write your own number formats (Format Cells > Number > Custom) with codes like #,##0.00 or dd/mmm/yyyy, indent and rotate cell text, fold rows or columns into collapsible groups (Data > Outline), and split the grid into panes that scroll on their own (View > Split). Your sheet reopens where you left it. Page Layout gives you margins, orientation, paper size, a print area, title rows repeated on every printed page, print gridlines and fit-to-width, all honoured when you print. Insert > PivotTable summarises a range without writing a single formula: drag the fields you want into Rows, Columns, Values and Filters, choose how each value is summarised (Sum, Count, Average, Count Numbers, Min or Max), and put the result on this sheet or a new one. Refresh it whenever the data changes. Dates group into years, quarters, months and days, nested the way Excel nests them - and if your data covers more than one year and you group by month alone, it says so and offers to add years, rather than quietly adding every March together. Show any value as a percentage of the grand total, the column, the row or its parent, as a running total, or as the difference from the row before (where there is nothing to compare against it leaves the cell blank, because a zero reads as a real answer). Add a field of your own defined by a formula over the other fields - note that, exactly as in Excel, it works on the totals rather than row by row, which the panel says beside the box. Add slicers, the button boxes you click to filter, and a chart tied to the pivot that redraws when you regroup, refresh or filter. Conditional formatting also takes a rule you write yourself: Home > Conditional > New Rule > Use a formula, written once for the top-left cell and shifted across the range exactly as a formula shifts when you drag it down, with $ pinning whatever you want to stay put. Import an Excel file, or export your sheet as Excel or CSV.

3. 3

   Presentations (like PowerPoint)

   Slides with text boxes, shapes and images you drag anywhere, layouts to start from, speaker notes, and a full-screen Present mode with your notes, a timer and a preview of the next slide. Insert > Table adds a real table you can type in and that leaves as an editable PowerPoint table - select a block of cells by dragging, or by holding Shift with the arrow keys, then fill them, colour the text, put borders on any side, clear them, merge and split them (a merged cell is always selected whole, never sliced in half), or fill down and fill right, which carries the formatting with the text. Pick a table style from a gallery that follows your deck's theme, with switches for the header row, a total row, banded rows and an emphasised first or last column; drag a row taller or shorter, or distribute rows and columns evenly, and a row will never crush smaller than the words inside it; animations now include emphasis and exit as well as entrance, so an object can appear, pulse and leave in one sequence; and Find (Ctrl+F) searches the whole deck including speaker notes and table cells, listing every hit with its slide number. Cut, copy, paste and a format painter sit on the Home tab; Insert > Chart adds a bar, line or pie chart with its own editable data that leaves as a real editable PowerPoint chart; Motion paths move an object along a line, an arc, a turn, a shape or a loop, with start and end points you drag to where you want them and a preview button, in the same sequence as your other animations - and a path can leave the slide, which is how you make something fly off the screen. The Animation Pane (Animations tab) lists every animation in play order so you can reorder them, set each to start on click or with or after the previous one, give it a duration and a delay, and play the sequence. Rehearse Timings runs the deck with a clock and records how long you spend on each slide; Use Timings then advances the show on your rehearsed pace. Undo and redo are yours alone in a shared deck, your undo never reverts a colleague’s edit. A grayscale preview on the View tab shows how the deck photocopies. Export the deck as a PowerPoint file.

4. 4

   Working together

   Sharing, comments and @mentions work exactly as they do for any Drive file, and who-can-edit follows the same Viewer / Commenter / Editor access as the rest of the drive.