The Next Google Docs Features

Google says a few of the top ideas it is prioritizing for Google Docs are: adding better header and footer functionality, making Google Docs available offline, and creating vertical merging in spreadsheets.

The company recently opened its Product Ideas page, as a tool to gather feedback from users about what they’d like to see next in Google Docs. Google got 4,000 people to participate and submit about 2,000 ideas, and these are apparently the ones they decided were most important to get out sooner rather than later.

“There were many other great ideas – from making Google Docs available as attachments in Gmail to allowing the use of Google Fonts across all Google Docs tools,” wrote Google Docs community manager Teresa Wu on the Google Docs blog. “While we can’t get started on these requests just yet, we’ll be sure to keep them in mind for future improvements.”

You can see all of the Google Docs ideas here. The page utilized Google Moderator, so you can see the ones that were voted up the most in order. It looks like the most popular idea was allowing the use of all Google fonts across all the Google Docs tools. Second was seamless integration between Google Docs tools: such as inserting part of a spreadsheet into a document, then the header/footer stuff. Those 3 priority features were all in the top six though.

This is another example of Google communicating with users to help improve its products – something the company has been doing a whole lot of with and on Google+. We talked about that here, looking at how open Google has been about potential new features for Google+.