“There may be times when you don’t have an Internet connection on your Android device, but you still want access to a file you’ve saved in Google Docs,” says Google software engineer Freeman Liu. “Now you can select any file in Google Docs to make it available offline. So regardless of whether you’re connected to the internet, you’re always connected to those files.”

This includes: documents, presentations, spreadsheets, uploaded images, and files in formats such as .pdf, .doc, .xls and .ppt. Google Sites, Google drawings, Google forms, Fusion Tables and collections can’t be made available offline.

Note that you need an Internet connection to make files available offline to begin with. You can make an item available offline while you’re connected, or you can request to make an item available offline while you’re disconnected, and it will update the next time your device regains connectivity.

“Even better, Google Docs automatically updates your offline files when you’re on Wi-Fi,” adds Liu. “You can also manually update files anytime you have a data connection by opening the file or tapping ‘Update’ from the Offline section of the app.”

In the offline section, files will be designated as “up to date,” “out of date,” or “not yet available”. They will be listed as not yet available if your device hasn’t downloaded the item yet.

As far as the tablet improvements, when you open a document on your tablet while online, you’ll get a high-res version, and you can swipe to flip between pages (or use the slider at the bottom to go more quickly).

“A year and a half ago, we released completely new document, spreadsheet and drawing editors. Google Docs has been picking up speed ever since with more than 60 new features and millions of new users,” says software engineer Steven Saviano on the official Google Blog. “Today we’re rounding out the suite by previewing a new version of presentations with faster collaboration and more features.”

“Presentations are made to be shared—whether it’s presenting your thesis to your professors or inspiring colleagues at a conference,” he adds. “And the best presentations are made together, collaborating with others to build a compelling story that captivates your audience.”

With the new version, presentations can be created by more than one person simultaneously, and you can see exactly what others are working on with “presence markers”. Teams can edit simultaneously, and there is a revision history feature so you can see who made changes or revert to earlier versions. There is also a built-in chat feature. Are we seeing some Google Wave creep in here?

Google says it’s gradually rolling out the new version of Presentations, but you can use it now if you go to Document Settings, click the editing tab, and check the box next to “Create new presentations using the latest version of the presentation editor.”

Google says you’ll need a “modern browser” if you want to be able to edit with the new version.

Google also says more collaboration features are on the way.

Google has also been working on some other accessibility-related features for Google Docs and Google Calendar.

“This fall, as classrooms fill with the hustle and bustle of a new semester, more students than ever will use Google Apps to take quizzes, write essays and talk to classmates,” says Google Accessibility technical lead T.V. Raman. “Yet blind students (like blind people of all ages) face a unique set of challenges on the web. Members of the blind community rely on screen readers to tell them verbally what appears on the screen. They also use keyboard shortcuts to do things that would otherwise be accomplished with a mouse, such as opening a file or highlighting text.”

The company has been working with advocacy organizations for the blind to make its products more accessible, and has already improved keyboard shortcuts and support for screen readers in Google Docs, Google Sites and Google Calendar. On the Gmail Blog, the company provides some examples of how screen readers and keyboard shortcuts have been improved specifically in Google Calendar:

• In your calendar lists, you can use the up and down arrow keys to navigate between your calendars. For each calendar in the list, you’ll hear its name and can use the spacebar to turn the calendar on or off. To remove a calendar from the list, use the delete key.
• In the agenda view, you can use the up and down arrow keys to move between events and use the left and right arrow keys to move between dates. To expand an event and expose the event details, press enter. To go to the event details page, type ‘e’. To remove an event, press delete. Although agenda view provides the best screen reader experience today, we are also working on improved accessibility for other views.
• In the guest list on the create/edit event page, you can navigate around using the up and down arrow keys. Use the spacebar to switch a guest’s status between optional and required. To remove a guest from the list, use the delete key.
• Additional keyboard shortcuts make it easier to use Google Calendar no matter which view or screen you’re on. Type ‘c’ to create an event, ‘/’ to start a search, and ‘+’ to add a calendar.

For a complete list os shortcuts and more information about screen reader functionality, you can find more info in Google’s help center.

JAWS, VoiceOver and ChromeVox are all supported by Calendars.

Google says it will continue to improve products for blind users in the weeks and months ahead.

“ZIP and RAR archives that are embedded inside other archives also work,” says Avner Aviad on the Google Docs Viewer team. “For example, if you have a RAR file inside a ZIP file (like in our example above) you can just click on that file to access the embedded archive.”

“We hope this removes the need to download full archives when you only need to work on select items,” Aviad adds.

The feature also works on mobile devices.

Here is the complete list of file types the Google Docs Viewer supports:

• Microsoft Word (.DOC and .DOCX)
• Microsoft Excel (.XLS and .XLSX)
• Microsoft PowerPoint (.PPT and .PPTX)
• Adobe Portable Document Format (.PDF)
• Apple Pages (.PAGES)
• Adobe Illustrator (.AI)
• Adobe Photoshop (.PSD)
• Tagged Image File Format (.TIFF)
• Autodesk AutoCad (.DXF)
• Scalable Vector Graphics (.SVG)
• PostScript (.EPS, .PS)
• TrueType (.TTF)
• XML Paper Specification (.XPS)
• Archive file types (.ZIP and .RAR)

Google is doing more to improve Google Docs. As reported this week, the company announced the new features it is prioritizing, based on user feedback. These include: adding better header/footer functionality, offline availability, 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+.

Now, Android users don’t have to use the web version on their phones anymore, as the app is available in the Android Market for Android 2.1+ phones.

It also brings a few interesting new features.

“With this new app it’s easy to filter and search for your content across any Google account, then jump straight into editing docs using the online mobile editors,” says Google Software Engineer Reuben Kan. “The app also allows you to easily share items with contacts on your phone, right from within the app.”

“The Docs app also allows you to upload content from your phone and open documents directly from Gmail,” he adds. “You can also add a widget to your home screen for easy access to three core tasks: jumping to your starred documents, taking a photo to upload, or creating a new document with one tap.”

The app also brings a cool feature that lets you take a picture with your phone’s camera, and turn it into an editable Google document, using Google’s optical character recognition technology. Pretty cool.

On a semi-related note, Google has made some adjustments to pricing for Google Apps for small and medium-sized businesses.

A post on the Google Docs Blog announced this afternoon, “[W]e’re doing another first for web browsers by adding a classic word processing feature – pagination, the ability to see visual pages on your screen.  We’re also using pagination and some of Chrome’s capabilities to improve how printing works in Google Docs.”

The post later explained, “Before, if you wanted to print your document we’d need to first convert it into a PDF, which you would then need to open and print yourself.  With native printing, you can print directly from your browser and the printed document will always exactly match what you see on your screen.”  (So long as you’re using Chrome, at least.)

These upgrades are bound to make Google Docs much more user-friendly.  Google’s timing is pretty good, too; this should give students a little time to adjust to the change before they have to tackle huge end-of-semester projects (where those page numbers will really come in handy).

Anyway, Google Docs users who preferred the old layout or are just stuck with small screens won’t be alienated, either, as Google engineers have made sure a compact view of documents will remain available.

First up, all comments will now contain a timestamp and picture.  Single comments will also be able to be edited.

Google has added a “resolve” feature to all comments.  This allows you to remove the comment from visibility without deleting it altogether.  The resolved comments are saved and able to be accessed through the “discussion” button on each document.

Probably the most important new feature Google Docs had added is the inclusion of email notifications within comments.  Constantly checking your documents to see if they have any new comments is a pain, so now you get a heads up.  Once you receive the notifications, you can either reply to the email or easily open up the document itself and reply there.

The email notifications act like Twitter mentions, in that you can include ‘@joesmith@email.com” within your comment.

Google says on its docs blog that their motivation for the update is to promote easier discussions: “The combination of added structure and intuitive email integration have really given life to the discussions that surround our documents, and we’re excited for this new feature to do the same for you.”  Your existing documents will look the same as the changes will only affect new documents.

Of course, to be honest, this may not yet affect many individuals.  Google Docs has had enough trouble catching on with English-speaking Americans, never mind people who aren’t in the company’s home market.

That could be kind of the point, though, as the development should encourage more potential users to give Google Docs a try.

So a post on the Google Docs Blog provided a picture of the new tech in action, as you can see below.

The post also explained to the uninitiated, "To begin editing, visit docs.google.com in your mobile browser, and select a document to edit.  Switch from view to edit mode by pressing ‘Edit’ to turn on the mobile editor and start typing away.  As a reminder, mobile editing is available on Android (2.2+) and iOS (version 3.0+) devices."

If you’ve got any ideas about what Google should do next in this field, the company’s welcoming feedback in the comments section and on the Google Docs Help Forum.

This is the technology that analyzes images and PDF files and extracts text and formatting, so you can edit. The feature was introduced last summer. The development of the technology would be aided by scans of ancient texts. 

In August, Google began allowing for file conversion utilizing the technology in Google Docs. It works for PDFs, JPEGs, GIFs, and PNGs. 

"Hit upload, and we’ll use this information to search for the right characters in your file," says Google software engineer Jason Schaeffer. "As usual, you will get best results with sharp, high-resolution images or PDF files. This update will also result in an improvement in OCR quality for languages that we’ve supported previously (English, French, Italian, German, Spanish). We’ve also made improvements to the way we import formatting from your documents, and are now doing a better job in preserving font and alignment information."

"We’ll keep adding languages and at at the same time will continue to improve speed and accuracy for the existing ones," says Schaeffer. "In the meantime, we hope you take advantage of this new way to import your data into Google Docs."

More information about the feature, including language information can be found here.