Another common word processor is Google Docs. While Microsoft has decades of being the industry standard in word processing, spreadsheets, and presentation software, Google offers a user-friendly design and collaborative features.
Menus in Google Docs
What tabs are to Word, menus are to Docs. In Word, the tools we use to prepare documents are arranged in tabs and then in command groups within those tabs. In Docs, the tools are arranged in menus instead of tabs. There are some similarities between the names of the menus and tabs: For example, you have the Insert tab in Word and the Insert menu in Docs. Docs also has a nice, user-friendly feature in which the tools that are used more frequently, such as some of the alignment tools and the font tools, are on a toolbar under the menu. This toolbar is called the action bar, and it is a static menu bar; it doesn’t change, like Word’s ribbon. This keeps those tools handy so that it is faster and easier for the user to change items in the document. Many of the tools on the action bar are similar to what you will find on the Home tab in Word.
Edit Menu
This menu is similar to the Edit menu in Word. This menu has commands such as Select All, Undo, Redo, and Find and Replace. As in Word, the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+Z will undo the last action you took, while Ctrl+Y is the opposite: It redoes what you have undone with Ctrl+Z.
Paste without formatting is a useful tool for copying and pasting text only, without any of the source formatting (such as font, font size, or color). This is particularly helpful when copying and pasting from an email or website.
Creating a Doc
The most direct way to create a new Doc is to log in to your Google Drive. Once you are in the Drive, you can create a new Doc by selecting the New plus sign. Then, choose Google Docs from the list. This will automatically open a new window with a blank document. You could also hover over the arrow to the right of the Google Docs icon and choose Blank document or From a template to create the new file. As an alternative, once in your Drive, you can create a new document by selecting the Google Apps icon. This will open a drop-down menu, and you will choose which app to access, in this case that would be Docs for the Google word processor application. A new tab will appear in your browser with the Docs. Here, you can choose to open from recent documents or create a new document either by a template or an entirely new file (by choosing blank).
If you select the first icon, Blank, Docs will open a blank canvas, similar to how Word opens its blank documents.