5 essential add-ons for Google Docs to make you a better writer

Google Docs has most of the features people need, but if you want more tools and functions, extend it with add-ons. Here are some great ones that add some very useful features.

This is not the first time I have looked at Google Docs add-ons and here are 5 add-ons you should install into Google Docs to work smarter. Those add-ons are good, but I think this new collection is even better!

Read that article for a step by step guide to installing and activating add-ons, which is actually quite easy:

1. Go to the Add-ons menu
2. Click Get add-ons
3. Browse the add-ons and find one you want
4. Click the + Free button to install it
5. Activate it on the Add-ons menu

All the add-ons here can be found near the start of the list, but there is a search facility if you cannot find them.

1 Table of Contents

This free Google Docs add-on opens a sidebar at the right side of the document that displays a table of contents. It is basically a list of links created by looking through the document for headings.

It recognises the different heading styles and indents subheadings to make a neat table of contents. Click a heading or subheading link in the sidebar and the cursor is moved to that position in the document.

It enables you to keep an overview of the document structure and sections constantly visible and you can easily jump back and forth between sections.

It does not support page numbers, it just links to headings. I found it tended to move the document so that the heading clicked was at the bottom of the screen and I needed to scroll up to see the section. It would be better if it showed the heading the top of the window. People with extremely large documents, 50+ pages for example, find it slow.

It is not perfect and there are a few flaws, but this is still a great add-on and it becomes more useful as documents grow in size.

2 Extensis Fonts

There are around 32 fonts to choose from in Google Docs and they are pretty boring, like Arial, Comic Sans, Verdana, Times New Roman, and so on. However, tens of thousands of fonts have been created by designers and there are some fantastic ones.

If you cannot find the right font for your document, get the Extensis Fonts add-on. Select it in the Add-ons menu and it opens a sidebar on the right and displays around 1200 fonts.

All you need to do is select some text and click the font you want on the right. The text size is not changed, only the font, so you might want to use the font size selector in the toolbar.

This does not allow you to add your own fonts and you are limited to the 1200 or so provided. It may not have your favourite font or a specific font you want to use, but there are many alternatives.

Its aim is to increase the number of fonts massively to give you more design and appearance choices when creating documents. It does this very well and it is recommended.

3 Highlight Tool

This is a very useful tool for reviewing documents and it makes highlighting blocks of text very easy. There is a very simple highlighter built in to Google docs, but this one offers more features.

It is enabled from the Add-ons menu and this opens a sidebar on the right. Click Highlighter Library and you can create sets of highlighters. Each set can be named and it can have its own collection of highlights. You choose how many highlights, select a colour for each of them and name them.

Multiple groups of highlights are very useful when you have different types of documents and a red highlighter for one type of document can mean something else in another document. The highlight name/function is on the highlight in the sidebar so you can see what it is for.

Another excellent feature of Highlight Tool is the ability to export highlights to another document. This means you can go through a document and highlight the important points, click a button and a new document is created with them.

This is another great add-on for Google Docs.

4 Word Cloud

Word clouds are those graphic images that consist of a collection of words taken from a document. The size of each word depends on the number of times it is used, with the most common word being the largest. Each word is displayed in a different colour.

These are interesting graphics that can be added to documents and web pages where they add interest to visually dull text. Common words like ‘and’, ‘the’ and so on, are not included in the word cloud, so the image can be used to highlight just technical terms and names used in a document.

There are Classic and Modern options and Modern is the best. Select Word Cloud on the Add-ons menu and a sidebar opens showing a word cloud created from the document. There are buttons to add a large or small image to the current document, or it can be downloaded and saved to disk as a 600 x 820 pixel PNG file.

There are four colour schemes to choose from, but they are quite similar. The images are portrait shaped, but I would prefer a landscape option. It is still useful and you could crop the image to the shape and size you need.

5 GradeProof: Proofreading with AI

Last but definitely not least is GradeProof, which is a fantastic grammar and spelling checker add-on for Google Docs. Some checking is built in to Google Docs, but this goes far beyond the minimal checking that Google does.

You may have heard of or even used Grammarly, which is one of the best known grammar checkers and GradeProof does the same sort of thing. It checks the text for common errors and highlights them so that you can fix them.

Start GradeProof and a sidebar opens on the right showing some useful statistical information like character, word and sentence counts. There are also readability and grade level scores, which indicate how easy or hard to read the document is.

At the top are counts showing the number of spelling, grammar, phrasing and eloquence problems detected. Click the View Suggestions button and a window opens containing the document text and GradeProof steps through each of the problems. It briefly describes the error and offers suggested fixes and alternatives that you can click to select.

This is a brilliant add-on for Google Docs and the suggestions it makes are very good. In fact, I prefer it to Grammarly and Hemmingway App.

The first time it is used, you must create an account at the GradeProof website. A basic account is free, but you also get a free 30-day trial of the Eloquence Engine. When this expires you can either pay to to use it or continue with the free basic plan.

GradeProof is recommended.