For two days in a row the Google Docs team has announced an update to their online office suite offering. Yesterday they enhanced the printing ability of Spreadsheets and today they have added pagination.
The enhancement to Spreadsheets printing in two-fold. The first the addition of of spreadsheets support for Google Cloud Print. When viewing your spreadsheet on a mobile device you will now find a “Print” option just below the document title. You will first need to set up your printer for “the cloud”. Google Cloud Print is supported for Android 2.1+ and iOS 3+.
The second part of the Spreadsheets printer update involved the desktop version of Docs. Google added more print options such as spreadsheet titles, sheet names and page numbers. You can now control which of these you want to print.
Today’s Google Docs update is the addition of pagination. Google claims that it is “another first for web browsers by adding a classic word processing feature—pagination, the ability to see visual pages on your screen.” It is rolling out throughout the days and will be available to all users before tomorrow. For users, this means you will be able to see page-breaks so that you can see how many pages are in a document and change your layout to get the look you want. According to Google “Because we’re able to show you individual pages, we can improve the way other features work too: headers now show up at the top of each page instead of just at the top of your doc, manual page breaks actually move text onto a new page and footnotes appear at the bottom of the pages themselves.” You can also hide page breaks if you prefer a continuous view. Simply click View – Documents View and choose between Paginated and Compact.
Google Docs continues to excel forward as it becomes the best online office suite available. Microsoft may want to get moving on their offering, which is still in private beta.