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Showing posts from January, 2020

Google Translate: Translate Documents

Google Translate is a fabulous tool when you're looking for a way to translate a few words, phrases or sentences, but wouldn't it be nice if it could translate an entire document? You are in luck because...it can! The software will even translate PDFs with readable text. Please note, this process will not work on PDFs that were created by simply scanning a paper document, although there is a workaround, find it at this link . Here's to do it: 1. Navigate to translate.google.com 2. Near the top left of the page, click 'Documents' 3. Click 'Browse your computer'. Notice the many file types that are compatible. 4. Select the document and click 'Open'. It also works to double-click the file. 5. Select the language the document is written in and the language you'd like to translate it to. 6. Click 'Translate' 7. You'll now see the text translated into the language you selected. You can copy and paste the text into

Google Docs: Share Docs with the World

It's kind of weird to think about them this way, but every Google Doc is actually a little personal website. Sometimes, it's great to be able to share a Doc with a few other people and other times it's great to share it with hundreds of people. But what if you want everyone to see it with no sharing required? Follow these steps to make your document viewable by anyone, even if they don't have a Google account! 1. Open the Google Doc you'd like to show the world 2. Click on the blue 'Share' button in the top right corner 3. Click the word 'Advanced' (look carefully, it's tiny) 4. Click 'Change...' 5. Select ' On - Public on the web' 6. If you want people to look at the document, just click 'Save'. If you're looking for people to be able to edit the document, click 'Can view' and select 'Can edit'. Please note that selecting this option means that literally, ANYONE who finds your docum

Google Docs: Add Color to Your Document

Ever want to spice up your Google Docs with a little color? Now is your big chance with this three-in-one tech tip! Change the Background Color 1. Open your Google Doc 2. Click on the 'File' menu and select 'Page Setup' 3. Under 'Page color', choose which color you'd like your document to be 4. Click 'OK' 5. Your document will now be the color you selected. If you chose a darker color, your text will probably be hard to read (see below), so you can... Change the Text Color 1. Highlight all of the text in the document you wish to change. If you'd like to change it all, you can use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+A 2. Click the 'Text color' icon marked by a capital A 3. Select the color you'd like. Be careful about choosing some colors as they may contrast and be difficult to see. For the dark purple color shown above, white text is a good choice (as shown below). 4. Wait, you want each paragra

Google Docs: Find and Replace

Years ago, while taking a class on children's literature, I read an excellent book called Esperanza Rising   by Pam Muñoz Ryan. After reading the book, the task was to write a paper outlining the benefits of teaching the book to students. I finished the entire paper before I noticed I had misspelled the word 'Esperanza' every time I'd typed it! I painstakingly went through my entire paper looking for every instance where I had typed the word to fix the spelling mistake...if only I had known about using 'Find and Replace'. Using this editing function allows for the option of finding the word each time it appears in a document and then replace it with another word or phrase. Here's how to use it. 1. Open the Google Doc where you need to replace a word 2. Click the 'Edit' menu and select 'Find and replace' 3. In the text field next to 'Find', type the word or phrase you'd like to locate within your document. In t