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Use the tools menu for spelling, voice typing, translation and dictionary.

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The Tools Menu in Docs Solution
Link The Tools Menu in Docs
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Quick reference

The Tools Menu in Docs

The “Tools” menu lets you access several useful tools in Google Docs, like a spellchecker, dictionary, outline generator, word count, automatic dictation, translator, script editor, and automatic substitution.

When to use

When you need to use any of these functions.

Instructions

Options in the Tools menu

  • Spelling: Run a spellcheck on your document. When it finds a misspelled word, choose to change it, ignore it, or add it to your personal dictionary.

NOTE: Words added to the personal dictionary will be accepted as correctly spelled from then on.

  • Explore: A research tool that lets Google suggest useful information about your document from the internet.
  • Define: Look up words in a dictionary.
  • Document outline: Automatically generate an outline of your document.

NOTE: Google Docs looks at the layout of your document and makes guesses about what should go in the outline, so don’t expect perfection.

  • Word count: Find out how many pages, words, and characters there are in your document.
  • Voice typing: Dictate text into your microphone and Google Docs will write it in your document.
  • Translate document: Create a new document with a translation of your text by Google Translate.
  • Script editor: Script editing for programmers.
  • Preferences: Change the automatic corrections that Google makes while you’re typing.
  • Personal dictionary: The spell checker will ignore all the words on this list. Add or remove words from the list here.
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  • 00:05 The Format menu contains most of the same functions
  • 00:07 that we looked at when we were viewing the toolbar.
  • 00:11 So next, let's take a look at the Tools menu.
  • 00:15 The first option is titled spelling and
  • 00:17 this brings up a spell-checker within drive.
  • 00:21 It will attempt to look for words which it thinks have been misspelled.
  • 00:25 You have the option to change it to it's suggestion or
  • 00:29 ignore the suggestion or even add that word to your own personal dictionary.
  • 00:35 Next is the Explore option.
  • 00:37 By selecting Explore, Google Drive will attempt to look at key words
  • 00:42 within your document and find relevant topics so you can explore further online.
  • 00:48 It may even bring back relevant images.
  • 00:51 If you'd like to do further exploration, you can use the search bar here.
  • 00:56 Our next option is define, which really brings up a dictionary.
  • 01:01 This allows us to type in or
  • 01:03 paste in any word to get a full definition of that word.
  • 01:09 We next have Document outline.
  • 01:12 By selecting Document outline,
  • 01:14 Google Drive will attempt to break out your document into relevant headings.
  • 01:20 Now, it may not always get it right the first time, so
  • 01:23 you may need to edit your outline depending on the results.
  • 01:27 But viewing your outline here on the left hand side of the screen can give you
  • 01:32 a very fast way to jump to different sections within your document.
  • 01:38 Next we have word count, which not only gives us the total number of words
  • 01:43 within our document but it gives us some other helpful information,
  • 01:47 such as the number of pages, and the number of characters.
  • 01:52 We also have the ability to take advantage of Voice typing.
  • 01:56 I'm gonna scroll down to the bottom of my document for this example.
  • 02:01 I'm gonna place my cursor here and select this microphone.
  • 02:05 And now, whatever I speak will be recorded directly into the document,
  • 02:11 and it looks like it's doing a pretty good job.
  • 02:15 Simply select that microphone again to turn off the voice recording.
  • 02:20 This can be a very effective and
  • 02:22 efficient way to get your thoughts into your document.
  • 02:26 And now since they have become text, you can go back and make edited changes.
  • 02:33 The next option here may only be available if you take advantage of the keep
  • 02:38 notepad system.
  • 02:40 This is Google's notes application, and this will allow you to access your notes
  • 02:45 and even bring in the contents of some of these notes directly into Google drive.
  • 02:52 We then have the ability to translate our entire document.
  • 02:56 Perhaps, you would like to translate your document into a different language.
  • 03:00 This will create a completely new document and all you need to do
  • 03:05 is select which language you would like to translate it into.
  • 03:11 We next have a script editor in which we will not get into much detail here.
  • 03:15 But this is for those who would like to go a bit further into the development code.
  • 03:23 We lastly have two more options, Preferences and personal dictionary.
  • 03:28 Preferences shows what things Google Drive will automatically do on your behalf and
  • 03:34 you may wish to review these options here.
  • 03:37 For example, by default it will
  • 03:39 automatically capitalize your words at the beginning of a sentence.
  • 03:44 If you don't want this to occur, you can uncheck this check box.
  • 03:49 And again, you may want to review the other options here, and
  • 03:52 check or uncheck certain features.
  • 03:55 You can also see a list of things in which
  • 03:58 Google Drive will automatically convert to symbols or other characters.
  • 04:03 So for example, each time that you type in the letter C around parentheses,
  • 04:08 it will convert it into the copyright symbol.
  • 04:12 Again, you can enable or disable these options, or even add new ones as you wish.
  • 04:17 And the very last option we have here is a Personal dictionary.
  • 04:22 And in many ways, this is related to the first option, the spellchecker.
  • 04:26 In the personal dictionary,
  • 04:28 we can add new words to make sure that they do not get checked.
  • 04:33 So for example, I may wish to add my last name so that it does not continue
  • 04:39 to appear within the spellcheck, that this is a word that is spelled correctly and
  • 04:44 I want them to ignore when I enable the Spellcheck feature.
  • 04:49 So there are the various tools that you can apply and
  • 04:52 you can explore within Google Documents.

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