Nifty New Feature in Google Docs – Sidebar Research

Google docs have been a useful tool for educators and collaborators world over. Its simple word processing and spreadsheet platform is familiar and easy to use, instantly saves your work, gives you access to your docs from any internet-capable device, and lets you collaborate simultaneously with contributors from the comfort of their own home. The latest feature rolled out by Google is the sidebar research tool that lets you search the internet on any topic / keyword about which you are writing. Simply select and right-click the words that you’d like to research and the search results will appear instantly on the right of your document without the need to go from tab to tab. It also has a built in linking ability and allows to instantly create footnotes should you like to cite a specific webpage. And for images, you can drag the image you’d like straight into your document. CTRL + ALT + R is another way to the research tool.

As many high school and college students are hard at work on their end of the year research papers, this nifty tool will offer an added convenience.