Unknown Tips For Google Drawings Users

Google is making things easier for everyone through its set of useful web-based apps. Now, people can collaborate with others to achieve the most excellent results for everything they do. If you use the internet often, definitely, you should have heard of Google Docs, Google sheet, and other web-based apps from Google. In this article, we will be sharing the top 10 tips/tricks for using Google drawing app; this app is somewhat different from the others. It is the best collaborative app for Basic artists to work.

Google Drawings is a free, web-based illustration software from Google for people to collaborate and work together in real-time. With Google drawings, you could design flowcharts, website wireframes, organizational charts, mind maps, etc. This diagramming app is also available on Chrome web store for Chrome users who wish to access it offline.

Here are the most useful tips to get the most of Google Drawings. However, some people using this app may know these tips while quite a lot of others may not.

1. Keyboard shortcuts for Google Drawings

While you can quickly access any drawing tool you want from the toolbar at the top of the workspace window, using keyboard shortcuts makes things seem much easier. You are going to save yourself a lot of useful time when you use these shortcuts instead of frequently moving your cursor to click on the drawing tools.

The keyboard shortcuts below are an application for both Windows and Mac PCs; replace ⌘ with CTRL for windows.

Also, the common shortcuts for steady actions every computer user knows such as copy (⌘ + c), cut (⌘ + x), paste (⌘ + p) are applicable on Google drawings. To duplicate selected objects, use (⌘ + d).

2. Using it for infographics

It is time to start doing your infographics by yourself instead of paying people for that. With Google drawings, you could create good infographics for various purposes.

To create infographics with Google drawings, below are the tips.

• Set the workspace canvas to a long rectangle instead of the natural square shape. To customize your drawing page, go to File >>> Page Setup and enter your custom dimensions

• Pick a unique background color for your infographics or use a free texture design. To set a background color, right-click >>> background and choose your color.

• Start making your infographics by combining different shapes, grouping them and designing them as you wish.

3. Creating a Comic Strip

To create Comic strips, you need to add speeches and thought bubbles to the drawings you make on this app. Speech bubbles are available as callouts on Google drawings; to access them, go to “Shape icon and then callouts,” to choose a specific type.

Also, you can add comic strips to animated pictures or anime drawings using this app (G.Drawings). But first, you will have to upload the photo or illustration, then, add callouts.

4. Make Graphic Organizers with Google Drawings

If you are going to host a seminar or want to send out information visually for easy comprehension, Graphic organizers are what you need. These are diagrams you use to visualize data. Some of its varieties are termed mind maps, concept maps, and entity relationship charts. For example, you could use a butterfly diagram to group lots of ideas, while a flow chart would serve for classifying a process.

5. You’re Missing Out if you Don’t use the Preset Templates

To make things easier, use the preset shape/chart templates to create your diagrams. There are numerous templates to pick from if you’re new to Google drawings. Use the library of templates to take a shortcut to generate flowchart templates. Nevertheless, you can start up your pictures from scratch; utilizing the various tools available on this app, you could draw any digraph you wish to create.

6. Making Custom Graphics for Google Docs, Sheets, or Slides

Yeah, actually, one of the main reasons Google added this app to its suite is to create an app which will enable Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides users to create custom shapes/diagrams to add to their works; Google drawings is the most accessible tool for adding custom graphics/charts into your Google Drive documents via Web Clipboard.

Alternatively, you could search out images from Google search, edit them with this app and send them to your other G.Drive documents.

7. Annotating Screenshots

A huge percentage of Google drawings users do not know that they can annotate images with the app. Well, you can add footnotes to describe what your drawing is all about; this will is straightforward for a teammate or co-worker to understand what you are up to. It means you could annotate your picture and turn them into a “story,” most likely.

Being packed with quite a bunch of tools, annotating with Google drawings is not a daring task. You could get an image from any source and upload it to your workspace. Even so, you can use the “prt scrn” on computers to a whole PC screen, then annotate the image to pass information across.

If there are areas you don’t want to appear in the end image result, use the Crop tool (Format > Crop Image) available on the toolbar to take such aspects off from the image. Also, the Shape and Line tools help to highlight critical points on the image.

Finally, use the Textbox tool or even Word Art to insert texts while annotating an image. The callout shapes can be of help too.

After everything, go on to download the final image in JPEG, PDF, SVG, or PNG format (as you wish). Annotating with Google drawings is somewhat more natural and seamless, unlike most other tools which can be used for such actions.

A lot of people use only text boxes and arrowhead shapes while annotating, but there are other shapes to use too, such as callout shapes. Honestly, this is the best app for interpreting your images or diagrams.

8. Collaborating is easier

There is so far no other great diagramming tool that allows you to invite other people to participate in creating a complex layout. However, with the Google drawings app, you can quickly ask as many people as you want to help in making out an outstanding diagram.

Just click on the “share” button to invite as many other Google users needed to complex a complex task. On the other hand, to make things easier, you can choose to get the share the document link to other people; they’ll be able to edit the drawing when they click on the link. However, you must activate “anyone with the link can edit” when creating the shareable link.

Well, one of the most reasons people use Google Apps (Docs, Sheet, Slides, Drawings) is because it allows many people to work collectively on projects. So, with Google drawings, you could engage many people or even form a team to design complex drawings for distinct presentations.

9. No limitations

Unlike a bunch of other software, tool or apps that allow you to draw, Google drawings has no restrictions. You could create professional drawings using this app as well as make simple charts. Also, Google drawing can be used to teach in classrooms.

Only if your ideas are limited, then, Google drawings tend to be limited too. But in the real, actual sense, there is nothing you cannot do with Google drawings; experts working with Google carefully designed the platform. Other similar apps or tools may limit your creations, but Google drawings don’t.

10. Categorize and Sort

For education/teaching purposes, this app can come in as the best platform to use in creating categories and adding key terms for students sort the words. Write the words on separate text boxes, get the shareable link to the drawing and send to the students, have them sort the works individually. This way, they’ll learn new vocabulary words or spelling sorts. Learning with Google drawings is more effective as everything is visually shown on a screen.

Wrap up and final words

Honestly, Google drawing is the best Basic diagramming app so far. It is available in the chrome store, or you could access it by visiting https://docs.google.com/drawings. Of recent, this app is mostly used in schools for teaching; it appears to be a useful learning tool for this generation of students.

Selva Ganesh

Selva Ganesh is a young Editor running his Blog from his living room. He is a Computer Engineer, Tech Enthusiast, An experienced Android Developer, Professional Blogger & addicted Web Developer.