Most people are not so familiar with Google Docs. So let me first give you guys an intro of the service that is very widely used around the world.

Google Docs is an online application by Google which lets you create, share and maintain documents, spreadsheets and presentations. This is for people who love cloud computing and the hidden powers it has waiting for you to unleash. You can use Google Docs for free if you have a Google account.

When I said hidden powers waiting for you to unleash, I definitely meant it. Now, I will tell you what these hidden powers are and how to unleash them.

1. Language Translation

Google has its own language translation engine which works good with various languages, most of the languages you dint even know existed. If you have a document in a language that you don’t understand, or if you have to send a document to somebody in a language that you don’t know, you don’t have to worry. You can do the translation in an instant here.

But you cant obviously be sure that you will get 100% accuracy with it, because Google does not use word-by word translation. It maintains a database for this and uses statistical approach. If you have used the language tools by Google, you will be knowing that the users of the service help in the translation. So don’t be too confident. But the services serves your needs very well.

You can either let the app do a translation of the whole document you are dealing with, or select a part of the document. You just select, or highlight the text that you want to translate and click on the Tools menu on the menu bar. There you get the option ‘Translate document’. You now select the language to which you want the text to be translated. You will instantly get a new document with text in the language you selected.

2. Editing Scanned Documents

When you scan a document, may it be fax or a conventional scanner, you get the softcopy as an image file, usually JPEG or GIF. Now how are you going to edit the text in an image?Don’t give up so early. Google Docs has an answer to this as well. Head over to Google’s OCR upload page. Here, upload the image file you got from scanning your document. The service converts the image into a PDF file with options which allow you to insert, delete, edit, cut, paste or anything you want with the text in it. Comes in very handy at situations.

3. Group Editing Documents

Sometimes it happens that your work buddies are somewhere far from you, probably a different state, or a different county, and sometimes, a different continent. Now, how do you work together on a document? Its very simple.

If you already have a document, first upload it to your Google Docs. If you don’t have, create one there. You get an option to share this document with others. Open the document you wan to share. In the top right corner, you see the Share button with a drop down menu attached to it. Click on the arrow to reveal more options.

Once you click on the share button, you can invite the people you want to share the document with. You can invite them with their email addresses. Once they login to the service, you can all work on the same document at the same time and make real time changes to the document. You can even see the changes happening on the document in real time.

Many times, I have ended up chatting with my friends on document in this way, because this feature is very addictive, yet equally useful.

4. Self Updates

This particular feature is helpful for people who deal with finance stuffs a lot. I don’t know much about this but I’m going to tell you how much ever I know. One of my friends uses this a lot, and that is how I came to know about this.

So if you have a spreadsheet on Google Docs, and if you have listing of prices for different stocks, you will probably want the prices to be updated and precise to the clock. You can not monitor the stock market every other minute and update the prices of each stock you have on your spreadsheet, manually. For this, use a formula that pulls the price of a particular stock you specify automatically from Google Finance service. So this way, you can be sure of the automatic updating of prices and also that it will be precise.

The formula to use would be =GoogleFinance(“xxx”). Replace the xxx in the parenthesis with the symbol of the stock you want. Google has a tutorial and a video also to help you with this. Its best if you consider giving it a visit over here.

Share your ideas on this with us in the comments section.