Google Add-ons expand the capabilities of Drive Docs and Sheets

While Google Docs and Sheets are already extremely useful, a good thing is about to get even better. Today Google announced the Add-on store, bringing you a way to add new functionality to your documents.

The design of the new add-ons ‘store’ is reminiscent of the Chrome Web Store and currently features about 35 add-ons, with more on their way. It’s important to note that the first batch of add-ons were from developers specifically invited by Google, but soon any developer will be able to create apps using Google Apps Script. The only catch is that Google will carefully evaluate add-ons before letting them into the store.

So what kind of add-ons are there right now? Some of the featured add-ons include Avery Label Merge and EasyBib’s Bibliography Creator. The former of these makes it easy to merge data from a Google spreadsheet over to Avery address labels. The latter lets students look up academic sources and easily insert citations into a document in APA, MLA and Chicago Manual of Style formats.

Beyond this, you’ll find MailChimp for sending customized emails from Docs, PandDoc for electronic signatures, HelloFax for easily sending online faxes and the list goes on. Bottom-line, Google is looking to expand the capabilities of its Google Drive apps in a big way and we like what we see so far. It’s worth noting that Google eventually plans to expand support for add-ons to Presentation and other web apps as well.