My 10 favorite Google Docs Add-ons for teachers and students

Over the years, I’ve played around a lot with Add-ons for Google Docs, and I thought that EDU Week would be the perfect opportunity to share some of my favorites with you all. The ones I’ve chosen are particularly useful for teachers and students, though they can be used by anyone. Whether you’re creating labels or envelopes, sharing creative pieces, writing screenplays, or anything else, I think that you’ll find something for you below! If you’re looking for non-Docs-related resources this week, look no further than our Mega list of the best tips, tricks, and updates for education.

These are but a small slice of the insane amount available on the Google Workspace Marketplace, and my opinion is going to be fairly narrow as I’m just one person, so don’t forget to check out all that’s offered. I should also note that some or many of these may have a price or subscription cost associated with them, as with Smartsheet, for example. Be sure to check with your school or IT admin to see if there is bulk licensing or some kind of deal available to you before shelling out your own cash, or simply look for free alternatives in the Marketplace!

Please be sure to share your favorite add-ons for Docs, Sheets, and Slides in the comments section. If there is one thing I’ve learned about the incredible educators and students that read Chrome Unboxed, it’s that they’re always ecstatic to share tips, tricks, and wisdom with their peers, so let’s band together and push education further!

Templates for Docs

Thousands of free and premium templates to jump start your project. Download useful templates such as calendars, business cards, letters, cards, brochures, newsletters, resumes, and more. You can use any template you download as-is, or you can customise it to meet your needs. To download and use a template, click the Create Copy button and a new file will be created for you, using that template, all ready for you to customize with your information.

Templates for Docs

Adobe Creative Cloud

With Adobe Creative Cloud for Google Workspace, you can search Creative Cloud to find the assets you need then attach link previews to synced files, Libraries, and Mobile Creations right from Gmail. You can also save any attachment received in Gmail back to Creative Cloud to the folder of your choice.

The latest release also lets you quickly access and use brand colors, character styles, and graphics stored in your Creative Cloud Libraries, right in Google Docs and Slides.That way you’ll have your assets on-hand and your projects on-brand when working in your favorite Google Workspace apps.

Adobe Creative Cloud

Change Case

Current features include changing all characters to uppercase or lowercase, changing just the first letter to a capital, inverting the case of each character, capitalizing entire sentences and titles.

Change Case

DocSecrets

DocSecrets hides and encrypts sensitive information such as passwords, patent ideas or other secrets. Using the DocSecrets sidebar you can insert secrets into your document, displayed as a highlighted text-areas. Given the correct passphrase the sidebar shows all secrets in your document. You may edit, reveal or remove your secrets. DocSecrets automatically tracks your cursor position and highlights the current secret.

DocSecrets

Avery Labelmaker

The best way to create and print labels from Google Docs and Google Sheets. Mail merge from templates compatible with Avery® as well as other labels providers such as SheetLabels, OnlineLabels & more.

Whether you’re printing address labels for a mailing, shipping addresses for a delivery or making name badges for your next event, Labelmaker helps you generate professional labels within minutes.

Avery Labelmaker

Fountainize

Fountainize lets you write simple text and convert it into a beautifully formatted script all with the press of a button. Collaborative screenwriting has never been this easy! Fountainize is based on the Fountain markup language.

By writing your text following a simple set of rules, Fountainize is able to determine what should be a character, dialogue, action, or any other part of a script. Don’t worry though! The rules are easy. For example:

Fountainize

EasyBib

The Bibliography Creator by EasyBib allows you to easily create a bibliography for your research paper. Automatically cite books, journal articles, and websites just by entering in the titles or URLs. Format citations in MLA, APA, Chicago, Harvard, and over 7K other styles. When you’re finished creating your bibliography, click Generate Bibliography and we’ll alphabetize your citations and add them to the end of your paper.

EasyBib Bibliography Creator

Now Novel

The Now Novel Google Docs add-on enables Now Novel members to import their story outlines to view in their private Google Docs projects. View all your character profiles, plot points, settings and scene summaries in one convenient place while you write.

Now Novel

ProWritingAid

ProWritingAid is your online writing editor and personal writing coach. It checks your grammar, but also does much more to help you improve your writing. This includes checking for consistency of spelling, hyphenation and capitalization, eliminates cliches and redundancies, checks for plagiarism and unoriginal content, improves readability, finds overused and repeat words, improves dull paragraph structure, eliminates vague, abstract, and complex words, and more!

ProWritingAid

Screenplay Formatter

The Screenplay Formatter is a tool that adds the capability of formatting your document files to meet screenplay standards.

This app features basic script formatting functions (such as setting your indents for speakers and dialog) tied into easy-to-use buttons. Each button will assist you as you switch effortlessly between scenes and action, as well as speakers and dialog. The screenplay formatting tool also includes the basic scene transitions to help save time.

The features the Screenplay Formatter add are; adding Headers, setting Action text, setting a new Speaker, adding Parenthesis to dialog, setting Dialog text, setting New Characters, setting Special Effects, and inserting pre-made transitions.

Screenplay Formatter

Bonus: Smartsheet Merge

Creating invoices, form letters, envelopes, or other documents from your Smartsheet data is now a breeze with Smartsheet for Google Docs. Use Google Docs to design a custom template to fit your needs, point it at your data in Smartsheet, and quickly create any number of personalized documents.

Smartsheet allows you to collaboratively collect and track lists, names, addresses, and other information. Smartsheet for Google Docs gives you the power to merge that data into a custom Google Doc that acts as a template and create multiple Google documents in a snap. It’s like a mail merge but with real-time collaboration and no version control issues.

Smartsheet Merge