Writer: documents

Writer is the document editor built into SingleSign Mail — write, format and share documents, and work on them with other people at the same time. Open it from the app launcher (the grid of squares in the top bar) or go straight to email.singlesign.com/writer.

Every change saves automatically as you type; the title bar says "Saving…" and then "All changes saved". Each document is also a file in Documents, owned by the mailbox you're in — your personal mailbox or a company one — and it counts toward that mailbox's storage.

Sharing, comments, suggestions and version history work the same way in Writer and Spreadsheets — they have their own page: Sharing, comments and version history.

More Writer guides:

Writer: tabs, sections and page layout — document tabs, section breaks, columns, line numbers and watermarks.
Writer: building blocks, variables and citations — ready-made trackers and an email draft you can send to Mail, reusable values, and an automatic bibliography.
Writer: e-signatures and locking — signature fields, the audit trail and locking a signed document.
Drawings and AI features — shared with Spreadsheets.
Apps Script — automate documents with your own scripts, menus and sidebars (Extensions ▸ Apps Script).

Starting a document

The Writer home page opens on "Start a new document": a blank page and a strip of templates. Click "Template gallery" to see them all:

Resume (two designs), Letter, Meeting notes, Project proposal, Report, Newsletter, Lesson plan, Recipe and To-do list.

Below the strip are your recent documents — the ones you own and the ones shared with you. You can:

switch between a grid and a list, filter by "Owned by anyone", "Owned by me" or "Not owned by me", and sort by "Last opened by me", "Last modified" or Title;
search by name and by the words inside documents;
open Starred and Trash;
use "Open a file" to browse your Documents folders and Shared with me.

Each document's ⋮ menu has Rename (if you can edit it), Open in new tab, Make a copy, Add to Starred and — for documents you own — Remove, which moves it to the trash.

You can also start one from Documents: New ▸ Writer document or New ▸ Writer document from a template. The new document is created in the folder you're looking at.

Importing a file

File ▸ Import file… turns a Word document (.docx), OpenDocument text (.odt), plain text (.txt), Markdown (.md) or web page (.html) into a new Writer document named after the file. Your original file isn't changed. You can also open a Word or text file straight from an email or from Documents — see Opening files from Mail and Documents.

Headings, lists, tables, bold, italic, underline, links, images and footnotes come across from Word files. Fonts, colors, alignment, page setup and headers and footers in a .docx file don't, so check those after importing.

Formatting text

The toolbar across the top has undo and redo, print, spelling check, paint format, zoom, the paragraph style, font and font size, bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, text color, highlight color, link, comment, image, alignment, line and paragraph spacing, checklists, bulleted and numbered lists, indent and outdent, and clear formatting.

Paint format copies formatting from one place to another: select the text whose look you want, click the roller, then click or select the text to change. Double-click the roller to keep painting until you press Esc.
Format ▸ Text also has superscript, subscript, inline code, Size (bigger or smaller) and Capitalization (lowercase, UPPERCASE, Title Case).
Fonts include Arial, Georgia, Courier New, Roboto, Lora, Merriweather, Montserrat, Playfair Display and a dozen more.
Spelling check uses your browser's built-in spell checker. Turn it on or off from the toolbar or Tools ▸ Spelling check. File ▸ Language sets the document's language, which tells the spell checker which dictionary to use.

Paragraph styles

Pick Normal text, Title, Subtitle or Heading 1 to Heading 6 from the styles box, or with Ctrl+Alt+0 (Normal) and Ctrl+Alt+1 to 6 (headings).

Each style has a look — font, size, weight, color and spacing — that belongs to the document. To change it everywhere at once, format one paragraph the way you want, then choose Format ▸ Paragraph styles ▸ (style) ▸ Update '(style)' to match. Reset styles puts every style back to its default.

Format ▸ Align & indent has left, center, right and justified alignment, increase and decrease indent, a hanging indent, a first-line indent and Remove indentation. Format ▸ Line & paragraph spacing has Single, 1.15, 1.5 and Double, space before and after a paragraph, and Custom spacing….

Lists

Bulleted lists — disc, circle, square, arrow, star, dash or diamond bullets. Nested levels get their own bullet automatically.
Numbered lists — 1. 2. 3., 1) 2) 3), A. B. C., a. b. c., I. II. III., i. ii. iii. or 01. 02. 03. Use Restart numbering or Continue previous numbering under Format ▸ Bullets & numbering.
Checklists — tick items off as you go. Strike through checked items is on by default.

Press Tab to nest an item one level deeper and Shift+Tab to bring it back.

Markdown shortcuts format as you type: # and a space for a heading, - and a space for a bulleted list, 1. and a space for a numbered list, **bold** for bold. If you'd rather they didn't, turn off Tools ▸ Preferences ▸ Automatically detect Markdown.

Tables, images and links

Tables — Insert ▸ Table and pick a size from the grid. Format ▸ Table inserts and deletes rows and columns, merges and unmerges cells, toggles a header row and opens Table properties (border color and width, cell padding, cell background, vertical alignment, table alignment). Drag a column edge to resize it. In Pages mode a long table continues on the next page, repeating its header row.
Images — Insert ▸ Image ▸ Upload from computer (PNG, JPEG, GIF or WebP up to 25 MB) or By URL, or simply paste or drag an image into the document. Click an image to resize it, align it, choose how text wraps around it (in line, wrap text, or break text), reset its size or delete it.
Links — select text and press Ctrl+K (or Insert ▸ Link). A link can point to a web address, an email address, or a heading or bookmark in the same document. Hover over a link to open, copy, edit or remove it.

Image options

Select an image and choose Format ▸ Image ▸ Image options to adjust it. Changes show as you make them:

Recolor — Grayscale, Sepia, Light, Dark, Blue, Red, Green, Yellow or Purple (or No recolor).
Transparency, Brightness and Contrast sliders.
Crop from the top, right, bottom or left (up to 45% from each side).
Rotate left, Rotate right, Flip horizontally, Flip vertically, or an exact Rotation in degrees.

Reset puts the image back as it was; your original image is never changed. The adjustments are included when you download a PDF.

Everything else you can insert

The Insert menu also has:

Help me write — AI drafting and rewriting; see AI features.
Building blocks — meeting notes, an email draft you can send to Mail, and ready-made trackers; see Building blocks.
Drawing ▸ New — a diagram or sketch made in the drawing editor.
Smart chips — type @ anywhere (or use Insert ▸ Smart chips ▸ People / Date / Dropdown / Checkbox / Files) to insert a person (from your contacts and your organization), another Writer document or spreadsheet, a date (Today, Tomorrow, Yesterday or a date you pick), a dropdown (a colored status chip with options you define) or a checkbox. The empty page reminds you: "Type @ to insert people, dates, files and more."
Horizontal line — Solid, Dashed, Dotted, Double or Thick.
Variables — named values that update everywhere at once; see Variables.
Signature field — ask someone to sign; see Writer: e-signatures and locking.
Citation — cite a source and build a bibliography; see Citations and bibliography.
Emoji reaction — react to the text you've selected; see Emoji reactions.
Code block, Emoji and Special characters (arrows, symbols, Greek letters and more, with search).
Equation — an inline equation or a display equation on its own line, written in LaTeX (for example E = mc^2).
Footnote (Ctrl+Alt+F) — footnotes are numbered automatically, in order, at the bottom of the page.
Bookmark — marks a spot in the document so a link can jump straight to it.
Table of contents — with page numbers or with blue links, built from your headings. Click Update on it after you change the headings.
Break (Page break, Section break (next page) and Section break (continuous)), Headers & footers, Page numbers and Watermark — see the next section and Writer: tabs, sections and page layout.

Pages, pageless and page setup

A document is either laid out as Pages — separate sheets of paper with margins, page breaks, headers and footers — or Pageless, one continuous page that fills the window. Switch in File ▸ Page setup, or turn View ▸ Show print layout on or off.

File ▸ Page setup also sets:

Paper size — Letter, Legal, Tabloid, Statement, Executive, Folio, A3, A4, A5, B4 or B5;
Orientation — portrait or landscape;
Margins — Normal (1"), Narrow (0.5"), Moderate, Wide, or your own;
Page color, and whether the first page has a different header and footer.

In Pages mode, Insert ▸ Headers & footers adds a header or footer to every page, and Insert ▸ Page numbers puts numbers in the header or footer, aligned left, center or right, with Show on first page and Start at options. View ▸ Show ruler shows the ruler.

For landscape pages in the middle of a document, a different header for one chapter, columns, line numbers or a watermark, see Writer: tabs, sections and page layout.

Suggesting mode

Switch between three modes from the mode button in the toolbar or View ▸ Mode:

Editing — change the document directly.
Suggesting — your changes are shown as suggestions, marked with your name, for an editor to accept or reject: typing and deleting, formatting, new or joined paragraphs, paragraph styles, alignment, spacing, indents and lists, and adding or removing tables, lines and equations. People with comment access work in this mode.
Viewing — read without changing anything.

Editors accept or reject suggestions one at a time from the comments panel, or all at once with Tools ▸ Review suggested edits ▸ Accept all / Reject all. A few changes can't be made as suggestions — adding, deleting or merging table rows and columns, for example — and Writer tells you when that's why an edit didn't happen. Headers and footers are edited in Editing mode only. More in Sharing, comments and version history.

Tools

Find and replace — Ctrl+F to find, Ctrl+H to replace. Options: Match case, Whole words and regular expressions (use $1 in the replacement for a captured group). Replace all is a single undo step.
Word count (Ctrl+Shift+C) — pages, words, characters and characters excluding spaces, for the whole document and for your selection. Tick Display word count while typing for a live counter in the corner.
Tabs and outline — View ▸ Show tabs & outlines (Ctrl+Alt+A) lists the document's tabs down the left side, with the headings of the current tab under it; click one to jump to it. See Document tabs.
Search the menus — press Alt+/ and type what you're looking for, such as "page numbers" or "pdf".
Voice typing — Tools ▸ Voice typing (Ctrl+Shift+S) types what you say. It uses your browser's speech recognition, so it only appears in browsers that support it (Chrome and Edge do; Firefox doesn't).
Translate document and Dictionary — in the Tools menu; see AI features.
Compare documents — see below.
View also has Dark page, Zoom (50% to 200%), Full screen, Show section breaks and Show editors.

Compare documents

Tools ▸ Compare documents shows what's different between this document and another one. Click Choose a document…, pick the other document, and click Compare. Writer makes a new document in your Documents — "Comparison of this and that" — that reads as this document, with every difference shown as a suggestion by "Comparison". Accept all turns it into the other document's text; Reject all keeps this one's. Neither original is changed. Differences in formatting alone (the same words, styled differently) aren't reported.

Show editors

Turn on View ▸ Show editors, then point at a paragraph to see who last edited it and when — for example "Edited by Maria · 5 minutes ago" — followed by the people who wrote the text that's in it now, with "editing now" for anyone in the document at that moment. A list or table counts as one block. Paragraphs nobody has changed since this feature arrived show "No edit of this paragraph recorded yet" until their next edit, and text written before it existed shows as "Some text predates edit tracking."

Emoji reactions

React to a passage without writing a comment: select the text and choose Insert ▸ Emoji reaction. Pick one of the emoji shown — 👍 ❤️ 😂 🎉 and more — or type any other emoji under Other emoji.

The passage gets a light highlight, and a small chip after it shows each emoji and how many people used it, such as "👍 2". Point at a chip to see who reacted; click a chip to add or take back your own reaction. Reactions stay with their text as the document changes, and disappear if the text is deleted. You need comment access to react.

Preferences and automatic substitutions

Tools ▸ Preferences controls how Writer helps while you type. Your preferences are saved for your account on this device.

The General tab (everything starts on):

Automatically capitalize words — capitalizes the first word of a sentence, and a lone "i".
Use smart quotes — turns straight quotes into curly ones.
Automatically detect links — turns web addresses into links.
Automatically detect lists — starts a list when you type - or 1. and a space.
Automatically detect Markdown — formats Markdown as you type (see Lists).
Show automatic substitutions — turns the substitutions below on or off.

The Substitutions tab lists text that's replaced as you type, and you can add your own: type what to Replace and what to replace it With, then Add. Untick one to pause it, use the bin to remove it, or Restore defaults. The defaults:

Type	Get
`(c)` `(r)` `(tm)`	© ® ™
`->` `<-`	→ ←
`<=` `>=` `!=`	≤ ≥ ≠
`1/2` `1/4` `3/4`	½ ¼ ¾
`--` `...` `+-`	— … ±

Accessibility

Tools ▸ Accessibility has:

Turn on screen reader support — adds an Accessibility menu to the menu bar, with Speak selection, Speak formatting and Speak cursor location, and announces collaborators, suggestions and formatting through your screen reader.
Announce formatting as the cursor moves (with screen reader support on).
Turn on braille support — types exactly what you enter, with no automatic substitutions, smart quotes or capitalization.

Like preferences, these settings are saved for your account on this device.

Working offline

If your connection drops while you're signed in, keep typing: the title bar says "Offline — changes saved on this device" and everything syncs when you're back online. You can also open a document with no connection at all, as long as you've opened it on this device before. See Working offline for the details.

Downloading, printing and emailing

File ▸ Download saves a copy as:

Format	Good for
Microsoft Word (.docx)	Word, Pages, Google Docs — keeps styles, tables, images, headers and footers, page setup, and any pending suggestions as tracked changes.
OpenDocument Format (.odt)	LibreOffice and other OpenDocument editors.
PDF Document (.pdf)	Sharing and printing exactly as laid out — a real PDF file, made in your browser.
Plain Text (.txt)	Just the words.
Web Page (.html)	A single web page with images included.
Markdown (.md)	Notes apps, code repositories and other Markdown tools.
EPUB Publication (.epub)	E-readers — each Heading 1 starts a new chapter.

The PDF is laid out page by page like Pages mode: your paper size, orientation and margins (per section), headers and footers with page numbers, footnotes at the bottom of their page, tables that repeat their header row, images, drawings, equations, chips, citations, signatures, the watermark, line numbers and columns. The text is real, selectable text in embedded fonts, links stay clickable, and your headings become the PDF's bookmarks. Text in scripts the embedded fonts don't cover or that need their letters joined or combined — Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Hebrew, Hindi and other Indic scripts, Thai, Khmer, Myanmar and emoji — is included as a sharp picture of the text, so it looks right but can't be selected.

Printing is separate: File ▸ Print (Ctrl+P) opens your browser's print window with your paper size, margins, headers and footers applied. In Pages mode it prints page for page, just as you see it: every page has its header and footer, real page numbers ("Page 2 of 5") and its footnotes, and long tables repeat their header row.

In a document with several tabs, File ▸ Download also lets you choose Current tab only or All tabs. Downloads other than .docx show the document as it would read with pending suggestions left out.

File ▸ Email hands the document to SingleSign Mail:

Email as attachment — pick a format (PDF included), and a new message opens with the file already attached.
Email collaborators — a new message opens addressed to the people working on the document, with a link to it.

File ▸ Make a copy creates "Copy of …" owned by you. Comments aren't copied.

Publishing to the web

File ▸ Share ▸ Publish to web makes a public, read-only version of the document. Click Publish and you get:

a Link that opens the document for anyone, without the editing tools;
Embed code — an <iframe> you can paste into a website or blog to show the document there.

Both have a Copy button. Publishing turns on "Anyone with the link can view" for the document, and Stop publishing turns it off again — the link and any embedded copies stop working. Only people who can share the document can publish it.

Notification settings

Tools ▸ Notification settings chooses which emails you get about this document — for every comment, only comments for you, or none, and whether to be emailed when the document changes (right away or as a daily digest). See Notification settings.

Opening files from Mail and Documents

From an email. Word (.docx), OpenDocument (.odt), text (.txt), Markdown (.md) and web page (.html) attachments have an Open in Writer button next to them. It makes a Writer copy in your Documents and opens it — the original attachment isn't changed, and Undo in the message that appears moves the copy to the trash. Ctrl+click (⌘-click on a Mac) saves the copy without leaving your email.
From Documents. Uploaded Word and text files have Open with Writer in their menu and in the preview. The copy is saved next to the original (files from Email attachments or Shared with me go into My files).
Into an email. When you write a message, Insert from Documents adds a Writer document as a link — or as an attached file — and checks that your recipients can open it before you send. See Sending a document in an email.

Keyboard shortcuts

Press Ctrl+/ in Writer to see and search all of them. On a Mac, use ⌘ for Ctrl and ⌥ Option for Alt.

Action	Shortcut
Undo / Redo	Ctrl+Z / Ctrl+Y or Ctrl+Shift+Z
Copy formatting / Paste formatting	Ctrl+Alt+C / Ctrl+Alt+V
Paste without formatting	Ctrl+Shift+V
Find / Find and replace	Ctrl+F / Ctrl+H
Insert link	Ctrl+K
Insert comment	Ctrl+Alt+M
Insert page break	Ctrl+Enter
Insert footnote	Ctrl+Alt+F
Word count	Ctrl+Shift+C
Voice typing	Ctrl+Shift+S
Show outline	Ctrl+Alt+A
Open a document	Ctrl+O
Version history	Ctrl+Alt+Shift+H
Print	Ctrl+P
Keyboard shortcuts	Ctrl+/
Search the menus	Alt+/
Bold / Italic / Underline	Ctrl+B / Ctrl+I / Ctrl+U
Strikethrough	Alt+Shift+5
Superscript / Subscript	Ctrl+. / Ctrl+,
Increase / Decrease font size	Ctrl+Shift+> / Ctrl+Shift+<
Clear formatting	Ctrl+\
Normal text	Ctrl+Alt+0
Heading 1 – 6	Ctrl+Alt+1 … 6
Numbered / Bulleted list / Checklist	Ctrl+Shift+7 / Ctrl+Shift+8 / Ctrl+Shift+9
Align left / center / right / justify	Ctrl+Shift+L / E / R / J
Increase / Decrease indent	Ctrl+] / Ctrl+[

Ctrl+S isn't needed — Writer saves every change automatically.

What Writer doesn't do

A few Google Docs features aren't part of Writer: the Explore web-search panel and Google's public add-on Marketplace. Apps Script is available, and so are add-ons you or your organization publish — see Apps Script: automate Writer and Spreadsheets.

Writer: tabs, sections and page layout
Writer: building blocks, variables and citations
Writer: e-signatures and locking
Drawings
AI features
Sharing, comments and version history
Spreadsheets
Your Accounts & Organizations — which mailbox a document belongs to
Storage & Limits