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A set of new add-ons for Google Docs and Sheets aims to give users of the two apps the ability to do a lot more work-related tasks with their mobile phones.
Google this week announced that products from eight vendors have now been tightly integrated with its Docs and Sheets productivity tools.
The new Android add-ons for Docs and Sheets include DocuSign, an app for electronically signing documents, ProsperWorks for importing CRM data to a mobile device, ScanBot for scanning business documents and EasyBib for adding citations to a Google Doc.
“Whether it’s readying a contract you have for e-signature from your phone, or pulling in CRM data on your tablet for some quick analysis while waiting for your morning coffee, Android add-ons can help you accomplish more,” Saurabh Gupta, a product manager with Google Apps wrote on the company’s Google Docs Blog.
The DocuSign add-on lets users initiate a document-signing process or complete one right from their Docs or Sheets app, Gupta said. Users can simply pull up a document saved in either app and prepare it for an electronic signature or send it to others for their signature.
The ProsperWorks integration makes the features of the company’s Customer Report Builder more directly accessible to the Sheets Android application. The integration allows Sheets users to pull CRM data directly from the ProsperWorks app and use it to create charts, reports and graphs with their mobile devices.
The ScanBot Android add-on gives Google Docs users the ability to scan printed documents, and extract information from them, which can then be inserted in Docs in the form of editable text, according to a description of its capabilities.
The EasyBib add-on meanwhile lets Google Docs users easily add citations by title, URL or a book’s barcode directly to their document on their mobile phone.
The other Android add-ons that Google announced this week are PandaDoc for e-signing, Zoho CRM for importing contacts from Sheets to Zoho’s CRM app, Teacher Aide and AppSheet for creating apps from data in Sheets.
To take advantage of the new functionality, users will need to install each of the add-ons on their phones.
Both Docs and Sheets are a part of Google’s suite of cloud-hosted productivity apps. The company is competing in the space mainly with Microsoft and its Office 365 suite of productivity apps.
A report released earlier this year by identity management vendor Okta showed that many enterprises, somewhat surprisingly, are using both suites simultaneously in their environments. More than 40 percent of the organizations using both suites said they were doing so because different business departments had different application preferences.
About 30 percent of those using both products said they were using Google Apps for daily email and collaboration purposes and Office 365 because that made it easier for them to license the desktop version of Office and keep it updated.