Google tools: 6 best Google Chrome extensions to increase productivity

Looking for Chrome extensions to make the most of Google Drive and increase your productivity? Here are the best Google tools to try right now.

Google Drive is one of the most widely used Google tools and a key application in the Google suite. It is useful because it allows you to upload documents, photos and entire folders of files to a cloud so that you can access them at any time and from any device. The features of the Google suite are many and can be increased through Chrome extensions.

Files uploaded to Google Drive can be edited and shared with multiple users, to work on presentations, text documents and Excel spreadsheets thanks to integration with other Google applications: Google Docs, Google Sheets and Google presentations.

Extensions for Google Drive

To make the best use of this tool, there are several Google Drive applications available, which can be downloaded from the Chrome extension store free of charge and represent little tricks to increase productivity, as they simplify our work (and our lives). Let’s take a look at the 6 extensions for Chrome suggested by Pigro:

Edit PDFs online with DocHub

Some tasks such as signing forms, no matter how simple they may be, take time and involve actions including printing, scanning and so on. Dochub is a great Google tool that saves you this time and also saves you from using unnecessary paper. It is an extension that allows you to edit and sign PDF and Word documents securely and for free, as well as merge and reorder pages, or create templates. This tool allows you to manage PDFs and share files with Google Drive.

Retouch and edit your photos online with Pixlr Editor

There are lots of photo editing applications out there, but Pixlr’s added value is that it allows you to edit and crop your photos directly in Google Drive. It also contains many Photoshop features, such as effects, drawing brushes, layers and clone stamps, and is completely free.

Create diagrams and maps with LucidChart

This is an intuitive tool for creating and editing flowcharts, demonstration models, UML and concept maps on the cloud. You can quickly create professional, interactive diagrams to document any process or idea and share them with your colleagues.

Measure the efficacy of your documents with Knowledge Insights

Knowledge Insights is a feature created by Pigro to analyze the quality of the company’s knowledge base. Connecting to your Google Drive repository can provide you with useful insights on issues in your documentation and how to improve it.

For example, it locates outdated and poorly-structured content, broken links and 404s, conflicting information, problems in sharing permissions, duplicates, redundancies, or scattered documents.

Automatically identifying these problems gives you actionable insights to solve them and increase the effectiveness of your documentation.

AwesomeDrive for Google Drive

People often think that the Google suite and the Office Suite are rivals, but thanks to extensions like AwesomeDrive you can work with both suites productively. Awesome Drive allows you not only to open your Office documents directly from your Google Drive profile without having to convert them to Google Docs format but also to create new files in Word, Excel and Powerpoint formats.

Quick Create for Google Drive

A great way to be productive is to speed up simple actions like creating a new Google doc, spreadsheet or presentation. Quick Create for Google Drive is a time-saving Chrome extension that lets you create files in any format directly from the toolbar. You no longer need to open new pages to create the file you want. 

Discover also the content creator platforms and apps selected by Pigro.