Coolsymbol.com - fun stuff (and a very useful tool for Hebrew)

Check out coolsymbol.com. It is full of fun symbols to dress up your docs, neat text effects and all other sorts of goodies.

Just look at all the different star symbols to use in place of a boring asterisk:

Just click on anything and it loads into your clipboard.

It has so much more than the Insert Special Character in Google Docs. 

But if you scroll all the way down to the bottom of the home page, there's something very useful for Google Doc workers in Hebrew or Arabic or any other Right to Left language: Other Special Non-Printing Characters. [UPDATE: This can be done manually on Chromebooks. See below.]

The one we want is the very last one - Right-To-Left Mark.

If you've ever put a punctuation mark after a Hebrew word in Google docs (like a single quote, a/k/a גרש, a/k/a tchuptchik) you know the frustration of having it go to the other end of the sentence.

Click the Click to Copy box and after you type the גרש, hit ctrl+v and the mark will magically jump back to where it belongs.

(This is one of the many reasons I still write my multilingual English/Hebrew documents in Word rather than Google Docs; Word keeps going right to left until you switch back to English.)

UPDATE: Manual method for Chromebooks only.

After you type the גרש and it goes to the wrong side, switch to English and hit Ctrl+Shift+U. You'll see an underlined u. Type 200F and hit enter. This will insert a RLM (Right-to-Left Mark)
I didn't say it was easy, just manual.

Hebrew Formatting from Word to Docs

If you have ever tried to save a multilingual Word Doc mixing right-to-left and left-to-right text as a Google Doc, you know that the formatting can often get messed up in the transition.

(Full confession: I still write most of my tests in Word. It still handles Hebrew better than Docs.)

However, if you paste the Word doc into a blank Google Doc, the proper formatting is preserved.

The one thing that gets changed is - if you use automatic numbering in Word, the numbers will get pasted into Docs as regular text, not automatic updating numbers. Not a deal-breaker for me. The upside outweighs the downside.

Search within folders in Google Drive

Sometimes something new is right in front of you and you don't pick up on the difference. Once when I was a kid, my father shaved off his mustache and I didn't notice it.

Apparently, for the last year, there's been a new feature in Google Drive; one, in fact, that I always felt was a major missing feature that rendered Google Drive less than user-friendly. You can now (now being either January 2018, or this morning, when I finally noticed it) search within folders on Google Drive.

This is important. Although I keep my Drive fairly neat, with nested folders within folders, often I can't remember in which folder a crucial file is hiding.

Right click on the folder in Google Drive online. One of your options is "search within _____ "