Google Docs is one of the most essential tools for anyone whose work involves writing and online collaboration. The online availability of Google Docs means you don’t need proprietary Microsoft Word for composing documents. Google Docs offers many features that can seem tame compared to Word or other open-source word-processing software. But thanks to add-ons, you can increase its versatility.

Add-ons are tools built by third-party developers that can be installed within Google Docs (as well as Sheets and Slides). Add-ons can cater to different aspects of writing and productivity. There are a ton you can check out, but here are 10 essential ones you should try first.

1 OneLook Thesaurus

You often want to look up the synonyms or antonyms of a word when you are in the thick of writing. The standard way is to open another tab to do these tasks, which can be distracting. With OneLook Thesaurus, you find synonyms, rhyming words, adjectives, lyrics, quotes, nouns, and more without leaving the Google Docs sheet you're working on. You can either type in the word directly in the side panel box or select the word or phrase and click on any of the nine options you get. This add-on is a must-have for creative writers.

2 WolframAlpha for Google Docs

Students and researchers who find it annoying to leave the doc they're working on to look up a fact or add a math formula need to download the WolframAlpha add-on. It's great for adding items like math formulas, chemical composition diagrams, answers to research questions, and more. Type in the phrase with your question, select it, and click on Compute Selection add-on. Within a few seconds, the selected phrase is replaced with the response from the add-on. WolframAlpha has been a great computational engine to use since it was released in 2009, and you can now use it easily in Google Docs thanks to the add-on.

3 Bibcitation Bibliography and Citation Generator

For students working on research papers or essays for schools and universities, ensuring the citations follow the right format is important. With Bibcitation Bibliography and Citation Generator add-on, you can create automatic citations for books, journal articles, and websites, or manually add citations for videos, images, and artwork. Bibcitation lets you select from over 9,000 citation styles, including the most popular ones, such as APA. After you select the source and the citation style, Bibcitation generates the citation that you can copy-paste into your paper right within Google Docs.

4 Lucidchart

Communicating using flowcharts, diagrams, and wireframes is can sometimes be more effective than written or verbal communication. Lucidchart is an add-on that lets you create elaborate charts and diagrams. It's cloud-based, so you can use it across devices and browsers. It allows your team to collaborate on diagrams in real time while helping them with chatting and commenting features. It helps you visualize things such as organization charts from Excel sheet data. Integration with popular tools such as Slack, MS Office, G Suite, and more is available too.

5 Easy Accents

For most of us using the English language keyboard, there aren’t easy ways to add certain accents or umlauts that are the norm in other languages such as German, French, Polish, and so on. Sure, you can switch between keyboards online, but if it’s just a matter of using foreign words sparsely, you most likely have to fire up Google Search to look up accented words. Easy Accents add-on resolves that issue. Additionally, it also lets you add mathematical and logic symbols to your Google Doc. You can also create your custom list of symbols with this add-on for quick retrieval.

6 Highlight Tool

Google Docs has a highlighting tool that lets you highlight text in different colors, but its utility stops just there. What if you wanted to use other colored highlighters for different sections in the text and then have all those selected texts in one place categorized according to the color? The Highlight Tool add-on lets you do that with ease. This is immensely helpful for research work and collecting ideas from a large document. You can export highlighted text into a separate document as well, based on the color of the highlights.

7 Code Blocks

This Google Docs add-on lets you add code within your document with the right syntax for non-development-related tasks. You just have to select the code and highlight it. Code Blocks can automatically detect the coding language, but you can also add it manually. You can also select between different themes before finalizing how it looks. Code Blocks also lets you format the code inline and preview it before adding it to the document. This add-on is best for developers or anybody in the IT field who wants to share code blocks in a document.

8 Writing Habit

The only way to improve your writing is to keep writing more regularly. Writing Habit add-on for Google Docs is an easy way to track how much you write daily. You can set a daily writing goal and work towards a target of how many words you want to write by a specific date. The add-on presents data such as writing streaks, typing speed, and how many words you must write daily to reach your larger writing goals. You can also look at graphs that give you visual cues about your writing habits. This is a great add-on for students and anyone wanting to improve their writing.

9 Rhetoro

Rhetoro is a text-to-speech Google Docs add-on that can read the text you have written out loud. You can choose between 30 different AI voices across accents that sound natural, and adjust their speed and pitch. You need to highlight the text that you need to read. Once the file is generated, you can even download it as an MP3 file and share it. The only catch is that the free version only offers 2500 characters, and you have to spend $8.99 to buy 100,000 characters. Rhetoro does offer a way to get 10,000 free characters if you leave a review of this add-on on the Workspace Marketplace.

10 Translate All

For those of you who need to translate your written text to different languages but want to avoid firing up Google Translate whenever the need arises, the Translate All add-on gets the work done. It has a simple interface where you must select the source and target languages from the over 100 available languages. With the free tier, you can translate 1800 words per 24 hours, which seems decent unless you want to translate multiple pages of documents. You can opt for the paid tier for unlimited translations at $7.99 per month and $49.99 per year.

Power up your Google Docs experience

With these 10 Google Docs add-ons, you can do a lot of tasks for which you would typically have to open a new tab. If you have multiple excellent monitors, it's still easy to research on one monitor while working on the other, but when you are working on a laptop or a single monitor, the back and forth between tabs can be distracting. Accessing tools such as translation, currency conversion, researching, and checking the thesaurus without leaving the document you are working on reduces unnecessary distraction. This could lead to improved productivity and increase overall efficiency.