Google Docs rolls out student-oriented features

Google Docs' summer interns this summer were tasked with working on improvements and additions to the service geared toward students.

The results of their work, now available to try out, include new features such as an equation editor, superscripts and subscripts, document translation, improvements to surveys, and more outlining options.

Google Docs' new equation editor.

(Credit: Screenshot by Harrison Hoffman/CNET)

While none of these features is groundbreaking on its own, collectively, they help round out Google's productivity suite, fulfilling some specific needs that probably prevented some from using the service.

A lot of people complain about the minimal feature set of Google Docs, as compared to market leader Microsoft Office, which got a 16-year head start on Google's offering and is sometimes criticized for being feature-cluttered. Students comprise one of the core groups of users and potential users of Docs, so it makes sense to build out the feature set to support the kinds of word-processing, spreadsheet-tweaking, and presentation-building tasks that they typically need to perform.