The Best Add-ons for Google Docs, Sheets and Slides

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The availability of third-party add-ons for Google Docs, Sheets and Google Slides have certainly made the Google Office productivity suite more capable and useful. If you haven’t tried them yet, open any Google document or spreadsheet in your Google Drive and look for the new add-ons menu near Help.

The availability of third-party add-ons for Google Docs, Sheets and Google Slides have certainly made the Google Office productivity suite more capable and useful. If you haven’t tried them yet, open any Google document or spreadsheet in your Google Drive and look for the new add-ons menu near Help. G Suite users may have to ask their admin to enable support for add-ons for the organization.For starters, Google add-ons are like extensions for Chrome. Extensions add new features to the Chrome browser and add-ons extend the functionality of Google Office applications. To give you an example, here’s the screenshot of a Twitter add-on I wrote for Google Docs and Google Sheets that you can use to find and curate tweets right inside your documents.

Anyone can write an add-on for Google Docs. All you need are some basic programming skills for writing HTML, CSS for styling the add-on while the server side code is written in Google Apps Script which is similar to JavaScript but runs on the Google Cloud.

Google Apps Script vs Google Add-ons:


Google Add-ons are written in the Google Apps Script language but while regular Google Scripts can work on any document in your Google Drive, add-ons only work against the document or sheet that’s currently open in your browser.

Also, while Google Scripts support triggers and can run in the background (like this Website Monitor), add-ons can only run while a document or sheet is open and active. (Update: Google now allows you to create time-based triggers for add-ons)

The other big difference is that you can view the source code of regular Google Scripts while in the case of add-ons, the code is hidden from the end user. This helps developers protect their code but a downside is that the user has no clue about what’s happening behind the scenes.

The Best Add-ons For Google Docs, Sheets and Google Slides:

The Chrome store lists hundreds of Google add-ons and here are some of favorite ones that you should have in your Google Docs and Sheets


  1. Mail Merge for Gmail – Send personalized emails with emails to multiple email recipients with Mail Merge for Gmail and G Suite.
  2. Document Studio – Generate perfect documents automatically in Google Drive from source data in Google Sheets or Google Form submissions.
  3. Save Gmail as PDF – Download your Gmail messages and attachments in Google Drive for archiving.
  4. Twitter Archiver – Save tweets for any search term or hashtag in a Google Sheet.
  5. Email Scheduler for Gmail – Schedule emails inside Gmail for sending later at a specific date and time. Send repetitive emails that go on a recurring schedule.
  6. Google Drive Permissions – Know who has access to your files in Google Drive.
  7. Gmail Address Extractor – The add-on extracts the email addresses from the header and body of email messages for preparing a mailing list.
  8. Twitter Curator – Search, filter and add tweets in a Google Documents. It is like Storify for Google Docs.
  9. Bulk Gmail Forward – Easily forward one or more email threads from Gmail to any other address.
  10. Google Forms Notifications – Get Google Forms responses in an email message when people submit your forms. Send customized email notifications to respondents.  

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