Save safely with new saving buttons

Many of you have told us you'd like consistent and intuitive features across all the Google Docs editors, so today, we’re happy to launch a couple of improvements to the way saving works in all of Google Docs.

Now it's much easier to tell, at a glance, when documents need to be saved, when documents are busy saving, and when documents have been saved into the cloud:
A clickable save button means your document has edits which haven't been saved yet and the timestamp lets you know when it was last saved. You can either wait for autosave to kick in after a few seconds, or you can manually save at any time using the keyboard (ctrl S on PC, cmd S on Macs), save button, or by going to through the file menu.

A disabled button reading “Saving” means your document is currently being saved, and should complete in a second or two.
A disabled button reading “Saved” means all data in this document is now saved, and the timestamp tells you when the last change happened. You can safely exit the application or continue editing the document.

These changes are available today in presentations and documents and will be coming to spreadsheets soon. We'll continue to improve consistency in Google Docs, so if you have suggestions about what we should tackle next, let us know on our forum and ideas page.

Posted by: Garry Boyer, Software Engineer and Joseph Wain, User Experience Designer