Google Docs gets 6 new templates courtesy of QuickBooks, Reading Rainbow, others

Google today announced that Google Docs, the web and mobile app for composing web-based documents, is getting a few new templates. These are in addition to the document templates Google introduced last year.

But the new ones are special, Google will tell you, because they were developed by organizations that people actually know, including GV (formerly Google Ventures), Reading Rainbow, and Intuit’s QuickBooks.

GV came up with a pitch deck template in Google Slides that should be useful to entrepreneurs. Reading Rainbow made lesson plan and book report templates for Google Docs. QuickBooks has crafted an annual business budget for Google Sheets. Google Science Fair made a science fair template for Google Slides. And Chip and Dan Heath, the authors of the book Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, drew up a “big idea template” for Google Slides, Google product manager Brian LeVee wrote in a blog post.

These are all free, of course, and they can help Google further distinguish itself from other online document creation tools, including those from Dropbox, Box, Microsoft (Word, Excel, and PowerPoint have had templates for years), as well as upstarts like Quip and Pingpad.