Google announced some nifty updates to Google Docs today, focused on students as they get back to their books and into the classroom. The document collaboration tool now supports equation notation, superscript, subscript, and language translations.

First, let's talk about our favorite new addition to Google Docs: equations. The feature, available under the "Insert" menu, allows you to type in full, clean equations for everything from your standard high school physics to my favorite, mutlivariable calculus (yes, I'm a math nerd). Google Docs also highlighted its addition of subscript and superscript formatting so that you can add in simple exponents and label variables. It's easy to see why this feature could be huge for students. A group of friends could collaborate on notes via a Google Doc, making sure that they don't miss any of the important lecture notes. Equations in Google Docs are also simply cleaner to look at. If you've ever tried to read someone else's calculus notes, you can't help but appreciate clean equations.







Google also highlighted Google Docs integration with language translation, something they added last month. Finally, they added some customization to bullet styles and added the ability to print footnotes as endnotes.

It's a small series of useful updates, though this announcement's a bit late for college students who have already started their first semester. Oh well, there's always next semester.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, Hiob