How to Make Google Docs Look Like Dropbox Paper

A step-by-step guide to aesthetically upgrading Google Docs

Photo source: Artem Sapegin/Unsplash, screenshot: Josh Johnson

I love Dropbox Paper. Some people have tons of complaints about it, but I’m not one of those people. It’s one of my favorite tools and I use it for all kinds of work and home documents.

Limitless adoration aside, where I work, we use Google Docs (insert sad trombone sound). I have two main issues with Google Docs:

• I simply don’t like the default type styles. I think they’re ugly and difficult to read. That’s 100 percent my subjective opinion, but there it is.
• I hate that I’m forced into this weird printed page metaphor. This is great if you’re writing compare and contrast essays for Mr. Smith’s English 101 class and he requires you to print your work like it’s 1985, but I am not doing that. No one I work with is printing Google Docs. Ever. And yet all the documentation we create is awkwardly forced into a standard print format.

The bottom line is, I have to use this tool. No choice. So I set out to make it more like my beloved Paper. If you want to do the same, here are some tips to get you started.