Writing a Resume in Google Docs

Google Docs is a perfectly good place to write a resume, with two specific weaknesses worth knowing about and one export decision that matters more than anything else on this page.

What it does better

Three genuine advantages over a desktop word processor.

Version history. Every edit is retained and you can restore any earlier state. For a document you revise across a job search over months, this is more useful than it sounds, particularly when you want the wording you had three versions ago.

Sharing for feedback. Handing a document to someone for comments, and getting those comments in context, is materially easier than emailing files back and forth. Just remember to resolve and delete them before exporting.

Nothing to install, nothing to lose. It works on any machine you can sign into, which matters if you are job hunting from a borrowed laptop or a library.

Consistent rendering. Fewer font substitution surprises than sending a Word file, because the document renders in the browser rather than depending on locally installed fonts.

What it does worse

Fine typographic control. Tab stop management, non-breaking spaces, keep-with-next and precise paragraph spacing are all either less accessible or less capable than in Word. For a one-page document this rarely matters. For a dense two-page resume where you are fighting page breaks, it does.

Template quality. The built-in resume templates are visually pleasant and several use tables for layout, which is exactly the structure that extracts unpredictably. See ATS resume templates for why that matters.

Neither is disqualifying. Both are worth knowing before you commit an hour.

The setup

Ten minutes, before writing content.

One: page setup. Margins around 0.75 inch, letter size, portrait.

Two: define your styles. Docs lets you update a heading style to match the current selection, then apply it everywhere. Set up four: title for your name, one heading level for section headings, normal text for body, and a distinct treatment for job lines. Then save them as your default styles so future documents inherit them.

Three: one font throughout, a widely available one. See the resume fonts guide.

Four: turn off the automatic capitalisation and link detection you do not want, since both cause the same irritations they do in Word.

Aligning dates without a table

The one technique worth learning here, as in Word.

Set a right tab stop at the right margin using the ruler, then press Tab once between the employer and the date. The date sits flush right, the paragraph stays a single ordinary paragraph, and the text extracts in reading order.

This replaces the two-column table that most Docs resume templates use, and it is the single change that makes a Docs resume safe to upload.

The export decision

This is the part that decides whether your application works.

Use File then Download, choosing a file type, which is the route Google documents for creating, viewing or downloading a file. Download the PDF.

Two things not to do.

Do not send the document link. It can break, it may prompt a recruiter to sign in, it exposes your comment and revision history to anyone with access, and it cannot be uploaded into an application form. It also lets you keep editing a document someone is assessing, which is worse than it sounds.

Do not print to PDF via a screenshot or an image export. A flattened file has no selectable text, so a parser reads nothing and a screen reader reads nothing, which is the point Section508.gov makes about accessible PDFs.

Then do the paste test: open the downloaded PDF, select all, copy, and paste into a plain text editor. If your name is first, your jobs are in order with their dates, and nothing is missing, you are fine.

Templates worth starting from

Skip the gallery’s more designed options and start plain.

University career services publish good Google Docs resume templates. Harvard’s career service, for example, provides downloadable templates in both Word and Google Docs versions, in bullet-point and paragraph formats, alongside a written guide. They are deliberately unremarkable, which is the correct quality for this document.

Whichever you use, check whether the layout is built on a table by clicking into the text and watching whether cell boundaries appear.

Two Docs-specific gotchas

Comments left in. Resolved comments are hidden rather than removed, and while they do not appear in a PDF export, sharing the document itself exposes them. Delete rather than resolve before sharing anything.

Suggesting mode edits. If someone reviewed your resume in suggesting mode, unaccepted suggestions remain in the document. Accept or reject all of them before exporting, or you may export text you had decided against.

Tailoring efficiently

Docs makes one part of this easier: keep a master document containing every bullet you have written, grouped by role, in a separate file. Then copy from it into a fresh copy of your template for each application.

Make a copy of the template rather than editing the original, and name each copy for the employer. Detail on the approach is in advanced Word resume techniques, and it transfers directly.

Related

For the Word comparison, see the Microsoft Word resume guide and Word resume formatting. For design tools, see the Canva resume guide. For template choice, see the resume templates guide and ATS resume templates.

Browse the Google Docs templates or build one free.