Google Docs can make a great free journal or diary to keep track of your thoughts and feelings over time.
With Google Docs you can make journal entries and organize them using the document outline feature so that you can easily navigate through your entries.
In this tutorial, I will show you one great way to use Google Docs as a Diary or Journal.
Table of Contents
Why Use Google Docs as a Diary?
Google Docs is perfect for using as a diary for a few reasons:
- It’s free – Google Docs is free, so using this as your journal is a no brainer over other journaling apps
- Your document will be private – If you don’t share your document with anybody, you will be the only one that is able to view it. A real diary could be picked up by anybody and read
- You will never lose it – As long as you remember your Gmail login info, your Google Doc diary will always be there for you to read and create new entries. It will never be lost
- It’s easy to navigate – With the outline feature of Google Docs, you can easily navigate through entries in your file. A real journal or diary would require manual navigation, which can be time consuming
Making Entries in Google Docs
The best way of using Google Docs as a Diary or Journal is to make sure that you have some kind of title in your entry that you are setting as a heading. When you set something as a heading in Google Docs, it is automatically added to the outline which you can then use to navigate.
Here is an example of a diary created in Google Docs:
In the above template, the week is a heading, and each entry is organized according to the date, day, and time.
Because the week is a heading, it can be used for navigation:
In this journal, you can click on the week in the outline area, and your diary will instantly pull up all the entries from that week. This is great for naviation.
Any title that you set as a heading will allow you to use it for navigation.
To create your own heading for your journal:
- Highlight the text that you want to turn into a heading
- Click on the “Styles” tool and change the text to a heading
You will then see that text appear in the outline so you can use it for navigation
Closing Thoughts
Google Docs is an excellent free journal.
With its outline feature, you can create a very organized journal that is easy to navigate.
In my example template, I have used weeks as the navigation option in the outline, however you have complete customization over want you want to use to navigate in your journal.
More Google Docs Tutorials:
How to Write on an Image
How to Rotate Text