Collect All Highlighted Texts in a Document in One Click Using Google Docs

We actually don’t need the entire document to give references. All we need are the highlighting points of it. Because one cannot go through the number of pages to find that reference or cannot flip over a number of pages to read those highlighted texts.

How cool it would be if you can collect all your highlights in a document and save them separately with no effort of copy-pasting at all?

If you want to avail this feature, you need to have a Google account and the digital copy of the document that you wanted to gather highlights from.

Uploading the file

Step 1: Go to Google Drive > Click on ‘New’ button > Chose ‘File Upload’ and select the document file from your computer > Click ‘Open’ to start uploading.

Opening it in Google Docs

Step 2: Click on ‘New’ again > Click on ‘Google Docs’ and it opens in a new blank document in a new browser tab.

Step 3: Switch to the Google Docs tab, go to File > Open > Search for the uploaded file and click on it to open it.

In this step, it will look like as if you are previewing your Gmail attachments before downloading.

Step 4: Click on the ‘Open’ option on the top tool bar to open it in Google Docs. It will open the document in another browser tab.

Installing an Add-on for Google Docs

Step 5: Now, you need to install an add-on to your Google Docs. Search for ‘Texthelp Study Skills’ add-on and click on +Free button to install it.

Step 6: Go to ‘Add-ons’ from the menu again and you’ll find the add-on installed. Now, go to Texthelp Study Skills > Show highlighting tools.

It will open a sidebar on the right with all the text highlighting options.

Highlighting text(s) & collecting them

Step 7: Select the text from the document and select a color from the sidebar options. You can choose a different color for every selection.

Step 8: When you are done with highlighting text, click on ‘Collect highlights’ from the sidebar.

It will ask you to select the sorting of the highlights by ‘document position’ or ‘color’. Choosing ‘document position’ will sort the highlights in the order of text in the document where as choosing the ‘color’ will sort them by order of the color appeared in the sidebar.

Step 9: Choosing an option and thereby clicking on ‘Collect highlights’ button will create a document with highlights. A click here link will be provided to open this document in a new browser tab.

When it is opened, it will look like as shown in the following screenshot:

You can then go to File > Download as a file of a format that you wanted it in.

Watch the video demonstration of the same here:

Hope that helped!