Google Docs is a great word processor if you need something free, accessible from almost every device, and with great team collaboration and sharing capabilities.
There are, however, some features that are simply missing, like the ability to add custom fonts as we discussed on the harry potter font page. For some missing features, you can find an effective workaround as we saw in the dotted line article. Sometimes, you simply can’t find a solution, as there’s no real working solution.
Double underlining text in Google Docs belongs to one of these 3 categories… Which one? Keep reading and you’ll discover.
Why double underlining text?
There are many reasons you may want to underline. Maybe you want to put more emphasis on a word, or maybe you want to have two different ways to highlight text (single and double underline).
The quick answer: how to double underline in Google Docs?
The quick answer is that there’s no way to double underline in Google Docs, everyone here around seems to come up with about the same workaround, but it’s just a simple trick they’re using to give you a solution.
The reality is that the proposed solution works only with their examples, which are voluntarily built so it seems that it’s working.
What is almost anyone else suggesting?
If you looked for a solution online, you probably found some spam, just suggesting to make random things, using a keyboard shortcut that is not working, or using the border style option from the format menu.
Let’s see a step by step description of everyone’s proposed solution:
- Select the text.
- Add a single underline with the underline option button.
- Select the text again.
- Open the Format options menu.
- Got to paragraph styles.
- Click on the Border and shading option.
- On the borders Option tool, select the bottom position option. Here someone claims that you can even change the underline color.
- Click on apply and you’re done.
Typically, the shown result is something that seems to work well like this:
But if we see the image with attention, or if we try to reproduce this on a different example we will soon figure out that this example is artificially built so that it seems to work well.
Why the suggested solution is not working in real-life examples?
The double-underlined text in all the examples is voluntarily made as long as a full line. And this makes the trick effective.
However, if you try the same step by step procedure with a shorter text, you’ll end up with something like this:
The text is shorter, the first underline is under the text as it’s using the underline option, but the other line inserted with the border and shading method is a full-page line, as it’s independent of the actual text.
The same happens if you have longer text on multiple lines. The paragraph border option applies the border only below the paragraph, so you get it only on the last line.
As we anticipated, this method is working only for the example, that is intentionally built to be a single full line of text.
The response from the official Google support community
There’s a guy that asked for this feature on the Google official support community.
The response from the volunteer product expert just answers that the feature is not implemented and that if you want to suggest google adding the double border option, you should send feedback from the Google Docs Help -> Report a problem menu.
You can read the thread on the google official support community.
So what’s the right solution?
Unfortunately, there’s no right solution, there’s no keyboard shortcut, no magic button or icon, and the most suggested “horizontal border method” is just there to write something, but without a real-life application.