Earlier this year, Google began rolling out a Quick Access panel in Google Docs to a limited scope of G Suite customers. Functioning similar to the Quick Access panel in Google Drive, except being located in the Explorer button, Docs uses artificial intelligence to to show relevant files in the Explorer button of Docs based on your Google Drive activity and information in your document. Now Google is rolling it out to all G Suite customers.
While the feature is still rolling out, once you have it, you will have a richer experience on the Explorer button in Google Docs with this new relevant information. This will allow you to reference other files more quickly but also get information from those files to put into your current Docs.
In addition to this change, Docs is also picking up natural language searching. Instead of having to try to recall a particular file name or particular content, with natural language processing, you can search more broadly for the information you are looking for in your files. For example, you could search for, “Show me files with charts from last week”. This functionality will search across Google Drive, Docs, Sheets and Slides so it will get you results from those services, not just Docs.
Quick Access in Google Docs
Google has indicated in the release announcement that this roll out is going to take up to 15 days to get to everyone. If you aren’t seeing it this morning, give it some time as it will be coming. It is unclear if the consumer version of G Suite will be getting these updates. Chances are high it will but until it is fully deployed and starts showing up, it won’t be 100% known.
