Category: Google Docs

An update is currently rolling out to the Google Play Store for Google Docs and Google Sheets that further both apps features around collaboration.  Both apps now allow you to create and assign action items to collaborators on a document or file.  For example, if you want to have a team member work on a specific paragraph or the financial figures in a particular part of the document or sheet, you can assign it to them and get notified when that task is completed.  It is a great way for teams to work together on a file and to make sure specific edits are completed.

It has been a busy day for the Google Cloud and G Suite team at Google.  They have just announced that new versions of the Android apps for Google Docs, Sheets and Slides have been released to the Play Store.  In those updated apps, you can now retrieve a trashed file within the app itself.  To this point, if you delete a file on purpose or accident and needed to retrieve it, you had to go to the Trash folder in the web-based version of the app or Google Drive on the web.  Now you can bypass that requirement and do it all from the apps on your phone or tablet.

If you are a user of Google Docs, Sheets and Slides, there is a small but nice new update that is rolling out to the web version of these apps.  Google announced yesterday that they are adding the ability for users to see file information on a document that they have open in one of the apps.  This is very similar to a feature that is already in the online version of the apps which is to see file or folder in Google Drive.  It has just been added to the Docs apps for convenience.

Getting to this new file information is pretty straight forward.  Open up a Docs, Sheets or Slides file and from the File menu select Document Details.  This will pop up an overlay that shows you the location within your Google Drive that the file is stored, the owner of that file and the last time it was modified.

Google has rolled out a behind-the-scenes update that enabled comment notifications in Chrome and on Android for Google Docs, Google Sheets and Google Slides.  Previously, when someone made a comment on a shared file, you would receive an email notification that the comment had been made on the document.  Now you will get a standard notification on your Android devices or in Chrome when these comments have been made on the file.

A new update to Google Docs, Google Sheets and Google Slides is hitting the Google Play Store that brings a more effortless way to get to your files while you are offline.  In the update, recent files you have been working on are automatically downloaded to your device so you will have them when you are offline.  Right now, if you want to work on a file while you are offline, you have to flag that file to download to your device.  If you forget, you are out of luck until you get back online.  This new feature removes this manual step.

Following up on notifications coming to Google Drive, Google has announced that their productivity apps, Google Docs, Sheets and Slides, all have the ability to send you and you can control push notifications from the apps.  The update to the three Android apps will be rolling out to the Google Play Store and should come to your devices over the course of the next three days.  While push notifications themselves are not necessarily new to the productivity apps, how you control them is in this update.  Previously, if you did not want push notifications from Google Drive, Sheets or Slides, you could only deactivate that feature from Google Drive.  That is now no longer the case.