Category: Google Slides

Some improvements to the Activity Dashboard in Google Docs, Sheets and Slides are in the process or rolling out to G Suite domain customers.  The updates bring an easier way to email contributors on shared files right from the dashboard as well as a file activity chart to see access and editing information of a file.

The update is rolling out to G Suite Business, Enterprise, Education, and Nonprofit editions and everyone should see the new information in the Activity Dashboard over the next couple of weeks.

A new Activity Dashboard has started rolling out to G Suite domains that allows admins and users to see when shared files have been viewed by others.  The idea behind the dashboard is to improve collaboration by letting users know when someone who is working with them on a file has actually viewed that file.  Think of it as read receipts for files.

The new feature works for Google Docs, Sheets and Slides files and the feature will be rolling out in two phases.  First, admins will have the ability to enable or disable the feature starting today and only they can see the Activity Dashboard.

Google has announced that they will be making some minor menu updates to some of the G Suite apps starting in January.  The updates are primarily focused on Google Docs and Google Slides with the idea being to make it easier for users to find certain menu settings.

The changes that Google outlined will be coming to the apps starting January 4, 2018 with the schedule release of the updates.  It should be noted that the changes that are coming are only for the online version of the apps.  Google Docs, Google Sheets and Google Slides for Android and iOS are not impacted by this change.

As for the changes themselves, most of them are renaming of features and not necessarily moving them.  For example, in both Google Docs and Google Slides, “Lists” in the Format menu have been renamed to “Bullets and numbering”.

Google Docs, Google Sheets and Google Slides all have an update rolling out in the Play Store for Android.  The update brings the normal raft of bug fixes and performance improvements but also has some new editing tools.

There are new toolbar items will allow you to more easily format tables, images and drawings within your Docs, Sheets or Slide documents.  The editing features are tools that have been on the web-based versions of the apps so these updates bring feature parity between the platforms.

Google is in the process of rolling out updates to their Android apps for Google Docs, Google Sheets and Google Slides.  The updates, mainly aimed at G Suite customers, brings a lot of improvements to each app individually but collectively brings them all in-app notifications.  Today, the way it works, is if you are collaborating with someone on a document, you get a notification that they have updated it – in Google Drive.  With the update to the apps, now you get the notifications within each app.  It is a bit of a no-brainer really.  Each app’s notifications are separate from the others so you will only see notifications for Google Sheets in Google Sheets.

Read on as there are other improvements beyond notifications.

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.