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A new feature to Google Drive is currently in the process of rolling out to all G Suite versions that will allow for commenting – and to be able to see those comments – on Microsoft Office files, PDFs and image files.  The new feature means that users of G Suite will be able to collaborate with colleagues or others outside of their organization who use Microsoft Office.  More importantly, this can be done without having to convert the files.

The new feature appears in Google Drive online and when you open up the preview pane on a Microsoft Word, Excel or PowerPoint file, you will be able to see the comments on that file and be able to add comments.  They will be saved and will stay attached to the file.  This should significantly lower the friction on collaborating on projects within organizations and with customers of an organization.

Four years after being acquired by Google, Nest has now become merged into the Google hardware team.  The announcement came today from Nest CEO Marwan Fawaz and it made it clear that the goal of merging the teams was to accelerate smart home technologies with Google AI at the heart of that innovation.

By working together, we’ll continue to combine hardware, software and services to create a home that’s safer, friendlier to the environment, smarter and even helps you save money—built with Google’s artificial intelligence and the Assistant at the core.

While details on when the full merging of teams would be complete, the announcement highlighted that the teams already work very closely together, indicating it would be in short order.

With the release of the third build of Chrome 65 into the Chrome OS Dev channel, a new feature has popped up in settings that has big and positive implications for those who use their Chromebooks connected to an external monitor.  The new settings is enabled with a flag setting, chrome://flags/#enable-display-zoom-setting which enables the ability to change how scaling is done on external monitors.

Currently with a Chromebook, if you connect it to an external monitor, especially a high resolution monitor, you end up with having to scale the display to be able to read everything.  Usually this is 125% of normal to make things bigger and readable.  Doing this effectively changes the resolution to something lower, thus you lose screen real estate.

A new beta of Google Play Service is currently available and it is bringing a much desired fix to the “Check for Update” button on Google Pixel devices.  The new beta build is version 12.2.09 and multiple sources are reporting that at least on the Pixel 2 lineup, you can actually tap the “Check for Update” option in Settings and it will immediately go download the new February Android Security Update patches.

The Check for Update button has been broken for a while now.  A fix was to come with Android Oreo but an update to Google Play Services, the culprit in all of the issues, broke it again late last year.  Google then indicated that a fix would be coming in 2018.  That fix now appears to be happening.