Powerful Features in Google Docs

Google Docs has some new and powerful features:

Tabs: I’ve been sent documents go on for tens of pages. I’ve tried to read and understand them, but couldn’t. I wished for tabs: why can’t documents have tabs like spreadsheets? My wish has been answered: Google Docs now has tabs. You can put secondary information like an Appendix there, so that the main document is concise and clear. You can also have sub-tabs. For example, within the Appendix tab, you can have sub-tabs for Appendix A, Appendix B, etc.

Collapse headings: When you hover over a heading, you now get expand / collapse controls. I find this helpful when I’m done reading a section and want to collapse it so that I can focus on the rest of the document without being distracted.

Google’s design is simpler than Notion’s, where you have to choose between a Heading and a Toggle Heading. So, every time I create a heading in Notion, I have to stop and think whether it should be a Heading or a Toggle Heading. Google Docs has less cognitive load.

Page break: If you want a heading to start on a new page, press Cmd-Enter. Don’t press Enter multiple times¹.

Section break: A section break is a more powerful version of a page break. Not only does it start a new page, but it also a new section, which can have different settings, like being landscape while the earlier section remains in portrait.

Drawing: You can insert a drawing² in Google Docs. When you do, a drawing editor will pop up, letting you add various elements like boxes and lines.

Dropdown: To use a dropdown, you define a template. For example, a “Task” template that describes the kinds of tasks that exist in a software project: Bug, Feature or Chore. Then, you can insert as many copies of the template as you want:

For example, you could create a table of tasks where each is a bug, feature or chore.

You can also give each of the choices a color. When someone selects a choice, its color is automatically applied:

This helps you quickly scan visually.

You can edit a dropdown to add a new choice, like Legal Issue, at which time Docs will prompt you whether you want to change all instances of the template or just this. If you choose the latter, it will create a new template for just this.

Paste a slide: You can go to Google Slides, copy a slide, and paste it into a Doc. When you do, you’re offered a choice of whether you want to paste it linked or unlinked. If you choose linked, when the slide is edited in Slides, you’ll get an update button in Docs.

Paste from Sheets: You can go to Google Sheets, select a range of cells, and paste them into a Document, linked or unlinked.

Insert table: This is similar to Paste from Sheets, except that here you create and edit the table completely with Docs, and you don’t have the power of a spreadsheet, like formulas.

Copy as Markdown / Paste as Markdown: This lets Docs interoperate with Markdown easily. More interoperability is better.

Watermark: You can insert a watermark, which is a giant text stamped diagonally across the page:

You can have it appear behind the text or in front of, and change the color and opacity. I suggest in front of; otherwise it’s often not visible because of images or color. Set it to black and make it translucent so that you can read the text through the watermark.

Bookmark: You can insert a bookmark at any point within a document. For example, you can add it to an image. Or to the third paragraph under a certain heading. Then, click the bookmark to copy a link to the bookmark, which you can paste into Slack to send people to a specific point in your document. You can also paste the link elsewhere in the document to create an intra-document link.

If you want a link to a heading elsewhere in the same document, you don’t even need a bookmark. Just insert a link and type the name of the heading you want to link to.

Insert table of contents: If your document is long or has a complex structure, you should insert a table of contents. Google autogenerates this from the headings. For this to work, you should use the headings feature in Google doc and not increase the font size to make a heading. When the structure of the document changes, you’ll get a refresh button you can click to update it.

Compare documents: To compare two docs, open one and select Compare documents, and then select the doc to compare to. Docs will create a third doc containing the diffs. This is an independent document in its own right. For example, if your company has signed contracts with two customers, and your boss asks you to identify the differences between the contracts, you can Compare documents, and share the diff document with your boss. The diff doc doesn’t update if you modify one of the original documents. If you want to see the updated differences, Compare documents again.

This tool is so effective that I’ve used it to compare two Notion pages³, by creating two blank Google Docs, copy-pasting each page into one document, and then using Google Docs’s Compare documents.

Paint format: This tool effectively copy-pastes format. To use it, select the text whose format you want to copy, then click Paint format, then select text you want to apply the format to⁴.

Text width: You can choose how wide your text is. Choose View > Text width > Narrow to increase readability⁵.

Smart chips are fancy links. For example, you can link to a calendar event. Say you’re planning a project. To this end, you’re writing a Project Plan doc, and you’ve created an event to review the progress of the project. You can link to the event from the doc. Similarly, you can link to a contact, a place in Google Maps, a file in Google Drive.

Building blocks: This is an interesting new feature. Google Docs comes with various building blocks. For example, there’s a Team directory, which is a list of people who each belong to a department and work out of a specific city. You can add the Team directory building block to your document and fill it out.

These blocks are fully customisable: for example, if a team member regularly shuttles between Vizag and Vizianagaram, you could have two cities for that person. If you want to track who’s a full-timer and who’s a contractor, you can add a column for that. By default, each row is a link to a Google Contact, and information like phone number and email ID are stored there. But if you don’t want to use Google Contacts, you can add columns for name, email ID and phone number inline. Blocks are fully customisable — inserting a block doesn’t restrict your flexibility as compared to inserting a blank table. It just helps you get started with a pre-existing template rather than from a blank slate.

Another building block is Project assignments, but that’s no way comparable to a real project management tool like Jira. For example, Jira is all about structured data: everything has to be a ticket. A ticket can’t have multiple assignees. It has to have a ticket number which can’t be edited. It has to have a title, but that can be edited. A ticket can have a parent, but you can’t have a circular dependency. And so on. These rules are in place to ensure that your Jira remains useful for its intended purpose.

Google Docs, being a word processor, still lives in the world of unstructured data, and so isn’t a replacement for a project management tool.

There’s a building block that holds a list of applicants, but that can’t hold a candle to an ATS.

Chart: Sometimes the best way to present something is a chart. Google Docs lets you now insert a chart. When you do this, Docs creates a Google Sheet for you in the background populated with sample data and a chart. You can edit the data in the spreadsheet, and when you go back to the doc, you’ll get an Update button. When you click it, the chart in the doc reflects the changes. The chart is just a dumb image — if one of the labels in a pie chart is truncated, you can’t hover over it to see the full title. If you resize the chart to make it smaller, Docs scales down the image resulting in tiny, unreadable text. By contrast, when you scale down a chart in Sheets, it re-renders, keeping it readable. Docs’s implementation of charts is poor, and not significantly better than what you can do by just exporting an image from Google Sheets or Excel and adding it as an image to Google Docs. Ideally, a chart should have been represented as more than just an image.

1. This doesn’t work when you later edit the document — the heading might end up beginning partway down a page.

2. This is an old feature, but I’m mentioning it here since it’s noteworthy.

3. Notion doesn’t offer this feature, unfortunately.

4. Google Sheets has the Paint format tool, too. In addition, Sheets lets you copy the original cell, then Paste Format. This is a variant of paste where only the format is pasted.

5. Even Narrow is wider than recommended for optimal readability. With 12-point Arial, Narrow produces 95 characters per line, Medium produces 124, Wide produces 155 and Full produces 297. Research has found an optimal width of 45-90 characters.