An Overview of the New Google Docs Interface
Google Docs has been rolling out its new interface across the world in the past few months, and it’s a significant change from the Google Docs interface people have been accustomed to so far. I recently got a chance to check it out and I thought I’ll share some features of this new look, and talk about what has changed from the previous look.
The highlight of the new interface is reduction of clutter, big buttons and lot of white. As you see in the screenshot below, the buttons on the left are now red in color and most of the other buttons you find will be gray colored.
There is an option to quickly switch back to the classic look. Below it there are the Sort and Settings buttons. They have been made bigger to ensure better visibility.
You can sort documents by last modified, last opened, title, storage used and priority.
The Settings button has some new stuff, namely Display Density. By default it is set to comfortable but you can change the look slightly by switching to cozy or compact. There’s also the set up Google Docs offline thing that was recently introduced. You cannot edit docs offline yet. Only offline viewing capabilities are available.
When you select a doc, at the top, below the search bar, options will appear to add collaborators, create folders, trash the doc and more.
This new interface with more white space and bigger buttons is replicated across Google Docs spreadsheets, documents and presentations.
Overall, I have to say that the new interface is kinda different and I’ll take some time to get used to it. There’s definitely less clutter and that’s a good thing.
What about you? Did you get a chance to try out this new interface yet? How do you like it?
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It looks a lot like the new Blogger interface. I like the clean and simple look. We’ll see if I can still use it like I want the next time I need to edit a form!
Thanks for the overview, I’ve bookmarked it for future reference.
It’s good, but rather than “user interface” I would like to see more features in the wordprocessor. I would like to see things such as hanging indents so that I can use the full APA style which is required for university classes. In fact if you could get all the major writing syles covered a lot more students would use Google Docs.
I’ve been using this new interface for several weeks now and I really like it a lot, especially the “Display Density” settings. The new look mirrors the new look of Google search and Google Voice, etc. and totally matches the new “Dense Preview” Gmail theme.
Overall the look is more contemporary and streamlined. Kudos to Google!