Sorting and Hiding in Google Docs

Another month, another Google Docs and Spreadsheets upgrade. The official Google Docs and Spreadsheets just announced minor updates to the Google office suite. The upgrade applies to the just redesigned Documents list.

If you have used the old Documents list for Google Docs and Spreadsheet, it used to have a feature that shows only your most recent active documents. Documents (and spreadsheets) that has not been updated for a certain number of days are automatically placed to an Archive, which hides them from your main Documents list when you first open it after logging in. While you can always show these archived documents, this actually posed a problem of giving a false perception on the number of documents that user has on a first glance. After all, if I leave my files untouched for a while, my expectation as a user is that thing should be where I left them. This is why the new Documents list is a very welcome upgrade, leaving this auto-archive feature off.

All users are not the same though, and there are those who actually wanted the “archive” feature back, which hides inactive documents from view. This actually makes sense, because it makes the documents list cleaner and less cluttered. Well the Google Docs and Spreadsheets team listened to the users and they just reintroduced the new “hidden” view in the sidebar and a corresponding “hide” item in the toolbar. This allows you to hide some documents from the rest of the views.

Hiding can be done by clicking on hide toolbar icon or by dragging your documents to the hidden item in the sidebar.

Selecting the “hidden” view in the sidebar shows all your hidden files. To unhide files, just choose “unhide” or simply drag them to any folder or view.

Another new feature is document sorting. Clicking on the column headers in the main documents list pane will sort your items based on that clicked column. So now you can sort your documents based on date, folders / sharing, name or the documents’ star status. This makes documents more organized and easier to work with.

The sorting feature can make use of some good polishing though. Right now, changing views always resets the order of documents to sort by Date. It would be better if the Documents list can remember the sort setting for each view after you have changed them. Sorting by date with the newest item on top groups in a user-friendly way based on how recent things were updated (today, earlier this month, earlier this year).

This grouping would also make sense if implemented on other “sorted” views like Folders / sharing, and names.