It's interesting how the documents industry is moving from print oriented legacy softwares (Google Docs, Word) to block based, app-ish, smart canvases (Notion, Coda, etc).
Also both Microsoft & Google have adopted completely different strategies to compete in this market. Microsoft launched Loop as an entirely new app while Google is incorporating these blocks as smart chips in Google Docs itself. Both strategies have their own pros and cons.
My bet is on Google Docs style, because this means a group that's already invested in traditional document making skills (legal professionals, academic professionals, etc) will be able to incrementally step up their game without their workflow being completely destroyed. Sure, this will slow down the pace with which Google Docs can innovate and evolve - but overall it helps the older generation to smoothly transition over to the new age document editing, which is great.
Also in the industry. My bet is on all of them. Some people prefer block based, some prefer text, some prefer Markdown, some don't care. Writing a book on Notion is impossible for now, but building beautiful pages is much easier in Notion.
Microsoft and Google (And Atlassian) have all adopted the same strategy which is "Look more like Notion".
I don't think that Microsoft should be worried about Notion. But things are different with Google Docs, which is really threaten by Notion. At the end of the day, most Google docs can be created in Notion without any difference, and I actually doubt Google docs will be able to evolve enough to prevent that.
The strongest advantage of Notion compared to Google docs is not its text editor but it is his list feature. And there are a lot of list porn people. When you have 10% of your workforce being "hardcore list porn people" and 90% of the others being "dont care people". Then it makes sense that the full organization goes closer and closer to Notion
I'm one of the original authors of Writely / Google Docs, and worked on relatively heavy-duty word processors in an earlier life.
I'd agree with you, and add that there are are a lot of other details that make Notion nicer to use. We made the move from Docs to Notion at work a year or two ago, and I've recently switched for personal use as well. Some of the differences are power-user things (e.g. easier to manage certain types of formatting from the keyboard), but a big thing for me is that Notion makes it a lot easier to manage multiple pages. Both the left-hand navigation list, and the ability to nest pages, are game changers when you're trying to manage a large collection of information.
Also Notion just feels cleaner; I haven't really tried to analyze why. And it seems like pages load faster, though I'm not sure whether this is literally true or just something about the experience makes it seem that way. Either way, it makes a difference.
As a word processor, Notion is still pretty immature. It's not very good at handling cross-block selections, using cut/paste to manipulate bullet lists often results in a dropped bullet, etc. There are a lot of little fit-and-finish touches that are table stakes for a mature word processor, but don't seem to be a focus for Notion. I'm hoping, but not confident, this will improve over time. Docs is better at this (ever since they threw away our our original hacky contenteditable code and built the entire editing experience in JavaScript), but that's not enough to make me switch back from Notion, just enough to make me wish Notion would put some energy into this.
I preferred notion initially, for many of the same reasons you outlined, but eventually I just couldn’t stand how slow notion is. Google Docs is so much faster.
I’m interested to try Google’s new tables product when I get a chance.
Second this comment - notion would win for me hands down if it wasn't slow. Unfortunately I don't have the capital or desire to upgrade to an M1 to fix notion. So maybe when I eventually upgrade my system it will be my go to. Fingers crossed.
> cut/paste to manipulate bullet lists often results in a dropped bullet,
I'm not in the business but I did once spend two weeks of my life QA'ing just bulleted list copy-paste edge cases for a content-editable based WYSIWYG wiki editor and I would like that time back thank you very much.
For certain type of softwares, there is no fear of "not adopting". Text and document software is one of them. Every tool has their own offering and nothing makes them obsolete.
Let's say, text editors. In the last 2-3 years we have been told AI driven auto-complete or code companions will "disrupt" the entire experience of writing text and code. Before that we had the plugin saga of VSCode and Jetbrains and what not telling us more features means more convenience. Before that we had GUI and cursor based text editors that were simple to use. Before that we had VI and emacs.
But is there any kind disruption? Not really. People still like what the use and feel comfortable with. They don't need to switch environments but they can comfortably add features that they think is necessary. For people who are comfortable with Vi text editor the process is Vi > VIM > Neovim and not Vi > Notepad++ > VSCode > Github Copilot.
I think GP's "porn list people" means "people who really like lists (as if lists are pornography to them)"; see meaning 3 and 4 in https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/porn#English.
I would say the other way around though, i.e. "list porn people".
I hope they meant list porn and English isn’t their native tongue. In the sense of people who get pleasure from making lists. Porn list people would imply people who make lists of porn which doesn’t fit the context.
Have you ever tried to print a Notion document? It feels like they made the "Export to PDF" in a weekend. It's hugely underpowered and under-featured.
It feels like Notion's demographic just dont need to share documents as documents. Notion would likely have put more effort into that feature if they did.
> It feels like they made the "Export to PDF" in a weekend
Ah well, I built it in my first week or so as part of a hiring trial process, back when the company was 16 people in a remodeled auto body shop. Before that, the “PDF Export” feature just opened the browser print dialog.
One fun thing about working at a startup is that you solve a problem for 90% of your users, but after a while of user growth and demographic shift, that remaining 10% ends up being bigger than the original 90% was in raw numbers.
You are right. I’ve been in Notion heavy companies almost since its launch, and I’m not sure I ever tried to print a page ever.
Sharing has been done in two ways as far as I remember: straight making the page public when it was open information, or using Notion as a common draft and reformatting the text in Docs (+ adding headers etc.) before sending it to the partner.
I think instinctively anything “serious”, like a legal contract for instance, goes into Docs, even if Notion or another tool is used as a first step for collaboration.
I am not a big fan of notion, but printing a document (even as a pdf) is an increasingly niche usecase in an increasingly digital-only world and I can totally understand if they don't put in much effort into it.
One of my clients wants it for everything (typically text, stats, and graphs), and typically views it as just an "add a button" sort of feature, when it winds up being a "reimplement the layout in a different language" sort of thing. (leaving apart the thing where basically they want a gigantic lovecrafian horror of an excel file translated to the web)
PDFs have the ability to be a fixed, baked reference of a document. Even if it's not printed, it's something that people want.
> PDFs have the ability to be a fixed, baked reference of a document
I completely agree. Having the ability to look at what a dynamic document looked like at a particular moment in time (and be able to archive it), is a very important feature. In a dynamic document like Notion, people will still want to know what the data/doc looked like when decisions are made. Page-based layouts make this much easier.
What you're talking about is a failure in the "addressability" section of the digital media rubric. It's not page-based layouts that make this easy. That's entirely orthogonal. (This new Pageless feature of Google Docs, for example, doesn't make it any better or worse at satisfying the use case you're referring to than it was before.)
I’m thinking specifically as using PDFs as an archival format to snapshot the state of a document at a moment in time. PDFs are inherently page-based (well, at least in the way they are commonly used in business, I know they could be any dimension, but that’s still a “page”).
It isn’t just the ability to have temporal addressability (if I’m using the word the same way as you). I don’t really care if I can time machine back to see how a notion document looked two weeks ago. I need the ability to archive that document, save it outside of notion, send it to my client, etc. You can do this with many different formats, and could also export JSON objects if necessary.
However, when it comes to mixing layout and data, PDF is a pretty good format that has good existing tooling.
So, it’s not entirely orthogonal… it’s not just about recording state in time. You have to be able to share it in a meaningful format — independent of the original application.
A full single-file archival HTML file would really get you pretty far in the regard (embedded CSS, no JS, data/base64 images). You might even convince me that JS is okay if needed to render the page, but a static dom would be better.
All the things you said about PDF are true. You can say other true things, like that it's true that PDF gives these nice archival properties and that at the same time it's true that PDF begins with the letter P. Nevertheless, it doesn't make sense to conclude that what you want from an archive format is for it to begin with the letter P. That PDF simulates physical pages (versus not) is similarly beside the point.
Sure, but the particular PDF I emailed you is immutable (by me). It's sitting in my Sent folder and your Inbox folder in our respective email clients, and we can both be sure what it said.
Notion could implement a feature like "permalink to the content as it was at this point in time". Maybe they already have. But for me to be sure that's an immutable record, I at least have to trust Notion.
I don't see where checksums come into it - either I trust Notion to tell me I'm getting the same document we agreed on, or I need to be able to download the document in a readable form and compute the hash on my client. In which case we're back at PDF again.
Could also just be a temporary thing for now. Wasn’t long ago when signing things over the internet wasn’t a thing. People adapt slowly to changing technological advancement. Businesses can take even longer to adapt (requires then to fail + a new generation to bring along new ways with them and supplant the old way).
I haven't actually printed a document in years, but I export PDFs pretty regularly. When sharing documents with enterprise customers, it's far more reliable to share a PDF than to share a link to a document which is often restricted due to access rules on my side or firewall rules on their side.
Submitting assignments as pdf’s is extremely common at Universities. It feels like literally everything needs to be a pdf.
Also, when sending something to a client, it’s way more professional to send them a pdf document as an attachment they can open right in their browser instead of some obscure google docs / notion link.
I don't recall the past time I tried to print any document. And given that I don't own a printer and haven't been to the office in years, it must've been a while.
That's the point though. If you frequently have to convert documents to PDF or print them then you shouldn't be using Notion. Not having to worry about these use cases gives these news apps a huge amount of flexibility to evolve their UX. Otherwise every single document editor will continue to look and work like Word, as they have done for the last 30 years.
When creating docs only meant to be consumed online, the page breaks have gotten in my way before many times. Splitting up paragraphs because they don't fit on a page etc.
So I can see this change having a big effect on consumers. If by "how big a change" you meant "would anyone even care", I think people will care, yes. Including me.
How big a change was it to implement? I don't know.
Note in addition to not having page breaks, it appears to have several "responsive" features added too (from the OP description, I haven't played with it yet myself). Lines wrap at whatever your screen size is (including zoom level), and there is apparently some screen-size-responsiveness to at least some images too.
I couldn't say how difficult this was to implement, having no idea what the code is like, and knowing that large legacy codebases can make naive predictions of how difficult a given change might be unreliable.
Our org does a lot through google docs. Every single doc I created I had to fight the stupid page breaks. Like, I was never gonna print the thing so knock it off, google!
It looks prettier, it allows you to put blocks bigger than the content. For example you can have the content to be fixed sized 800px and then inside the content put a large table or an image that is full width, and it can also feel like a static website. That what Notion does, you can "publish your page to the web" that gives a public URL that anyone can visit, without feeling like they are inside Notion
The last time I printed something written on google docs was probably 2012 or so, a printed copy of my resume
Limiting my docs to a IRL format doesn't make much sense to me, page breaks make no sense, with H1/H2/H3 etc you can just navigate the doc that way, and internal links work etc. No need to say "check out the flurple widget subsection on page 92" you just slack/email them the link to the subheader or H3 or whatever and bam they're there reading what you need them to look at, similar to markdown docs on github, but with all the manual formating GUI'd away.
Thanks for your insights, that's really interesting. Also, if you are putting the same amount of attention to detail and focus on pragmatism over beauty that Zoho Mail uses, I think you'll kill it. I'm by no means dogging on Zoho Mail, I think it's good looking. But the reason I love it is that it's loaded with features/settings, and it's done in a way that is intuitive and highly usable.
No connection to Zoho other than being a happy mail customer
A tangential question on Zoho Writer: why isn’t there any information on pricing (or a statement that it’s free)? I looked for pricing links. I even went to the resources page and searched for pricing and found no results. The very first thing I need to know when looking at an online platform is what kind of lock-in exists, how I can safely try it out and how much time I should invest in trying it out. The Writer pages don’t help me in this regard. I’m on mobile using Firefox Focus, if at all this happens to be a browser and/or ad blocker issue.
Hi, sorry about the confusion. We didn't have a pricing page because the app itself is free for individuals (along with a bunch of other editors as well for spreadsheets and powerpoint presentations). You can sign up with your email account right away and start using.
We do have paid plans in case you need to onboard a team and want access to a bunch of other apps as well - https://www.zoho.com/in/workplace/
It's "free"... but as a SaaS office suite, the documents (along with any attached images, etc) are stored in the cloud. And if you're not paying for WorkDrive, then the storage limits (if any?) are not really documented or clear at all.
I recently signed up for Zoho mail hosting, after Google announced the sunsetting for their legacy free customers. But the mail plans don't come with WorkDrive access. So even though I'm a paying customer to get IMAP access, I haven't really touched any of the Zoho office suite apps yet because I simply don't understand what my caps and limitations are.
One piece of UX/design feedback -- the red color on 'START WRITING" triggers an automatic response that I've done something wrong or that a site is trying to warn me about something. I don't think a lighter shade/different color would trigger the same response
I just hope the industry doesn't "move on" from print-focused word processing and start treating it like a second class citizen. Some of us target actual print: Books, technical manuals, posters, pamphlets, brochures, etc. and Docs is still basically decent "poor man's desktop publishing". Trying to layout a document for print when you don't have WYSIWYG page boundaries is a nightmare.
I don't think we ever will or even should ditch paper formats. It will always have its place in legal or any other industry that relies on formal documenting.
My selfish reason: take the most popular paper format - PDF. A PDF created thirty years ago, is viewable today and will be preserved intact and viewable thirty years from now. I won't be able to say the same about a Coda or Notion doc. With all that dynamic blocks pulling data from all over the internet, I don't even think it's possible.
But you could have made a similar critique of PDF 30 years ago: it started as a proprietary format vastly more complicated and fragile than plain text documents. Plain text documents had existed for decades and would continue to exist. Nonetheless, the benefits of the then-new PDF format were so great that it was eventually standardized.
There is no "Google Docs" format, though - you have no idea how Google is representing your data, or if there even is any single "blob" that is your file (and even if there is one on the server side, AFAIK you can't get it). I'm not very familiar with Notion, but it seems like it's probably the same way. That means there's no chance of "Google Docs" or "Notion" becoming a standardized format. At least with a proprietary standalone format you (or the community) has a chance at reverse engineering it.
Don't forget passing around Excel documents. I'm not a lawyer, but I've read accounts of this from enough to think it's a whole thing and not an isolated phenomenon.
Not to mention that having any kind of client-related document on an online service like Google that's indexing the content (at the least) is probably a violation of attorney-client privilege.
<sigh> I guess I'm old fashioned but I really like being able to print things (even if sometimes not to real paper).
eg. I print / save websites' ToS to PDF all the time. Over the last few years (especially from Chrome) the result looks increasingly garbled, nothing like what's on my screen. God forbid figuring out how to produce them as exhibits for litigation.
Paper-sized, static content also tends to be a convient dimension for reviewing material of substance (eg. think academic papers).
Often during tax season, or when reviewing database models or complex business logic workflows I'll print the spreadsheets / ERM / flowcharts across large 11x17 sheets that get tiled up on the walls or littered across the floor effectively giving me infinite screen space. Humans are built for working spatially like this rather than clicking back and forth endlessly between tabs. (And incidentally, coworkers have been amazed how much more efficient we become being able to crowd around such an exposition together). I'll keep doing that until wall-sized, surround-you-on-four-sides touchscreens become commonplace (or VR ergonomic enough you can't tell you're in it) along with annotation tools that match the intuitiveness of cutouts and sticky tape.
And if I have to read hundreds of pages worth of literature I still prefer to do it on paper and save myself the eyestrain.
Not bashing the new tech, it sounds cool, I just fear it will make rendering to more traditional layouts more difficult.
Is your criticism limited to the CRM tool? I've had nothing but great things to say about Zoho, but I haven't used the CRM tool. Are your criticisms for Mail?
XML is a document. A relational database is a relational database. Both can be used to create a tree structure. Notion does it wit a "block" table, each block having a parent block id, and a list of child block ids, allowing tree traversal in both directions.
Once you're into a relational model you can start treating your forest of trees as a big graph if you want to (though you don't have to). And you can edit nodes individually without having to iterate the entire document.
But assuming you're trying to maintain the tree structure you still have many of the same issues. Each node will need to entail the context of its parent, which means that you'll need to know things like transitive closures in order to know if a parent node affects a child (e.g. deletion) or if a child affects a parent (e.g. re-render tree). Or if you move a node do you have to re-create pointers below it? And tracking history could get complicated because it might span both the content of the node and the tree structure metadata (e.g. can you undo a change where the text was bold and a block was moved around). Where do you put transactions?
I'm not saying this is the same as XML, just that you can't magically escape all of the downsides. It's a fun problem to solve!
XMl is format, not a document. XML can be used to express whatever data structure you want. For the user it has little meaning whether the backend is using xml, json, a sql- or nosql-database. The interface and workflows are hiding it all away.
A SQL database, with indexing configured correctly, allows you to look up a row in O(log(n)).
A bag of XML bytes doesn't give you that. It takes, at best, a SAX parser to do an O(n) scan through the whole document to find stuff. Most DOM implementations give you O(1) indexing by ID, but they require you to parse it first, and that's going to take O(n).
The problem isn't creating the XML file. The problem is querying it later, after you've dumped it from RAM to disk, you have to load the entire thing off disk back into RAM in order to rebuild the DOM.
A database like SQLite allows you to perform structured queries at faster-than-O(n) speed straight off the disk.
Is there some reason why you can't save the DOM or other datastructures that you help you query/manipulate the XML?
A database isn't a set of flat-file CSVs even though that's all that is actually needed to do everything that people do with databases (albeit one operation at a time). (The data may be normalized but the datastructures aren't necessarily.)
Instead, a database is data together with some data structures (and relevant code) that are maintained to speed up operations on said data.
Why can't one persist auxillary datastructures for XML, including (but not limited to) the DOM?
A "pageless document that lives online" is also known as... a web page.
Instead of creating web pages in html, css, and js, people will now create them using familiar "word processing" and "spreadsheet" apps on Google Drive.
And these web pages come with nice fine-grained access controls -- authors can specify who is able to view, comment on, and edit their documents with a few clicks.
The way you laid out the beats of your original comment made it sound sarcastic if you read it expecting the usual off-hand snark that's prevalent on the internet, so "makes perfect sense" would turn into "makes no sense at all" - therefore seeming like the product is useless or a step back when web pages already exist.
Thank you. Your feedback is helpful: In hindsight, I can now see my comment could be misinterpreted as sarcastic, even if that wasn't my intention. (If anything, I think giving people more/better tools for creating online content is great -- with the obvious caveat that all this content will reside in "private webs of documents" controlled by a single company.)
It seems we've all come across so much (unhelpful) sarcasm on the web that whenever we see certain phrases or grammatical constructs, we are unconsciously preconditioned to think the intent is negative -- even when it isn't.
On my end, I'll try to be more mindful about my phrasing next time.
I understood it as intended, but I can see how people would read it that way. It has roughly the structure of a "it's just x with y baggage" comment at the outset and could trip that wire in the mind of someone who doesn't finish reading before commenting.
edit: more comments appeared while I was drafting. I guess it never hurts to have the same feedback framed different ways...
Speaking of editing web pages using gdocs, I implemented this approach[1] on a recent project to make an easy-to-use CMS. The server acts as a proxy to get the HTML from google docs and does some cleanup[2]. It's pretty good for simple info pages that don't require any special CSS or layout.
What ? This is not a web page, this is a text editor with no page layout. It has nothing to do with a webpage. You have the implication backward (all web documents are pageless but not all pageless documents are web pages..)
Edit: I also thought your comment was sarcastic, my bad
I prefer the process of writing up a short document describing a feature proposal or small project using Google docs over confluence. Its self contained, limited (focused) in scope and the highlighting/commenting/editing feedback loop between multiple authors is way better.
Yes. Html/css/js is to a first approximation only usable by professionals anyway. It makes no sense to require normal people to employ professionals to simply make web pages.
> If your document contains elements like footnotes, headers and footers, or watermarks, and it is converted to pageless, those elements will not be visible.
Headers and footers are print-oriented, but losing footnotes is not ok. They could have displayed on the side, or highlighted in some way to display on mouse over or click. Whatever, just make them available...
I've used the new pageless style for a while and losing footnotes was a little annoying at first, be we adapted. I don't have a perfect solution to it, there are alternatives you can do (glossary or something at the end, with a bookmark on each item, so you can link directly to it).
If you make heavy use of footnotes, don't use the new feature (as others have said). It's a tradeoff, and I mostly prefer pageless, especially when embedding images that are larger (width wise).
Just spitballing, doesn't seem like you're on the team, but a possible solution could be a little popup when you hover over a footnote like Wikipedia has. Or maybe an option to put all the footnotes at the bottom of the document, except when printing.
I agree, there's no reason to lose that feature. Just add the footnotes at the bottom of the doc, no matter how long it is and make the number references clickable to toggle between them.
I'd even go as far as say Headers and Footers should be preserved but just included once at the very top and very bottom. Unless you toggle back to page mode and then everything just works. No data loss.
Seems like an easy improvement to make to pageless mode in the short term.
I'm not a huge google fan but I write a ton and I use google docs extensively, and I have to say I'm crying tears of joy seeing this update. Just yesterday I was complaining to a colleague about how a table he put in a google doc was hard to read because a page-break in one of the rows made it look like two rows when it was only one. Ask and you shall receive! Thank you google docs devs!!!
Does anyone know of a gdocs alternative that uses DOM-based rendering? Google recently transitioned from DOM-based rendering to canvas-based rendering, which prevents extensions like BeeLine Reader [1] from working. This has created problems for people with disabilities, who rely on it.
I'm the founder of BeeLine Reader, and we are looking for an alternative platform that we can steer our customers (which include major universities) toward.
it's not web based, but how is the accessibility of open office? in theory it might be possible to compile it to WASM and get it running inside a browser
As someone who has worked with "contenteditable" and the various javascript rich text editors, I find it quite amusing that they have made this change now. One of the hardest things to implement with contenteditable/DOM is wysiwyg page splitting. Now, just after Google abandons contenteditable/DOM for its own text editor/renderer implementation they add support to disable one of the hardest features they had to implement in the old version.
You are right. Implementing line breaks and pagination algorithms that work well with tables and images - is one of the hardest problems in implementing a word processor. Basically, the newer gen folks want to leave the paper layouts behind and as a result the softwares are becoming simpler to architect - could be a good thing!
To be expected: Later they will post some statistic, which supposedly states, that "no one is using the old way anyway" and that it will be removed in the future.
I know that's not what you meant, but I just want to say that I would probably fight to the death against a redesign that would remove the page splits from my toilet paper.
I'm not so certain you'd be saving. Unless you get a TP holder with sharp metal teeth and consistently use it to get straight cuts to avoid wasting a good part of each roll on those angle tears.
The dashed line is distracting and confuses when you are using dashed lines deliberately elsewhere. Why can't we just have an infinitely long canvas of a specific width? That's what I was expecting when I heard of pageless. Was disappointed. I'm not sure why I'd want to be able to set a minimal text width and then be left with infinite margin.
yeah I use it and it works quite well but then people use footnotes and they look weird there; disallow footnotes and make that dotted grey line go away and I'm sold
also: the view is a user-setting. When I author some text I still need to think about how does it look when there is a page split (e.g. tables, figures etc) in case some of my colleagues may end up reading it in the "print layout mode.
Is there a WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get [1]) document editor that is built on a foundation of HTML/CSS, and explicitly surfaces operations that map to CSS features, like flexbox? Changing the base style just means writing CSS rules for the `p` tag! And it could maybe even encourages component / class-based styling? I imagine it could be used for creating things that may get printed out, but will also see a longer life on a web page. You could even have explicit media queries to apply only when printing! [2]
I think of something like creating a good looking resume, which may include light graphic design elements like divider lines, and might not have a strictly linear layout and put some information in a sidebar. Making something look good in Word can be really frustrating, and require jiggering with margins and column layouts. It may fall apart when you try to add a new job. It's almost a joke that if you want a good looking resume, you should use LaTeX, but that's incredibly inaccessible. So many more people know basic HTML and CSS!
I think a lot of website builders (like Webflow [3] ?) expose a lot of underlying HTML/CSS, but I suspect they also support a lot more ad-hoc graphic design elements that can really make the underlying HTML document a total mess.
I tried this the other day. I had a document with some tables that could use extra width, so I switched to landscape mode and reduced the margins. I then adjusted the width of the tables so they looked decent at 10 inches wide.
Later, I turned on pageless mode. Now the tables all had horizontal scroll bars. From TFA I see that I could change the view to medium or wide, which is a personal setting. Thus, if I use pageless mode with wide tables my view may be fine. Everyone else has a miserable experience until they find this setting.
Pageless mode is indeed a global setting. I turn on pageless mode on my document with wide tables and everyone sees scrollbars with the wide tables.
I use "view > text width" to change the text width to medium or wide. This is a personal setting. It looks better for me but is still miserable for everyone else.
Suppose I forget that I changed "view > text width" and some time later I go about creating more documents that require this setting. Now, I'm unintentionally creating content that is difficult for all others to read with no idea of the misery I'm spreading until someone complains.
It's utterly bizarre just how much Google docs seems to have dropped the ball.
It really feels like they haven't developed the product in the past 10 years. This is the first significant feature change that I can recall in a very long time other than minor UI tweaks.
Agreed. It’s really weird; because of the bundling advantage, they don’t have to be better than Notion, they just need to be good enough that the convenience factor wins out.
It’s also frustrating because if Google played to their strengths, Docs could be best-in-class; the real problem that everybody is struggling with is internal knowledge management. Why can’t Google build me a privately indexed knowledge graph of my internal docs, then let me use Google’s search to answer questions? It’s insane that this is not their product strategy for Docs. This should be “easy” to wire up, they have all of the tech already for google.com search.
People like notion because it is easier to structure nested Wiki docs quickly, but you still have the same problems eventually of needing to curate your knowledge base, and things becoming too hard to find past a certain scale.
Instead we get Data Loss Prevention and a bunch of other box-ticking features which, sure, are how you close enterprise deals to displace Microsoft. But I think they are sleeping on their vulnerability to disruption plays from the bottom of the market, and they need to invest more in building a moat here. Make the free/SMB customers delighted, and you starve potential competitors of the oxygen they need to grow into a competitor at the enterprise level.
Thanks, I wasn’t aware of that feature (and I pay for Enterprise gsuite, so that tells you something about either my attention to Google product details, or the level of advertisement of this feature :)
I do wonder if this is actually building a semantic knowledge graph of the content, vs. just providing a dynamic facade/aggregator for other apps’ search APIs, and doing “old style” text indexing/searching within Workspace services. It looks like the former based on a cursory read of the docs.
It would be more challenging to build a knowledge graph over {drive,slack,Jira,…} documents, but if they just build a knowledge graph within Workspace that could provide more reason to use Docs vs. Notion/Confluence, or Google Chat over Slack. So there is actually a strong product/market reason to build this as a native feature even if you can’t solve it for other apps.
> Why can’t Google build me a privately indexed knowledge graph of my internal docs
Not easy to do [1]. But that's what we try to to at Dokkument [2]
And also knowledge is spread around different tools, Github, monday, JIRA, Confluence, Slack. It is not all on Google Docs. And is Google is not the most integrated product
> People like notion because it is easier to structure nested Wiki docs quickly
I don't feel like it is the case. You can't retrieve anything unless you know the title of the document or you have saves the URL. Most people don't prefer Notion and some do, because they are list-addicted people, and it is easier to list documents in Notions than in Google Sheet. Notion doesn't fix any knowledge management problems compared to using Google Drive. And Confluence still makes circles around Notion in that area
I’m not convinced Googles smart knowledge engine would work in that environment, it probably relies on lots of people doing lots of searches and clicking links etc
Compared to only the searches being done by a single business and no links in documents
81% of Googles revenue is from advertising, only 7.5% is from Cloud Services (Google Workplaces and Google Cloud Platform) I think its fairly safe to assume that the majority of that cloud revenue is from their Cloud Platform, not Workplaces. So it wouldn't surprise me if its as little as 1-2% of revenue (it could easily be less than 1%). There is no surprise then that it is such a low priority for them. It's mostly a box ticking exercise to ensure that they can sell more stuff to enterprises and hold Microsoft back a little.
>I think its fairly safe to assume that the majority of that cloud revenue is from their Cloud Platform, not Workplaces.
I'm not sure I'd make that assumtion. Google workplaces makes a lot of revenue. $20/user/month * 100k users in a large company is 24MM/year. I'm sure GCP will grow faster, but Google workplaces has had more market penetration for longer.
I totally understand this vision, google docs, google sites, google drive must be really down in Google's priority list. Heck, Google Meet was down there up until two years ago.
The problem I think is that, little by little, users start stepping outside the Google bubble and they start to realize that there's clear benefits.
I used to be a 100% google person, then we started using dropbox paper for documents, notion for company wiki (and personal notes too), tandem for video calls.
In 2022, our company is using Google only for email, calendar, and sheets. Two years ago we'd be crazy to even think about that. We're up to the point were it wouldn't seem crazy to go with the Microsoft suite, to be honest.
> We're up to the point were it wouldn't seem crazy to go with the Microsoft suite, to be honest.
I think for a lot of companies not going with Office is crazy, Google docs isn't good enough, and who's wants to have 7-10 different suppliers for different products (email, calendar, sheets, docs, presentations, wiki, chat, video). Far easer to just buy one cohesive system.
There is probably an opportunity for one of the larger players to acquire the others and move back towards a cohesive platform. There would be push back but I suspect it would pay off. Imagine Airtable, Notion and Slack under one operation.
I'm heavy into Google and hard a lot of gsuite education deployed. I was always agasp at how Google just doesn't improve gdocs/sheets sometimes at all for years. why do the two programs have different table/cell markup up and even options...
It is just the bare minimum, that most people using a word processor, can understand. They probably made it to grab some market share and then stoppen right there. It is nowhere close to being a workhorse to build upon for anyone, who has any professionalism in their workings with WYSIWYG word processors. Professional documents do not make use of direct formatting. One does not simply click a "bigger font size" button thrice or the "bold" button or whatever. Google Docs is a toy and I wont consider any document created in it in any way professional.
A feeling of progress is hard to convey to users if the iceberg is mostly invisible. I assume much of the work on Google Docs is harder to see like backend improvements/scalability, rendering compatibility across platforms, file-format compatibility with MS Word (both being able to read/write with high fidelity and supporting the useful features).
But if we look at release notes for the past year, we see a sequence of smaller features.[1] These include ML-driven quick replies for comments, being easily add smart links to people/docs/lists, being able to add image watermarks, and Japanese grammar suggestions. These announcements are in small blog posts [2], and are usually covered by the tech media [3] (largely summaries with a bit of flavor or - cheekily - instructions on how to turn features off). It is hard to feel like there's major progress in Google Docs when features, even useful ones, trickle out like this. Perhaps the big release every year model isn't that bad, for communication purposes. It's just not in the DNA of Google or any online service, however.
If you look at the roadmap for Google Workspace, it's very much about collaboration.[4] This plays to the brand and strength of the online-first vision of Google Apps - it's easy to jump in and collaborate on docs, the suite works well together. I think companies that choose Google Workspace do so to transform the way they work. It's not really about just replicating the Microsoft experience on the web.
That said, I think Microsoft has done an amazing job pulling their apps to the web and adding collaboration/sync. Their online version of Word has basically no caveats, and their realtime editing is even better than Google Docs in some edge cases. So its unclear which way the market will go. Perhaps Microsoft has effectively fended off the online-first threat and can use its inertia and muscle to keep Office at the top. In any case, we'll move to a more heterogenous world where many suites or even individual tools are viable businesses.
or QUIP. I've seen QUIP quickly gain adoption in the F500. QUIP is an easy addition that augments Microsoft's suite, and expands their existing salesforce relationship.
Kudos to salesforce on a great tool, and great enterprise positioning.
I'm in the industry – have been building Outline (https://www.getoutline.com) as a collaborative team knowledge base for the last 5 years. We went digital-first with the page-less style and implemented optional page control by having a "page break" element that you can insert anywhere in the document which honestly works well.
I thought it would be a more functional, but it seems mostly cosmetic. We don't have page boundaries, but actually they are still there. I can't place text or images outside those boundaries. It's nice, but it looks better with the vertical boundaries, and I think it's more accessible from a cognitive POV to have a boundary too.
It's about time. I curse the stupid page breaks every time I use it. The chance of me ever printing a document has been near zero for decades now.
I run into the same thing with Inkscape, where it seems to assume I am drawing on a piece of paper and I have to jump through hoops to not see the stupid page borders.
Great, personally I'd prefer to properly format letters (DIN 5008-B, anyone) without the need for invisible tables. Insert graphics without them looking like the page did not load correctly and have some sort of macro, variable system to make proper use of templates. Also, I'd love to upload my company's fonts or something a simple as proper numbering in lists with lists in them, but that probably just me trying to use their business product as an actual business user.
Docs largely feels like an abandoned product, newer features don't address actual issues people have. They just add nice to haves that I could use if it wasn't so embarrassing to use docs in the first place.
FWIW, the fonts issue isn’t a technical limitation, it’s a legal/licensing one. Font foundries license by the seat, and scenarios like docs where documents can be shared outside an organization and the font travels with it are against the rules. Office online has the same issue for the same reasons.
There are exceptions, where a company has developed a font internally and owns the font directly, but those are far and few between. Even when a company has commissioned a font from a foundry, they’re usually licensing it from the foundry rather than owning it themselves as a work for hire.
(Source: googler, used to work on workspace, and through a random series of events ended up working closely with the google fonts team on this problem)
EDIT: also, you should be able to use apps script to do document generation from templates, that’s a pretty common use case.
The missing feature I find most irritating is the lack of sophisticated paragraph and character style options. Normal text plus a bunch of headings isn't sufficient for the sort of documents I need to write.
My #1 complaint about Google Docs formatting is the lack of inline/block semantic code styles, and my primary complaint about Markdown is having to spam backslashes to escape variable names and math expressions outside of code blocks (I also wish it had multicolored highlighting like Google Docs, but that's just my idiosyncratic way of taking notes on code and color-coding values by type/origin).
It removes the gaps between pages vertically, but it's not an infinte canvas horizontally like OneNote. You also can't place text in arbitrarily-placed text boxes wherever you like.
I've been using Pageless for a few days. It replaces a fixed page width with dynamic horizontal width adapting to window size, with a viewer-defined maximum width by right-clicking the unmarked horizontal ruler. I find this to be a useful feature for the most part, though it's unfortunate that showing the outline makes the room leftover for text narrower.
Having been on a bit if a documentation spree of late, this is extremely relevant and I’m glad to see it. Pages are a constant distraction to composing content. I’m always trying to format and write my ways towards clean page breaks. I’ll get it right across a multi-page doc, then need to add another piece of important info to the first page and cause cascading chaos below. I’ve tried to get better at using page breaks, but they have their own quirks and aren’t really visible nor intuitive in the typical editing flow.
Confluence is among the pageless-natives, but their PDF export looks horrible and there’s no way to fix that as a user. I reach for it when I need to, but I almost always use https://docs.new when I’m ready to start capturing an idea or notes. So I’m happy to see Google Docs offer pageless and their recent additions of slash commands. I’d rather publish more Docs and less Confluence content. Having both at a large company does create a fair measure of bifurcation but neither seems to be able to replace the other.
We try to break this approach with OrgPad (https://orgpad.com/) and propose an alternative way of working with and thinking about information. In OrgPad, you have cells (nodes/ vertexes) and connect them with one or more directed or undirected connections (links/ edges) or can leave them without a connection. This is all done using a mouse and dragging or clicking. 7-year-olds don't have a problem doing that. The cells have optional title and optional content, yes, they can be empty which show just a little square. If the cells have a title, you can hide the content, which is visually suggested by raising the cell so it drops a bit of a shadow. The cells can contain anything, text, images, files even whole websites in iframes. You can add pages inside the cell, useful e.g. when learning vocabulary. If there is only an image in the cell, we analyze it for alpha color and render a bit differently so there is no extra canvas and the image pops out more. We support links on such images too. With this, it is possible to build simple websites actually and OrgPad can mostly replace e.g. Linktree. We will improve this even more in the coming days.
Of course, when you have created an OrgPage, you have split the problem into atomic ideas mostly contained in singular cells or a groups of cells. You can with a few clicks create a presentation by basically setting up a path of views on your graph. There you go, Prezi is also covered sufficiently well.
Then you add our physical animations, just the overall clean design and powerful keyboard shortcuts and you can do pretty much the same work like with Google Docs Pageless, Miro, Padlet just a bit differently and we feel with less hassle.
This just seems like it is solving a fundamentally different problem than Google Docs/Microsoft Word. When I'm using one of those I usually want to express my ideas in a linear fashion. I see the value in your product but I would never consider it to be a replacement for a document editor
I find this an interesting edge case in writing (mostly engineering docs and strategy for work) that maybe 1% of my audience wants to print out or save as a pdf. And it’s hard to go back and restyle a document to print after it’s written.
As a result, I write in page mode as a hedge against the people who like pages since it’s easier to write in page mode than to do the boring reformats after the writing is done.
I really am happy to see the direction Google is taking with enhancing the productivity suite — from the new integrated view in Gmail, to linked embeds in Docs, to Smart Chips, and soon Tasks in Docs.
These are major updates but aren't too intrusive.
Project management is still not really available the same way it is on Asana, ClickUp, and the likes, but it's really making us do more in Google Workspace.
I'm aware this isn't their primary use case, but the biggest feature missing from GDocs that moves me to notion / etc. is the lack of built in support for codeblocks. If they had that I really feel I would move most of my doc-writing here.
The way I've gotten around that is to create a table that's 1 cell, add inner-padding, and format it with consolas & 12pt ft...etc. Total PITA to do each time you want to copy in code.
google: You see, consumers can now scroll left/right as well as up/down, and content is more flexibly viewed.
observer: You mean...like a web page?
google: no, no...its like...its like...well, its...Um, content that can be authored by non-techies which consumers can view online with lots more flexibility and freedom...Hey, these consumers can increase/decrease font sizes, etc. Cool, right?
observer: So...Um, its like MS Frontpage?
google: No, no, its more sophisticated than that. Um, maybe we're not explaining it right. Its more complex than what somrything like Frontpage can make...or well, actually its just easier for content creators to use...i guess.
observer: Oh, so its like Dreamweaver circa-early-2000s??
I was expecting that it will allow writing anywhere on the pageless screen like OneNote does and will have blocks similar to OneNote. It doesn't. It's still restricted by the page size limit. Don't understand how it's an infinite page for screens.
I keep all of my notes in a single Google Doc called “notes”. The top contains an index with bookmarks to different categories eg health, business, etc. It’s so big and bloated and is barely usable. I am optimistic that an “infinite surface to work on” will help make my notes usable again.
I am sure Docs had this years ago (like maybe a decade ago) - and I recall being really annoyed when all these artificial pages appeared in documents I just didn't think of in a paginated way. It's nice to have it back.
(Disclaimer: not a Googler, my opinions are not my own and should be seen as the official position of my employer, this comment is confidential and is meant only to be read where it is posted)
Perhaps footnotes should convert to notes like the ones you have on Google sheets.
Finally. Every time I create a new doc, the first thing I do is make each page seamless, although it still has a line between each page. In some cases page breaks make sense, but definitely the majority web use case is a long running single page.
I excitedly enabled this right away on one of my docs only to see that it breaks columns. They’re stacked vertically with a line saying this should be a new column. Can’t believe it was launched in this state.
It's interesting how the documents industry is moving from print oriented legacy softwares (Google Docs, Word) to block based, app-ish, smart canvases (Notion, Coda, etc).
Also both Microsoft & Google have adopted completely different strategies to compete in this market. Microsoft launched Loop as an entirely new app while Google is incorporating these blocks as smart chips in Google Docs itself. Both strategies have their own pros and cons.
My bet is on Google Docs style, because this means a group that's already invested in traditional document making skills (legal professionals, academic professionals, etc) will be able to incrementally step up their game without their workflow being completely destroyed. Sure, this will slow down the pace with which Google Docs can innovate and evolve - but overall it helps the older generation to smoothly transition over to the new age document editing, which is great.