Fewdocument editorscan rival the sheer convenience and simplicity ofGoogle’s Workspace suitecomprising Docs, Sheets, and Slides. These utilities offer seamless sync across operating systems, convenient sharing, and a clean UI for sharing ideas and collaborating through comments and suggestions. However, the comments section UI in these apps has ample room for improvement. Google is finally addressing those concerns alongside a slight visual update to modernize the UI.
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Google’s Workspace files are shareable through links and exclusive email invitations for collaboration. Invited people can share their thoughts on the file content by leaving comments appended to selected text. However, too many comments and their replies from multiple collaborators can quickly become challenging to navigate, especially if you’re the one tasked with implementing suggested changes.
Thankfully, Google recentlyannounced an overhaulof the comments section in Docs, Sheets, and Slides. To explain, we’ll use Docs as an example, but the same changes apply for other Workspace utilities too. When you use theCommentsbutton beside therevision historybutton on the web, a new sidebar with the comments opens up. Instead of drowning in a sea of feedback, Google has aFor yousection featuring only the comments you need to act on, such as those you’re tagged in. The other tab,All comments, displays all the comments in a sidebar. You can also activate this view underView→Show all comments.
you may click on individual comments to expand them individually, or close the sidebar to see the expanded content float beside the text it’s appended to. Google calls this theExpand commentsoption in theViewmenu, and it is not available on Sheets. To get work done without the comments eating into the usable space, you can hitView→Minimize comments, which converts each comment into a circular icon on the right-hand side of the screen. Hovering on the icon brings up that suggestion and any conversation threaded below. This feature could come in handy on smaller laptop screens and compact Chromebooks, but is limited to Docs and Sheets only.
If you want to banish comments from view entirely, you may use theHide commentsoption in the sameViewmenu, and they won’t show until you choose one of the aforementioned options again.
We are already seeing these new options rolling out on the Google Docs web UI, indicating the rollout is underway. These features aren’t limited by account type, and will reach everyone using the Workspace suite by March 3.
