Google is adding a dropdown menu to its sharing menus inGoogle Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Drawings, as well as the Google Drive video player. It makes copying the document’s link easier and gives you information on who you shared it with at a glance. The revamped sharing menu is rolling out across paid and freeGoogle Workspacesright now.
Once the tweak has rolled out to you, you’ll see a new dropdown arrow on the right side of the Share menu. It offers a quick shortcut to copy the link and shows you which people or which groups the document is currently available to. The current overlay menu remains in place when you need to make bigger changes to how you want to share your document. Google additionally saysin its blog postthat the space will be used to show pending access requests, which can streamline the approval process.
Google also added this new dropdown sharing menu to videos saved on Google Drive along with a new feature. Like on YouTube, it’s now possible to copy a specific link to the current time of the video, allowing you to share and reference a specific part of it only.
Google hasn’t announced whether this feature is making it to the Google Drive Android app right away. However, you can easily create a link with a specified timestamp yourself by appending “&t=x” to the link, where x is the time in seconds that you want to share. If you want to share position 1:20 of a video, you can add &t=80, for example.
Similarly, Google hasn’t mentioned if it plans any improvements to sharing on its Android office apps. Copying a document’s link in Google Docs is a rather unintuitive two-tap process right now, requiring you to hit the share button and then tap the sharing options underManage access.Only then you will see a copy link option in the top right corner.
With the convenient improvements Google made to its web apps, we can only hope that its mobile apps are in line for a better workflow soon, too.
