Google Docs is getting a whole lot smarter - and collapsable?

Water is wet, the sky is blue, Google is once again late to the party

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In its eternal struggle to replicate features thatMicrosoft 365and even Office has had for aeons,GoogleDocs is getting - make sure you’re sitting down - collapsible headings.

This is good - it’ll keep documents from feeling cluttered or unruly, we’re just at a loss as to why it’s taken until 2023 for this to happen.

Theannouncement, posted on the Google Workspace updates blog, revealed that the change will arrive shortly forGoogle Workspaceand Personal users but, as tends to happen to us, we found that the feature isn’t yet available for us specifically.

Making a word processor fit for purpose

We’re not being contrarian for clicks when we assert that Google software has always been behind the times - whether it’sdeciding to chase the AI zeitgeist after Microsoft finds success in that spaceor still lacking reorderable headings in the document outline, meaning I much prefer to first draft long-form work inMicrosoft Word.

And it is a shame that Google is treating artificial intelligence (which, as we’re being urged to understand at the moment, is simply a form of machine learning) as the be all and end all.

The best way to enhance aproductivity toolisn’t to throw in features that trade on buzzwords and promises of a personal assistant to do your work for you. Less ambitious features, unconcerned with grabbing headlines but which are altogether more important at making work bearable.

Google is obviously going for a little from column A and and a little for column B with this approach. Its happy medium is something like the “smart chips” across Google Workspace, allowing documents to contain links to other ones, files, people, or events, making them better at centralising information.

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The “smart chips” are good, in that “smart” here means “convenient” rather than “literally sentient”. I feel like I’m on a theme here,  having written aboutthe ills of AI in office softwarerelatively recently, but I might like to revise what I wrote there.

This Google Docs update will finally help get your work in the right order

Google Docs is getting its own search bar to solve all your most pressing problems

We’ve also listed the best free word processors right now

It’s not so much that I need to be dazzled by innovation to keep me conscious, I just need to be able to get through the day without wanting to throw my cloud-drivenoffice softwareout of the window.

So, Google, take note: make it easy to export images from Docs without making me download a zipped .html file of the whole document, do the reorderable outline thing, and just generally step back in time to 2003. That all sounds reasonable.

Luke Hughes holds the role of Staff Writer at TechRadar Pro, producing news, features and deals content across topics ranging from computing to cloud services, cybersecurity, data privacy and business software.

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