Demo Slam Video Reveals Upcoming Google Docs Redesign

Google Docs is becoming the premier web app and the flagship of cloud computing for the company. It's understandable then that it's getting a lot of attention. And with Chrome OS delayed but still coming in a few months, it's becoming even more important. An updated interface, apparently in testing at Google, indicates that an upcoming Docs redesign focuses on the file management part of the service.

The redesign was spotted in a Demo Slam video and is probably in testing internally. The video seems a bit too well made for this to be an oversight, but this has happened before.

However it happened, it shows that the Docs file manager is getting filters to separate files by type. Since Google Docs has supported any-file uploads for quite some time now, the ability to quickly filter documents, images or other file types is useful.

This will enable users to restrict the list to similar files. It also highlights the approach Docs is taking to file management and sorting, labels and search versus folders.

Google Docs is still fairly limited in terms of file hosting and sharing, so this portion of the service hasn't exactly taken off.

Of course, that's part of the design, the functionality is intended to supplement Docs' main purpose, as a office and collaboration suite, not to compete with existing solutions intended solely for file sharing. The 1 GB storage limit along with the file size limits doesn't help either.

But Docs and the file storage feature will play a much bigger role as Chrome OS picks up steam. With no local storage capabilities to speak of, in the traditional sense, users will be forced to use Docs, or other cloud solutions, for this.

The video also reveals the revamped top toolbar we've been seeing pop up lately and the share button associated with Google's social "layer" project, Google Me or Google +1 as it's more recently known as.