Mar 16, 2011 15:31 GMT  ·  By

One of the great features of Google Docs is the possibility to comment on documents. Since collaboration is at the heart of the experience, comments have always played a big role in Docs and now they're getting a much deserved upgrade with Discussions, a greatly expanded way of commenting around a document.

The new discussions feature will only be available for new documents, for now, and is being rolled out in the next few days.

"We’re updating comments in Google Docs to facilitate rapid and seamless discussions and integrate with email in an intuitive way," Nick Cooper, Software Engineer at Google, announced.

"To start, we’ve improved the discussion flow by adding ownership and edit rights to individual comments. Each comment now has a timestamp and profile picture," he wrote.

This makes it easier to see who made what comments. Another interesting addition is the 'discussions' themselves, you can now "resolve" issues to have the comments removed from the visible document, to help with the clutter without deleting them.

You can view all of the comments by clicking on the Discussions button and even restore them by selecting "Re-open."

"We know you can’t watch all of your important documents all day to see if there are any suggestions, which is why we’ve integrated comments with your inbox," Cooper explained.

"You can now add someone to a discussion with an @mention. For example, typing @[email protected] in a discussion will send a notification email to Eddy with the text of your comment," he added.

Keeping up with the conversation is now easier without actually having the document open. You can be notified whenever a new comment is made or whenever someone replies to something you wrote and so on.

All of this should make discussions a lot more engaging and productive, while also not clogging up the document itself. Since collaboration is Docs' main touting point, a more intelligent comments system is a great addition.

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View past discussions in Google Docs
The new comments system in Google Docs
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