14 DAY TRIAL // One of the touted features of Google Docs is collaboration and it's one of the big advantages of using the cloud office suite. But being able to collaborate and doing it easily and efficiently are different things, which is why the upgraded discussions feature in Docs is welcomed.
Discussions is a new feature that replaced the older comments with a much more powerful set of tools and functionality.
Collaborators can now have different threads, notify others by using @mentions, or get an email every time a new comment is made.
"In March, we launched discussions in Google Docs, replacing comments with discussion threads, @mentions, email notifications, and much more. This week, we’re launching a handful of improvements based on your feedback," Joseph Scarr, Software Engineering Intern at Google, wrote.
The feature has now been updated, bringing several improvements, mostly small tweaks, but which make quite a difference. For example, the piece of text on which a discussion centers is displayed at the start of the thread for better context.
"The discussion pane now shows the selected text for each comment thread, making it easy to figure out which part of the document each discussion pertained to. We’ve also given the pane a visual tuneup," Scarr explained.
A new feature has also been introduced, Document statistics, which, obviously, display viewing stats for a shared document. This enables you to see if anyone is actually reading the doc, especially important if you're sharing something publicly.
"Sometimes, discussions can get a little long and start to clutter your workspace, particularly if guy-who-always-replies takes the discussion on a tangent. Now, long discussions are automatically collapsed and expanded on click," Google described another new feature.
One of the best features of the discussions revamp is email notifications and it's now getting an update as well. Notifications will display only the latest update and the selected text at the top, while the full conversation in chronological order is displayed below.