The feature should make it easier to collaborate on spreadsheets

Sep 6, 2012 10:11 GMT  ·  By

Apart from making documents available at any time, anywhere in the world, Google Docs' biggest feature is collaboration. With the new generation editors in particular, which enable real-time collaboration, the feature has become very important to companies and organizations.

But it's not always possible to have all the people working on something online at the same time.

People make changes when they can, so it helps to be able to follow what's been added or modified since the last time you looked at the document.

That's especially true for spreadsheets, which is why it's nice to see that the discussion feature is now available here as well, after being built into the document and presentation editor.

Discussions allow all the people involved to have their say, comment on changes, or debate on how to do things, without clogging up the interface too much.

"If a cell has a comment in it, you'll see an orange triangle in the upper right corner and when you hover over the cell you'll see the full discussion," Google explained.

"The total number of comments are also tallied up at the bottom of the screen on the sheet tab, and hovering over the comment icon shows all the comments on that sheet," it added.

"And just like you’re used to with comments elsewhere, you can +mention someone to automatically include them in a discussion and send them a notification via email—and they can even reply to the comment without leaving their inbox," Google also said.

The previous comments in spreadsheet will be saved as notes, but will not be integrated into the discussion feature.

The Notes feature will also continue to be available if you want to add something outside of discussions. Overall, the addition should make it easier to collaborate on spreadsheets that probably require the most comments and coordination.