Los Anglels — Relentlessly striving to trounce its rivals, search engine behemoth Google on Monday unleashed a revamped interface for “Google Docs” making it more visually appealing and promises to promote greater productivity as it seeks to improve its cloud-computing collaboration application for documents.
Around a year ago Google enhanced the document-storing capability for its Docs application, allowing users to upload large graphic files, .zip folders, RAW photos or personal videos in addition to the documents, spreadsheets, presentations and PDF files the application always accepted, so that they are then available wherever the user happens to log into Google Apps.
In a blog post today, Google said it is now addressing the need of the hour to better refining the search capabilities to organize the number and variety of files users can access in one place.
A move that completely altered the service into something not unlike the oft-rumored but never delivered “GDrive“. And now the company is going a few steps further.
“Many of you have been benefiting from the ability to upload any file to Google Docs,” reads a blog post from Bangaru. “With more files and a variety of file types in one place, it becomes more difficult to organize and find what you need quickly. As a result, we are happy to announce that, over the next couple of days, we will be rolling out a refresh to the documents list, aimed to make it more useful to find, explore and share all your files stored 100 per cent on the web.” The interface changes, he says, represent an attempt to make files more manageable.
The enhancements are all bundled toward making Docs a more important collaboration software player as the company seeks to place Google Apps against Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite and SharePoint, Zoho and other collaboration suites.
Docs now supports a large number of built-in filters to make it easier to sift through a pile of files down to a handful. In addition to old standby filters like “Owned by me,” users now have access to filters such as “Public on the Web,” “Not in collections,” or they can filter by document type. There are also filters for “Images” and “Videos.”
Google Docs new file interface
Google also providing a priority sorting feature that first appeared in Gmail, which as the name implies, sorts files using signals of relevance, as an option in all views. In essence, the company automatically creates a folder of files that its algorithms believe are particularly important to you.
“Priority sorting is like Gmail’s Priority Inbox, in that we look at a number of signals to put your most relevant files at the top of the list,” Banguru said.
“This is really great. I use Docs to store all of my pictures in a way to get around the 1000 file album limit in Picasa Web Albums. Docs is becoming much more image friendly, and would love for Docs to continue the trend by supporting image tags and facial recognition,” said a user named Philip.
The company also unveiled a new preview panel on the right side of the document list so that users may see a preview thumbnail and sharing settings. Furthermore, users can start playing videos directly from the preview panel or from the video player in Docs. Photos now open for viewing via a slide show format. See samples of the new features in this blog post.
Google Docs slideshow
The company also introduced a new default file category known as Home view, where you can actually use your own judgment to decide which files are most important to you, which lets users remove files by right-clicking the file and selecting “Don’t show in home.”
Finally, eliminating its file folders, the search engine giant now offers what it calls a new “Collections” tab that replaces Folders in the left navigation bar and will include labels and folders. To be clear, a file can live in multiple collections, just like with Gmail labels. Collections can also be stored hierarchically, just like folders on your desktop. And of course, collections can be shared, just like you can share docs.
The enhancements will be rolled out to all Docs users over the next couple of days, so make sure to check the application for changes and a “guided tour,” said Bangaru.
These refurbishments are the latest of a string of significant changes to Google Docs stretching back to April, when the company rewrote the application with a new JavaScript layout engine and HTML5 to speed up the application’s document, drawing and spreadsheet editors.
The updated design was spotted a week ago as it was being tested by Alex Chitu, who maintains the Google Operating System blog. Google Apps for Business customers who do not have the “”Enable pre-release features” box checked will have to wait a few weeks to see the new Docs.