Add personal tasks from Google Chat
In Google Chat, you can now create personal tasks from individual or group messages. These will then be viewable by you in Google Tasks, the quick-access side panel, and Google Calendar if the task has a set date.
This feature allows you to more easily stay on top of tasks that come out of conversations with your coworkers via Chat. Once you’ve created a personal task, you can add a due date and description, then quickly navigate back to the conversation.
Add shared drives to specific organisational units
For selected Google Workspace editions, admins can now place shared drives into sub organisational units (OUs). Doing so enables admins to configure sharing policies, data regions, access management, and more at a granular level.
This feature is available now as an open beta, which means you can use the feature without opting-in to a specific program.
Currently, all shared drives reside in the “root” OU. As such, all shared drives are subject to the same policies. This update gives admins the option to move shared drives to sub OUs within their organisations, such as Marketing or Legal, which allows for more control over the privacy and security of the shared drive’s contents on a case-by-case basis. For example, admins can restrict sharing of a shared drive belonging to the legal department because it contains highly confidential information. Additionally, this also gives admins more flexibility over applying default sub OUs to newly-created shared drives, assuring each new shared drive subject to appropriate security policies.
With this update admins will have greater control and more options to control how their data is accessed and shared on a case by case basis.
Available to Google Workspace Essentials, Business Standard, Business Plus, Enterprise Standard, Enterprise Plus
Table templates and dropdown chips available in Google Docs to create highly collaborative documents
Google is introducing two new enhancements for our flexible, smart canvas for collaboration: dropdown chips and table templates in Google Docs.
You can use dropdown chips to easily indicate the status of your document or various project milestones outlined in your document. There are two default dropdown options:
- Project Status, which includes selections for “Not Started”, “Blocked”, “In Progress” and “Complete”
- Review Status, which includes selections for “Not Started”, “In Progress”, “Under Review” and “Approved”.
Workspace is also adding table templates, which allow you to quickly insert building blocks for common workflows such as a:
- Launch content tracker
- Project asset
- Review tracker
- Product roadmap
Cut, copy and paste files using keyboard shortcuts in Google Drive Web
You can now use familiar keyboard shortcuts Ctrl + C (or ⌘ + C on Mac), Ctrl + X and Ctrl + V to copy, cut and paste Google Drive files in your Chrome browser. This saves you time by allowing you to copy one or more files and move them to new locations in Drive, and across multiple tabs, with fewer clicks.
Additionally, a link to the file and its title will also be captured when copying a file, which allows you to easily paste them into a document or an email.
To help you more easily organise files in multiple locations without necessarily creating duplicate files, Ctrl + C, Ctrl + Shift + V will create shortcuts.
Lastly, you can open files or folders in a new tab using Ctrl+Enter, so that you can easily view multiple files at once, or use different tabs to more easily organise files between two different folder locations.
Full rollout (1–3 days for feature visibility) starting on June 13, 2022 Available to all Google Workspace customers
Take action on multiple text selections in Google Docs
In Google Docs, you can now make multiple text selections at once, and apply actions such as delete, copy, paste, or format to all selections. This will make formatting and editing documents faster by eliminating the need to make repetitive changes, increasing your overall productivity.
New idle status in Google Chat
In Google Chat on the web and Chat in Gmail, you’ll see an orange clock badge for users that were recently active in Chat, but aren’t currently active. We hope this makes it easier to determine the best time to connect with your colleagues.
Visit the Help Centre to learn more about availability statuses in Google Chat.
