2021 in review: Ahead, aheader

What we were up to in 2021

Calendar is your pillar for returning to the office and hybrid work

• Schedule Calendar events from Chat
  You are now able to create meetings directly from Chat, inviting the people you're currently talking to.

• Chat with your guests
  You could email your guests before, now you can create an instant Chat group to discuss something in advance of a meeting. Less emails for all.

• See shared calendars when you join a group
  Google Groups are key to quickly organizing projects. When you create a group, people get access to shared drives and documents shared with the group, get access to Chat spaces and now get an email about shared calendars that you can add to your Google Calendar.

• Offline support for the web
  No internet connection at home? No problem! All Google tools are now available offline (without installing weighty programs that drag down your laptop's performance and need to be updated!). Be sure to enable offline support in settings.

• Ability to forward invites
  Forwarded invites now work, so you can easily bring your coworker along.

• Room replacements
  Returning to the office, but your conference room is too big? Did your reservation get canceled? Those who already use Calendar to manage their reservations can now benefit from automatic room suggestions, giving you a room nearby, just the right size.

• Split working hours
  All of us need to protect certain times to make hybrid work possible. You can now have as many working hour blocks per day as you like, so you can let people know what time you pick up the kids on Tuesdays, what time you aren't available because humans need to eat, that you care for your elderly relative on Friday mornings. You won't reveal the "why", of course.

• Working locations
  Friday is your home office day? Monday you're at the client? Let people know in advance - true hybrid work requires clear communication.

• Snooze desktop notifications
  "Just five more minutes" on Windows/Mac notifications is now second nature, but that was not possible last year.

• Google Maps in the side panel
  Yes. Just yes.

• Holidays split into "public" and "other"
  Adding your country's holiday schedule to Google Calendar is a super power. Better scheduling, friendlier conversations (happy Divali!). And the one from your client's HQ. And your Acceleration Center. For some calendars, only the public holidays may interest you, so calendars with only these are now available.

• Joining meetings virtually or in person
  Let your colleagues know whether you'll be there or dial in. Nobody will have to wait for you to never show up, and people can resize their meeting rooms if 50% are dialing in.

• Time insights
  Calendar has a new view that summarizes how your week is going, compares it to other weeks and makes it easy to see where you are spending your time.

• Meeting notes
  One button creates a Google Doc with all important information already filled out. It looks good, is attached to your event and can be collaborated on.

• Out of office is displayed in Docs, Slides, Sheets comments
  Plussing someone in, then nothing happens? Not with Google Workspace, you'll see a banner when someone is out of the office (BEFORE plussing in!).

Chat has integrated with Calendar, gotten a completely new interface and is ready to expand dramatically

• Spaces
  Chat rooms have been renamed to "spaces", which seems like another rebrand - but keep watching Google Chat over the next year and remember it all started with what seemed a rebrand. Google has announced that spaces will be bigger, more manageable, have inline replies, presence, polls, enhanced bot support and can (optionally) make rooms discoverable - Spaces will be your go-to destination for help desks, project Q&A rooms and office hours.

• Auto-suggest 1:1 and group chats
  Saying "sorry, I'm late" and "Thanks for the meeting, here is some more material" has never been easier, thanks to Calendar and Chat starting to talk to each other.

• Groups and Spaces (almost) merge
  Some love them, some hate them - your default room type is now "unthreaded" and dispenses with multiple conversations, looking almost like groups. Also, your group chats can now be converted to (unthreaded) spaces. And you can now add people to group chats.

• New user interface
  You may not remember, but Chat looked differently not too long ago. In May, Chat received the biggest update ever. Google made Gmail's Chat and Chat on the web look the same and removed an outdated Chat program from the desktop.

• Status messages
  Custom statuses with expiration dates and emojis are less than half a year old.

• Customizable notifications
  You are in charge of how Chat notifies you - go from a Twitter feed to Zen in two clicks, or customize it down to threads.

• Hide notifications when you're presenting
  The most frequently requested feature when Chat replaced Hangouts: How to hide your side chatter when you share your screen? Chat and Meet now say "Content hidden" when you're sharing your screen.

Docs has become a lean, mean collaboration machine

• People chips
  You can now insert good-looking people chips instead of typing out names. That enables contact lookup and avoids spelling mistakes.

• Even more chips
  Your links can now be chips, your dates and meetings can now be chips - looking clean and bringing more function to your audience.

• The universal @ menu
  You can now insert all the chips, people references, links and even design elements and formatting by just typing "@".

• Landscape (per section!)
  And a sigh of relief went through the organization.

• Comments can now be filtered
  Very busy important documents can have lots of comments and notifications. You can now determine what to be notified about (that lets you subscribe to all comments on documents you don't own!). Docs also filters notifications to focus on those you need to action.

• Comments with Smart Reply
  Smart replies are AI-generated snippets like "Thanks!" and "Be concise, Holger". They already speed up our work in Gmail and Chat. Now, you receive those suggestions in comments as well.

• Show editors
  Everyone loves the Sheets feature where you can see who edited a cell. Guess what - Docs does it too, up to the character. Find out who changed your spelling to British English by highlighting any passage. Collaboration requires control and you just got the most detailed control possible, when you need it.

• Image placement above or below text, Watermarks, Embedded Office files
  More creativity, less headache when upgrading legacy files.

• Enhanced braille mode
  Collaboration equity requires all can read your documents. That works even better now, out of the box.

Meet is now our best platform for (very) large web conferences

Meet runs rings about the competition, and so do we users. We tracked over 50 releases, one significant update every single week. Here is some of what you got this year:

• 500 participants
  As we doubled down on Meet, Meet doubled in size.

• New hardware devices
  Meet has launched new Logitech-powered hardware devices many companies are putting into their offices.

• Troubleshooting & performance help
  Meet will let you know if something is up with your computer or internet connection. That is helpful for quickly determining what's wrong - and seeing that it's in 99% not the Meet service, but your nephew downloading Game of Thrones in 4K or Windows apps keeping your processor busy.

• Self-check before you join
  Meet's "green room" now allows you to record a quick video of yourself to test how everything looks and sounds before your important call.

• New interface
  Meet had a big, white bar that was subject to endless discussions. Now it's black and everyone is happy. That new interface brought you super fast resizing of video feeds when your 49 friends join or silky-smooth transitions when someone presents. That same interface is now available for hardware devices, too.

• Setting up breakout rooms ahead of time
  The extremely popular breakout room feature can now be used before people join, so that everyone joins their assigned room.

• Closed captions in multiple languages
  Non-English speakers might not remember, but German, Portuguese, Spanish and French captions were added recently.

• Background replacement on mobile
  On the train? In front of mount washmore with your laundry? Nobody will know.

• Present from Docs, Sheets and Slides
  Screensharing can now be started from our editors, much faster than the other way around.

• Co-hosts
  How can you keep 500 participants and 100.000 live stream spectators organized? By making your team co-host. Meet is our only tool with this capability.

• Quick access and Meet safety
  Your event needs full control, over who (even within your company) can join, speak or record? Meet is your go-to tool.

Sheets

• Named ranges & Customize chart elements.
  Named ranges can be used in formulae and to navigate complex sheets. All these features make for easier upgrading your Excel files.

• Theme colors
  Easily determine standards to keep your sheet looking professional.

• Intelligent formula, function suggestions
  Sheets will now read your mind while you're working and suggest just the right formula.

• People chips
  We can never have enough chips, anywhere. (I wish they were in Sites already.)

Other noteworthy innovations

• Contacts: Full-page contact pages
  Google Contacts used to show a small popup screen when you viewed someone's profile. That has been redesigned, giving you all the space you need.

• Drive: Editing Office files is now the default
  A small, but important change: In the past, clicking MS Office files opened a preview. Now, it will launch Docs/Sheets/Slides.

• Forms: Save your replies
  Start to reply to a complex form, then finish later (or on another machine).

• Gmail: Expanded delegate limits
  You can now hyperscale your team mailboxes - the old limit of 25 delegates is gone.

• Gmail: External labels
  Gmail will let you know if someone outside of your company is copied, an essential security feature.

• Jamboards: Version history
  Collaboration requires control, I don't get tired of repeating it. You will only relax if you know everything is transparent and mistakes can be fixed easily. Jamboards join all other editors in having a full-blown, revertible history. "Who deleted the page?" is a thing of the past.

• Sites: Customize text, styles and everything else
  Previously, Sites could only use built-in styles. Now, you can customize the living daylights out of Sites. True corporate branding is now possible.

• Sites: Templates
  Sites gained templates, so you can start with our beautiful corporate identity that does all the customization work for you.

• Sites: Copy single pages
  In Slides, you can start a new document by copying only selected slides. The same thing is now possible in Google Sites. This enables you to break up complex pages, or to steal selectively and start quicker.

• Slides: Placeholders in files & templates
  Placeholders are graphical elements that beg to be replaced with text, images etc. This allows us to refine our templates, making them Holger-proof and consistent.

• Slides: New reviewing experience on iOS
  If your director lives on an iPad, you want to deliver your presentations and suggestions using Slides.

• Tasks: New user interface
  Tasks now allows you to see several lists at once on mobile. The web editor has switched to easy inline editing. To top things off, Tasks gained a new logo (yay).

That was not it yet, the year isn't over and neither are the improvements. We can all look back at an amazing year, pat each other's back and relax before things speed up in earnest in 2022. Share this post with anyone who thinks that "nothing really changed". I wish you the best holiday season, and do try to relax before Google Workspace takes it to the next level in 2022. You have been warned! Thanks for reading!

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