Document previews

Google has released document previews for mobile, after they had been available on the web for a while. When you hover over a link in the editors, you see a preview. Big thing, you say? You wait!

It will also preview web addresses, a nice bonus.

How it works

In the editors (Docs, Sheets, Slides), whenever hover over a link, you will now see more information about the linked content without having to open it.

If you link to another Google file (Docs, Sheets, Slides, Drawing, Jamboard), you will see a preview. If you are in Google Docs and preview a link to another Google Docs file, you can actually see a floating window you can move around.

Links to Office files are supported, too, as long as they are stored on Drive, as are PDFs. More files may be supported. Forms and Sites are not supported.

Pro tip: Pasting a link and then clicking "Replace URL with its title" saves you extra clicks!

Let's let Google explain how it works.

Such a small feature - why is this worth a blog post?

Welll, these are my favorites (forwarding Chat messages, anybody?). It touches all services. It integrates the services. It reveals a bit about where G Suite is going (in the right direction!). It is immediately useful in half a dozen ways and you probably find more.

Create link collections easily

Document previews make creating and maintaining link collections in any of the three editors very easy.

Document previews make creating and maintaining link collections in any of the three editors very easy. An example can be found in the idea for a daily log, using Docs.

Monitor content

Besides a pretty thumbnail, the window shows you the title, the owner and when the document was last updated. This is efficient when monitoring link collections or single, important documents you use in your content.

Bonus feature: If you drop in raw URLs, you can convert convert them to nice titles with one click. Even less typing!

Make fewer mistakes

URLs contain long codes so that they cannot be guessed. It is easy to insert the wrong URL, or the same URL twice. Thanks to the preview function, you can check your own work without opening every single link again.

Navigate faster

By selecting the right title and the right thumbnail, you can open the right document no matter what the link's title says. In the case of Docs, you can even read the linked Document without opening the link.

Why it matters

First and second class links

You could already refer to every item in G Suite using links - and also to other items, stored in different systems or on websites. It did not make much of a difference where an item was stored.

This update subtly introduces a rift. Links to files stored on Drive will be first class links, "smart links". Everything else will be "dumb links" because Drive cannot look into them*. If you paste a link to a document on a file server, on your learning platform, on a website, it will be the same old jumble of characters - no preview, no last updated date, nothing.

*Drive cannot show you previews you have no access rights to. That will not change.

Keep everything in Drive

This update is all about dropping the ball less: Collections of links will work better when everything is in Drive. For an ideal user experience, both your collection of links and the content you are pointing to would ideally reside on Drive.

People may notice that some links will look much poorer than others and, when clicked, take the team out of the whole collaboration experience. Those files may then get uploaded into Drive, instead of lingering on local servers.

I hope you liked the musing on a seemingly insignificant feature - there is always more than meets the eye, especially for G Suite-wide changes such as these, no matter how small and simple they look on the surface. And still, the most important thing is that they are useful, which I am sure they are. I cannot live without this feature anymore. Thank you for reading!

#docsPublished 2020-09-17 by Holger Matthies.Modified 2020-09-17 by Holger Matthies.

Page updated

Report abuse