G Suite (formerly Google Apps) recently introduced new features designed to speed up and simplify the way you work.
- Action Items
To help keep your projects moving, when you type phrases like “Ryan to follow up on the keynote script,” or “Andrea to schedule a weekly check in” on desktop, Docs will suggest an Action Item to assign to the right person, using Natural Language Processing (NLP).
You can also manually assign an Action Item to someone in the Docs, Sheets and Slides desktop and mobile apps by mentioning their name in a comment and checking the new Action Item box. The assignee will get an email notification and see the Action Item(s) highlighted with a blue bar when they open the file.
- Badges
The next time Action Item assignees visit Docs, Sheets, Slides (or Drive) from their laptops or mobile apps, they’ll see a badge on any files with Action Items assigned to them, plus any unresolved suggestions that others have made to their files.
- Forms
Launching November 2, G Suite will predict the type of question you’re asking and suggest potential responses for you to choose from.
Let’s say you’re planning an all-day event at the office and need to know which day works best for your team. When you type “What days are you available next week?” Forms will determine that “Checkbox” is the ideal question type, and generate related response options that you can add one by one or all together.
Launching November 9, there will be a new “File upload” question type. Your respondents can now upload files from their computer or Drive — all of which are collected for you in a new Drive folder. Note: This feature is only available in Forms shared within the UMICH domain.
- Voice commands
G Suite added more ways to format and customize content with commands for changing text color, deleting words, inserting links and comments, plus a number of other ways to format, hands-free.