22 ms·

Google Docs New Feature: Pageless

464 points by eddyerburgh 5y ago

aikinai 5y ago
I excitedly enabled this right away on one of my docs only to see that it breaks columns. They’re stacked vertically with a line saying this should be a new column. Can’t believe it was launched in this state.
gtk40 5y ago
Isn't this the same as "Normal" or "Web" view that has been in MS Word for ages?
eternityforest 5y ago
Maybe we should just stop with this pageless nonsense! Pages are human meaningful location references. Stop making this stuff harder!
adrianomartins 5y ago
Welcome to 2022, Google Docs. Unfortunately there's still a long way to Notion or Dropbox Paper.
- chippiewill 5y ago
  It's utterly bizarre just how much Google docs seems to have dropped the ball. It really feels like they haven't developed the product in the past 10 years. This is the first significant feature change that I can recall in a very long time other than minor UI tweaks.
  - jfoster 5y ago
    Considering the fates of other Google products, that's a great outcome. At least it didn't end up like Gchat or Google Reader.
  - slig 5y ago
    I think it's great as this gives new companies the opportunity to eat their lunch.
  - Already__Taken 5y ago
    I'm heavy into Google and hard a lot of gsuite education deployed. I was always agasp at how Google just doesn't improve gdocs/sheets sometimes at all for years. why do the two programs have different table/cell markup up and even options...
    - Andrex 5y ago
      The table limitations in Docs are really the biggest thing that grind my gears about the service.
  - user-the-name 5y ago
  - samwillis 5y ago
    81% of Googles revenue is from advertising, only 7.5% is from Cloud Services (Google Workplaces and Google Cloud Platform) I think its fairly safe to assume that the majority of that cloud revenue is from their Cloud Platform, not Workplaces. So it wouldn't surprise me if its as little as 1-2% of revenue (it could easily be less than 1%). There is no surprise then that it is such a low priority for them. It's mostly a box ticking exercise to ensure that they can sell more stuff to enterprises and hold Microsoft back a little.
    - adrianomartins 5y ago
      I totally understand this vision, google docs, google sites, google drive must be really down in Google's priority list. Heck, Google Meet was down there up until two years ago. The problem I think is that, little by little, users start stepping outside the Google bubble and they start to realize that there's clear benefits. I used to be a 100% google person, then we started using dropbox paper for documents, notion for company wiki (and personal notes too), tandem for video calls. In 2022, our company is using Google only for email, calendar, and sheets. Two years ago we'd be crazy to even think about that. We're up to the point were it wouldn't seem crazy to go with the Microsoft suite, to be honest.
      - samwillis 5y ago
        > We're up to the point were it wouldn't seem crazy to go with the Microsoft suite, to be honest. I think for a lot of companies not going with Office is crazy, Google docs isn't good enough, and who's wants to have 7-10 different suppliers for different products (email, calendar, sheets, docs, presentations, wiki, chat, video). Far easer to just buy one cohesive system. There is probably an opportunity for one of the larger players to acquire the others and move back towards a cohesive platform. There would be push back but I suspect it would pay off. Imagine Airtable, Notion and Slack under one operation.
    - luibelgo 5y ago
      2021 revenue was $257 billion, 1% revenue is a lot of money still
    - 5y ago
  - theptip 5y ago
    Agreed. It’s really weird; because of the bundling advantage, they don’t have to be better than Notion, they just need to be good enough that the convenience factor wins out. It’s also frustrating because if Google played to their strengths, Docs could be best-in-class; the real problem that everybody is struggling with is internal knowledge management. Why can’t Google build me a privately indexed knowledge graph of my internal docs, then let me use Google’s search to answer questions? It’s insane that this is not their product strategy for Docs. This should be “easy” to wire up, they have all of the tech already for google.com search. People like notion because it is easier to structure nested Wiki docs quickly, but you still have the same problems eventually of needing to curate your knowledge base, and things becoming too hard to find past a certain scale. Instead we get Data Loss Prevention and a bunch of other box-ticking features which, sure, are how you close enterprise deals to displace Microsoft. But I think they are sleeping on their vulnerability to disruption plays from the bottom of the market, and they need to invest more in building a moat here. Make the free/SMB customers delighted, and you starve potential competitors of the oxygen they need to grow into a competitor at the enterprise level.
    - Lealen 5y ago
      It's probably not available because someone decided that it should be only available for enterprise customers, take a look: https://workspace.google.com/products/cloud-search/ https://workspace.google.com/products/cloud-search/
      - theptip 5y ago
        Thanks, I wasn’t aware of that feature (and I pay for Enterprise gsuite, so that tells you something about either my attention to Google product details, or the level of advertisement of this feature :) I do wonder if this is actually building a semantic knowledge graph of the content, vs. just providing a dynamic facade/aggregator for other apps’ search APIs, and doing “old style” text indexing/searching within Workspace services. It looks like the former based on a cursory read of the docs. It would be more challenging to build a knowledge graph over {drive,slack,Jira,…} documents, but if they just build a knowledge graph within Workspace that could provide more reason to use Docs vs. Notion/Confluence, or Google Chat over Slack. So there is actually a strong product/market reason to build this as a native feature even if you can’t solve it for other apps.
  - pradn 5y ago
    A feeling of progress is hard to convey to users if the iceberg is mostly invisible. I assume much of the work on Google Docs is harder to see like backend improvements/scalability, rendering compatibility across platforms, file-format compatibility with MS Word (both being able to read/write with high fidelity and supporting the useful features). But if we look at release notes for the past year, we see a sequence of smaller features.[1] These include ML-driven quick replies for comments, being easily add smart links to people/docs/lists, being able to add image watermarks, and Japanese grammar suggestions. These announcements are in small blog posts [2], and are usually covered by the tech media [3] (largely summaries with a bit of flavor or - cheekily - instructions on how to turn features off). It is hard to feel like there's major progress in Google Docs when features, even useful ones, trickle out like this. Perhaps the big release every year model isn't that bad, for communication purposes. It's just not in the DNA of Google or any online service, however. If you look at the roadmap for Google Workspace, it's very much about collaboration.[4] This plays to the brand and strength of the online-first vision of Google Apps - it's easy to jump in and collaborate on docs, the suite works well together. I think companies that choose Google Workspace do so to transform the way they work. It's not really about just replicating the Microsoft experience on the web. That said, I think Microsoft has done an amazing job pulling their apps to the web and adding collaboration/sync. Their online version of Word has basically no caveats, and their realtime editing is even better than Google Docs in some edge cases. So its unclear which way the market will go. Perhaps Microsoft has effectively fended off the online-first threat and can use its inertia and muscle to keep Office at the top. In any case, we'll move to a more heterogenous world where many suites or even individual tools are viable businesses. [1]: https://support.google.com/a/table/7314896?hl=en https://support.google.com/a/table/7314896?hl=en [2]: https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2021/10/easily-add-to-google-docs-with-new.html https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2021/10/easily-add-t... [3]: https://9to5google.com/2021/10/20/google-docs-menu/ https://9to5google.com/2021/10/20/google-docs-menu/ [4]: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/workspace/the-future-of-work-with-google-workspace https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/workspace/the-future-... Disclaimer: I work at Google and used to work in the division that develops Google Docs. These are all my opinions.
  - benhurmarcel 5y ago
    I find it incredible that Docs is still unable to number headings. And they're trying to sell it to large organizations...
    - rwmj 5y ago
      Also no line numbering! I can't believe they have any lawyers as customers since line numbers are essential for them.
  - zelphirkalt 5y ago
    It is just the bare minimum, that most people using a word processor, can understand. They probably made it to grab some market share and then stoppen right there. It is nowhere close to being a workhorse to build upon for anyone, who has any professionalism in their workings with WYSIWYG word processors. Professional documents do not make use of direct formatting. One does not simply click a "bigger font size" button thrice or the "bold" button or whatever. Google Docs is a toy and I wont consider any document created in it in any way professional.
- hughrr 5y ago
  Yeah even Pages is better.
- bushbaba 5y ago
  or QUIP. I've seen QUIP quickly gain adoption in the F500. QUIP is an easy addition that augments Microsoft's suite, and expands their existing salesforce relationship. Kudos to salesforce on a great tool, and great enterprise positioning.
- xhrpost 5y ago
  I've been ignoring Dropbox Paper at my company but will now try using it on my next doc. What major features would you say Paper has that GDocs lacks?
dna_polymerase 5y ago
Great, personally I'd prefer to properly format letters (DIN 5008-B, anyone) without the need for invisible tables. Insert graphics without them looking like the page did not load correctly and have some sort of macro, variable system to make proper use of templates. Also, I'd love to upload my company's fonts or something a simple as proper numbering in lists with lists in them, but that probably just me trying to use their business product as an actual business user. Docs largely feels like an abandoned product, newer features don't address actual issues people have. They just add nice to haves that I could use if it wasn't so embarrassing to use docs in the first place.
- mattzito 5y ago
  FWIW, the fonts issue isn’t a technical limitation, it’s a legal/licensing one. Font foundries license by the seat, and scenarios like docs where documents can be shared outside an organization and the font travels with it are against the rules. Office online has the same issue for the same reasons. There are exceptions, where a company has developed a font internally and owns the font directly, but those are far and few between. Even when a company has commissioned a font from a foundry, they’re usually licensing it from the foundry rather than owning it themselves as a work for hire. (Source: googler, used to work on workspace, and through a random series of events ended up working closely with the google fonts team on this problem) EDIT: also, you should be able to use apps script to do document generation from templates, that’s a pretty common use case.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- Veen 5y ago
  The missing feature I find most irritating is the lack of sophisticated paragraph and character style options. Normal text plus a bunch of headings isn't sufficient for the sort of documents I need to write.
  - nyanpasu64 5y ago
    My #1 complaint about Google Docs formatting is the lack of inline/block semantic code styles, and my primary complaint about Markdown is having to spam backslashes to escape variable names and math expressions outside of code blocks (I also wish it had multicolored highlighting like Google Docs, but that's just my idiosyncratic way of taking notes on code and color-coding values by type/origin).
lewisjoe 5y ago
I'm in the business of building an online word processor - https://www.zoho.com/writer https://www.zoho.com/writer It's interesting how the documents industry is moving from print oriented legacy softwares (Google Docs, Word) to block based, app-ish, smart canvases (Notion, Coda, etc). Also both Microsoft & Google have adopted completely different strategies to compete in this market. Microsoft launched Loop as an entirely new app while Google is incorporating these blocks as smart chips in Google Docs itself. Both strategies have their own pros and cons. My bet is on Google Docs style, because this means a group that's already invested in traditional document making skills (legal professionals, academic professionals, etc) will be able to incrementally step up their game without their workflow being completely destroyed. Sure, this will slow down the pace with which Google Docs can innovate and evolve - but overall it helps the older generation to smoothly transition over to the new age document editing, which is great.
- k__ 5y ago
  What's the benefit here? Seems like it's touted as an innovation, but the only thing I see is that page breaks are gone. Which isn't bad, I mostly use Google docs for online articles and to maintain a todo list, so things are now a bit cleaner. But it doesn't seem like a big change...
  - JoBrad 5y ago
    Right? Isn’t this just the Web Layout view that MS Word has had forever?
  - polote 5y ago
    It looks prettier, it allows you to put blocks bigger than the content. For example you can have the content to be fixed sized 800px and then inside the content put a large table or an image that is full width, and it can also feel like a static website. That what Notion does, you can "publish your page to the web" that gives a public URL that anyone can visit, without feeling like they are inside Notion
  - jrochkind1 5y ago
    When creating docs only meant to be consumed online, the page breaks have gotten in my way before many times. Splitting up paragraphs because they don't fit on a page etc. So I can see this change having a big effect on consumers. If by "how big a change" you meant "would anyone even care", I think people will care, yes. Including me. How big a change was it to implement? I don't know. Note in addition to not having page breaks, it appears to have several "responsive" features added too (from the OP description, I haven't played with it yet myself). Lines wrap at whatever your screen size is (including zoom level), and there is apparently some screen-size-responsiveness to at least some images too. I couldn't say how difficult this was to implement, having no idea what the code is like, and knowing that large legacy codebases can make naive predictions of how difficult a given change might be unreliable.
734129837261 5y ago
Finally. I had a custom CSS plugin setup to do exactly this. Took me 3 minutes to figure out.
wslh 5y ago
Seems like they are looking closely at brainstorm tools more than typical document writing. Things such as https://www.mural.co/ https://www.mural.co/ and OneNote?
kbrannigan 5y ago
Hello Ms wordpad
- esjeon 5y ago
  Exactly. RTF has been around for ages. Also, it's pretty shocking that people forgot the term "rich-text".
lopis 5y ago
I thought it would be a more functional, but it seems mostly cosmetic. We don't have page boundaries, but actually they are still there. I can't place text or images outside those boundaries. It's nice, but it looks better with the vertical boundaries, and I think it's more accessible from a cognitive POV to have a boundary too.
foxbee 5y ago
I keep trying to write markdown. I can't get use to this!
togaen 5y ago
Google just reinvented HTML documents. Great.
- falcor84 5y ago
  I for one kinda liked MS FrontPage.
  - mxuribe 5y ago
    google: You see, consumers can now scroll left/right as well as up/down, and content is more flexibly viewed. observer: You mean...like a web page? google: no, no...its like...its like...well, its...Um, content that can be authored by non-techies which consumers can view online with lots more flexibility and freedom...Hey, these consumers can increase/decrease font sizes, etc. Cool, right? observer: So...Um, its like MS Frontpage? google: No, no, its more sophisticated than that. Um, maybe we're not explaining it right. Its more complex than what somrything like Frontpage can make...or well, actually its just easier for content creators to use...i guess. observer: Oh, so its like Dreamweaver circa-early-2000s?? google: Yes, exactly! Oh wait...crap. /s ;-)
samwillis 5y ago
As someone who has worked with "contenteditable" and the various javascript rich text editors, I find it quite amusing that they have made this change now. One of the hardest things to implement with contenteditable/DOM is wysiwyg page splitting. Now, just after Google abandons contenteditable/DOM for its own text editor/renderer implementation they add support to disable one of the hardest features they had to implement in the old version.
- lewisjoe 5y ago
  You are right. Implementing line breaks and pagination algorithms that work well with tables and images - is one of the hardest problems in implementing a word processor. Basically, the newer gen folks want to leave the paper layouts behind and as a result the softwares are becoming simpler to architect - could be a good thing!
- polote 5y ago
  I dont think hardest things to implement is something Google cares of. They dont have any resources constraint
- zelphirkalt 5y ago
  To be expected: Later they will post some statistic, which supposedly states, that "no one is using the old way anyway" and that it will be removed in the future.
- Andrex 5y ago
  > Now, just after Google abandons contenteditable/DOM for its own text editor/renderer implementation Minor note, they actually made that switch 12 years ago. https://drive.googleblog.com/2010/05/whats-different-about-new-google-docs.html https://drive.googleblog.com/2010/05/whats-different-about-n...
ryankrage77 5y ago
It removes the gaps between pages vertically, but it's not an infinte canvas horizontally like OneNote. You also can't place text in arbitrarily-placed text boxes wherever you like.
- nyanpasu64 5y ago
  I've been using Pageless for a few days. It replaces a fixed page width with dynamic horizontal width adapting to window size, with a viewer-defined maximum width by right-clicking the unmarked horizontal ruler. I find this to be a useful feature for the most part, though it's unfortunate that showing the outline makes the room leftover for text narrower.
topicseed 5y ago
I really am happy to see the direction Google is taking with enhancing the productivity suite — from the new integrated view in Gmail, to linked embeds in Docs, to Smart Chips, and soon Tasks in Docs. These are major updates but aren't too intrusive. Project management is still not really available the same way it is on Asana, ClickUp, and the likes, but it's really making us do more in Google Workspace.
cs702 5y ago
A "pageless document that lives online" is also known as... a web page. Instead of creating web pages in html, css, and js, people will now create them using familiar "word processing" and "spreadsheet" apps on Google Drive. And these web pages come with nice fine-grained access controls -- authors can specify who is able to view, comment on, and edit their documents with a few clicks. Makes perfect sense.
- da39a3ee 5y ago
  Yes. Html/css/js is to a first approximation only usable by professionals anyway. It makes no sense to require normal people to employ professionals to simply make web pages.
- deanebarker 5y ago
  This is exactly what I was thinking. I read that page, and at the end, I thought "...so HTML then?"
  - raldi 5y ago
    How do three nontechnical writers collaborate on an HTML document?
    - wongarsu 5y ago
      In the real world typically with Wordpress if the target group is outside the company or Confluence if the target group is inside the company.
      - monkeybutton 5y ago
        I prefer the process of writing up a short document describing a feature proposal or small project using Google docs over confluence. Its self contained, limited (focused) in scope and the highlighting/commenting/editing feedback loop between multiple authors is way better.
- prepend 5y ago
ithkuil 5y ago
I like to be able to ditch the page splits. But I'd love to have an option to keep the "paper" shape, albeit an infinite strip (toilet paper style). All this white horizontal space distracts me
- falcor84 5y ago
  I know that's not what you meant, but I just want to say that I would probably fight to the death against a redesign that would remove the page splits from my toilet paper.
  - thfuran 5y ago
    But think of how much less paper you'd throw away in switching to one of those endless towel rolls.
    - 3np 5y ago
      I'm not so certain you'd be saving. Unless you get a TP holder with sharp metal teeth and consistently use it to get straight cuts to avoid wasting a good part of each roll on those angle tears.
      - thfuran 5y ago
        Cuts? No: https://www.domesticuniform.com/product/smoked-continuous-roll-towel-cabinet/ https://www.domesticuniform.com/product/smoked-continuous-ro...
        3np 5y ago
        ...I'll stick to my Japanese washlet, I think.
- hnra 5y ago
  Is "View > Print layout" what you're looking for? It replaces page splits (header/footer whitspace and page margins) with a dashed line.
BrianOnHN 5y ago
But content still can't be collapsed/folded below headers [1]. Because of this, docs could already able to be too big to be useful. "But outlines..." Not helpful since you can't specify to leave out sub-headings. Which means manually editing the outline every update. That's why I've moved 1000+ pages of docs to Obsidian.md this year. I highly recommend, especially if you might be adhd. Edit: to anyone interested, this YouTube channel[2] is a great primer on Obsidian. [1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/24190618/collapsing-elements-in-a-google-doc-with-google-apps-script-is-this-possible https://stackoverflow.com/questions/24190618/collapsing-elem... [2] https://m.youtube.com/channel/UC85D7ERwhke7wVqskV_DZUA/videos https://m.youtube.com/channel/UC85D7ERwhke7wVqskV_DZUA/video...
- JoBrad 5y ago
  I’m guessing you can’t have a very wide section of the doc, either. Which is honestly a good thing, in my opinion.
  - dudus 5y ago
    You can cheat and create a very wide 1 cell table with a 0pt border and put your wide content in there.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
k__ 5y ago
Google Docs remembers this pageless layout across all of my documents. Would be cool if it did so with the zoom. I always use 125% because things are too small otherwise and it always switches back to 100%.
prepend 5y ago
I find this an interesting edge case in writing (mostly engineering docs and strategy for work) that maybe 1% of my audience wants to print out or save as a pdf. And it’s hard to go back and restyle a document to print after it’s written. As a result, I write in page mode as a hedge against the people who like pages since it’s easier to write in page mode than to do the boring reformats after the writing is done.
prima-facie 5y ago
Isn't this how Google Docs worked back in the day? I remember it didn't have page breaks by default and it took them a while to implement that.
danielvaughn 5y ago
Finally. Every time I create a new doc, the first thing I do is make each page seamless, although it still has a line between each page. In some cases page breaks make sense, but definitely the majority web use case is a long running single page.
chewbacha 5y ago
Neat
pete_nic 5y ago
I keep all of my notes in a single Google Doc called “notes”. The top contains an index with bookmarks to different categories eg health, business, etc. It’s so big and bloated and is barely usable. I am optimistic that an “infinite surface to work on” will help make my notes usable again.
xnx 5y ago
Glad to see this feature return after being removed years ago after Writely was absorbed into Google.
tomasreimers 5y ago
I'm aware this isn't their primary use case, but the biggest feature missing from GDocs that moves me to notion / etc. is the lack of built in support for codeblocks. If they had that I really feel I would move most of my doc-writing here.
- glmdev 5y ago
  I use an add-on called Codeblocks. It lets you select a block of text and will format it as monospace w/ syntax highlighting in various themes. Not quite as good as native support (e.g. doesn't update dynamically), but otherwise it's pretty solid.
- bushbaba 5y ago
  The way I've gotten around that is to create a table that's 1 cell, add inner-padding, and format it with consolas & 12pt ft...etc. Total PITA to do each time you want to copy in code.
mgerdts 5y ago
I tried this the other day. I had a document with some tables that could use extra width, so I switched to landscape mode and reduced the margins. I then adjusted the width of the tables so they looked decent at 10 inches wide. Later, I turned on pageless mode. Now the tables all had horizontal scroll bars. From TFA I see that I could change the view to medium or wide, which is a personal setting. Thus, if I use pageless mode with wide tables my view may be fine. Everyone else has a miserable experience until they find this setting.
- kyrra 5y ago
  Pageless mode is a global setting on that document that the editor of the document sets, and it applies to all viewers of the document.
  - mgerdts 5y ago
    Pageless mode is indeed a global setting. I turn on pageless mode on my document with wide tables and everyone sees scrollbars with the wide tables. I use "view > text width" to change the text width to medium or wide. This is a personal setting. It looks better for me but is still miserable for everyone else. Suppose I forget that I changed "view > text width" and some time later I go about creating more documents that require this setting. Now, I'm unintentionally creating content that is difficult for all others to read with no idea of the misery I'm spreading until someone complains.
rmbyrro 5y ago
> If your document contains elements like footnotes, headers and footers, or watermarks, and it is converted to pageless, those elements will not be visible. Headers and footers are print-oriented, but losing footnotes is not ok. They could have displayed on the side, or highlighted in some way to display on mouse over or click. Whatever, just make them available...
- polote 5y ago
  Then don't use the pageless feature and you will not have any issue
  - zarkov99 5y ago
    Pageless is great, except for the loss of footnotes. Why not fix that and have the best of both worlds?
  - rmbyrro 5y ago
    If footnotes are essential, I really won't use. But I don't think this should stop us from discussing a way to possibly improving a product.
- kyrra 5y ago
  (Googler, opinions are my own) I've used the new pageless style for a while and losing footnotes was a little annoying at first, be we adapted. I don't have a perfect solution to it, there are alternatives you can do (glossary or something at the end, with a bookmark on each item, so you can link directly to it). If you make heavy use of footnotes, don't use the new feature (as others have said). It's a tradeoff, and I mostly prefer pageless, especially when embedding images that are larger (width wise).
  - jer0me 5y ago
    Just spitballing, doesn't seem like you're on the team, but a possible solution could be a little popup when you hover over a footnote like Wikipedia has. Or maybe an option to put all the footnotes at the bottom of the document, except when printing.
sequoia 5y ago
I'm not a huge google fan but I write a ton and I use google docs extensively, and I have to say I'm crying tears of joy seeing this update. Just yesterday I was complaining to a colleague about how a table he put in a google doc was hard to read because a page-break in one of the rows made it look like two rows when it was only one. Ask and you shall receive! Thank you google docs devs!!!
- patrickwalton 5y ago
  Except, the article says tables aren't supported, right?
  - Hates_ 5y ago
    Not from what I can see. Seems only features that are reliant on there being a "page": Some features are not available on pageless docs: columns, page numbers, headers and footers, page breaks, etc
  - scoopertrooper 5y ago
    Well, in the Google Workspace post there is a picture of a table. So it probably supports them. https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/workspace/delivering-new-innovations-in-google-workspace-with-smart-canvas https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/workspace/delivering-... They also feature a table in a little GIF they have on that page. https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/original_images/Docs_Pageless_Format.gif https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/origin...
llaolleh 5y ago
This is the most innovative feature Google Docs pushed out in the past 5 years lol.
kaashmonee 5y ago
when the teacher says 6 pages double spaced
analogdreams 5y ago
so.... a mural clone? currently sitting through a 2 day training class that is using mural and i do not get the obsession/love of this tool at all.
notagoodidea 5y ago
Ok nice, can we have a sane way to add a caption to a table or a figure now?
CodeIsTheEnd 5y ago
Is there a WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get [1]) document editor that is built on a foundation of HTML/CSS, and explicitly surfaces operations that map to CSS features, like flexbox? Changing the base style just means writing CSS rules for the `p` tag! And it could maybe even encourages component / class-based styling? I imagine it could be used for creating things that may get printed out, but will also see a longer life on a web page. You could even have explicit media queries to apply only when printing! [2] I think of something like creating a good looking resume, which may include light graphic design elements like divider lines, and might not have a strictly linear layout and put some information in a sidebar. Making something look good in Word can be really frustrating, and require jiggering with margins and column layouts. It may fall apart when you try to add a new job. It's almost a joke that if you want a good looking resume, you should use LaTeX, but that's incredibly inaccessible. So many more people know basic HTML and CSS! I think a lot of website builders (like Webflow [3] ?) expose a lot of underlying HTML/CSS, but I suspect they also support a lot more ad-hoc graphic design elements that can really make the underlying HTML document a total mess. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WYSIWYG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WYSIWYG [2]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@media#print https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@media#prin... [3]: https://webflow.com/ https://webflow.com/
tommoor 5y ago
I'm in the industry – have been building Outline (https://www.getoutline.com https://www.getoutline.com) as a collaborative team knowledge base for the last 5 years. We went digital-first with the page-less style and implemented optional page control by having a "page break" element that you can insert anywhere in the document which honestly works well.
qnsi 5y ago
Great job google docs team! The amount of innovation comming from this team is extreme! No competition in Sillicon Valley and worldwide
dwighttk 5y ago
OpenDoc?
kaliszad 5y ago
It is still linear/ rigid in a way. We try to break this approach with OrgPad (https://orgpad.com/ https://orgpad.com/) and propose an alternative way of working with and thinking about information. In OrgPad, you have cells (nodes/ vertexes) and connect them with one or more directed or undirected connections (links/ edges) or can leave them without a connection. This is all done using a mouse and dragging or clicking. 7-year-olds don't have a problem doing that. The cells have optional title and optional content, yes, they can be empty which show just a little square. If the cells have a title, you can hide the content, which is visually suggested by raising the cell so it drops a bit of a shadow. The cells can contain anything, text, images, files even whole websites in iframes. You can add pages inside the cell, useful e.g. when learning vocabulary. If there is only an image in the cell, we analyze it for alpha color and render a bit differently so there is no extra canvas and the image pops out more. We support links on such images too. With this, it is possible to build simple websites actually and OrgPad can mostly replace e.g. Linktree. We will improve this even more in the coming days. Of course, when you have created an OrgPage, you have split the problem into atomic ideas mostly contained in singular cells or a groups of cells. You can with a few clicks create a presentation by basically setting up a path of views on your graph. There you go, Prezi is also covered sufficiently well. Then you add our physical animations, just the overall clean design and powerful keyboard shortcuts and you can do pretty much the same work like with Google Docs Pageless, Miro, Padlet just a bit differently and we feel with less hassle.
- chipgap98 5y ago
  This just seems like it is solving a fundamentally different problem than Google Docs/Microsoft Word. When I'm using one of those I usually want to express my ideas in a linear fashion. I see the value in your product but I would never consider it to be a replacement for a document editor
renewiltord 5y ago
(Disclaimer: not a Googler, my opinions are not my own and should be seen as the official position of my employer, this comment is confidential and is meant only to be read where it is posted) Perhaps footnotes should convert to notes like the ones you have on Google sheets.
gnicholas 5y ago
Does anyone know of a gdocs alternative that uses DOM-based rendering? Google recently transitioned from DOM-based rendering to canvas-based rendering, which prevents extensions like BeeLine Reader [1] from working. This has created problems for people with disabilities, who rely on it. I'm the founder of BeeLine Reader, and we are looking for an alternative platform that we can steer our customers (which include major universities) toward. 1: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/beeline-reader/ifjafammaookpiajfbedmacfldaiamgg?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/beeline-reader/ifj...
- dorianmariefr 5y ago
  WordPress?
- dataangel 5y ago
  it's not web based, but how is the accessibility of open office? in theory it might be possible to compile it to WASM and get it running inside a browser
- Seirdy 5y ago
  HedgeDoc is a FLOSS self-hostable collaborative markdown editor in the browser: https://hedgedoc.org/ https://hedgedoc.org/
rahimnathwani 5y ago
"In this setting, there are no page breaks, images adjust to your screen size" I created a doc just now with three different pieces of content: 1. Text - stayed within the text margins, as expected 2. Table with lots of columns - used the full window (i.e. ignored text margin) 3. Wide image - stayed to the right of the left margin (i.e. ignored only the right text margin) So the image only used 60% of the browser width.
tus666 5y ago
I am sure Docs had this years ago (like maybe a decade ago) - and I recall being really annoyed when all these artificial pages appeared in documents I just didn't think of in a paginated way. It's nice to have it back. But why is there such a huge left indent of text?
robbrown451 5y ago
It's about time. I curse the stupid page breaks every time I use it. The chance of me ever printing a document has been near zero for decades now. I run into the same thing with Inkscape, where it seems to assume I am drawing on a piece of paper and I have to jump through hoops to not see the stupid page borders.
reilly3000 5y ago
Having been on a bit if a documentation spree of late, this is extremely relevant and I’m glad to see it. Pages are a constant distraction to composing content. I’m always trying to format and write my ways towards clean page breaks. I’ll get it right across a multi-page doc, then need to add another piece of important info to the first page and cause cascading chaos below. I’ve tried to get better at using page breaks, but they have their own quirks and aren’t really visible nor intuitive in the typical editing flow. Confluence is among the pageless-natives, but their PDF export looks horrible and there’s no way to fix that as a user. I reach for it when I need to, but I almost always use https://docs.new https://docs.new when I’m ready to start capturing an idea or notes. So I’m happy to see Google Docs offer pageless and their recent additions of slash commands. I’d rather publish more Docs and less Confluence content. Having both at a large company does create a fair measure of bifurcation but neither seems to be able to replace the other.
smusamashah 5y ago
I was expecting that it will allow writing anywhere on the pageless screen like OneNote does and will have blocks similar to OneNote. It doesn't. It's still restricted by the page size limit. Don't understand how it's an infinite page for screens.

464 points by eddyerburgh 5y ago

I excitedly enabled this right away on one of my docs only to see that it breaks columns. They’re stacked vertically with a line saying this should be a new column. Can’t believe it was launched in this state.

gtk40 5y ago

Isn't this the same as "Normal" or "Web" view that has been in MS Word for ages?

eternityforest 5y ago

Maybe we should just stop with this pageless nonsense! Pages are human meaningful location references. Stop making this stuff harder!

adrianomartins 5y ago

Welcome to 2022, Google Docs. Unfortunately there's still a long way to Notion or Dropbox Paper.

chippiewill 5y ago
It's utterly bizarre just how much Google docs seems to have dropped the ball. It really feels like they haven't developed the product in the past 10 years. This is the first significant feature change that I can recall in a very long time other than minor UI tweaks.
- jfoster 5y ago
  Considering the fates of other Google products, that's a great outcome. At least it didn't end up like Gchat or Google Reader.
- slig 5y ago
  I think it's great as this gives new companies the opportunity to eat their lunch.
- Already__Taken 5y ago
  I'm heavy into Google and hard a lot of gsuite education deployed. I was always agasp at how Google just doesn't improve gdocs/sheets sometimes at all for years. why do the two programs have different table/cell markup up and even options...
  - Andrex 5y ago
    The table limitations in Docs are really the biggest thing that grind my gears about the service.
- user-the-name 5y ago
- samwillis 5y ago
  81% of Googles revenue is from advertising, only 7.5% is from Cloud Services (Google Workplaces and Google Cloud Platform) I think its fairly safe to assume that the majority of that cloud revenue is from their Cloud Platform, not Workplaces. So it wouldn't surprise me if its as little as 1-2% of revenue (it could easily be less than 1%). There is no surprise then that it is such a low priority for them. It's mostly a box ticking exercise to ensure that they can sell more stuff to enterprises and hold Microsoft back a little.
  - adrianomartins 5y ago
    I totally understand this vision, google docs, google sites, google drive must be really down in Google's priority list. Heck, Google Meet was down there up until two years ago. The problem I think is that, little by little, users start stepping outside the Google bubble and they start to realize that there's clear benefits. I used to be a 100% google person, then we started using dropbox paper for documents, notion for company wiki (and personal notes too), tandem for video calls. In 2022, our company is using Google only for email, calendar, and sheets. Two years ago we'd be crazy to even think about that. We're up to the point were it wouldn't seem crazy to go with the Microsoft suite, to be honest.
    - samwillis 5y ago
      > We're up to the point were it wouldn't seem crazy to go with the Microsoft suite, to be honest. I think for a lot of companies not going with Office is crazy, Google docs isn't good enough, and who's wants to have 7-10 different suppliers for different products (email, calendar, sheets, docs, presentations, wiki, chat, video). Far easer to just buy one cohesive system. There is probably an opportunity for one of the larger players to acquire the others and move back towards a cohesive platform. There would be push back but I suspect it would pay off. Imagine Airtable, Notion and Slack under one operation.
  - luibelgo 5y ago
    2021 revenue was $257 billion, 1% revenue is a lot of money still
  - 5y ago
- theptip 5y ago
  Agreed. It’s really weird; because of the bundling advantage, they don’t have to be better than Notion, they just need to be good enough that the convenience factor wins out. It’s also frustrating because if Google played to their strengths, Docs could be best-in-class; the real problem that everybody is struggling with is internal knowledge management. Why can’t Google build me a privately indexed knowledge graph of my internal docs, then let me use Google’s search to answer questions? It’s insane that this is not their product strategy for Docs. This should be “easy” to wire up, they have all of the tech already for google.com search. People like notion because it is easier to structure nested Wiki docs quickly, but you still have the same problems eventually of needing to curate your knowledge base, and things becoming too hard to find past a certain scale. Instead we get Data Loss Prevention and a bunch of other box-ticking features which, sure, are how you close enterprise deals to displace Microsoft. But I think they are sleeping on their vulnerability to disruption plays from the bottom of the market, and they need to invest more in building a moat here. Make the free/SMB customers delighted, and you starve potential competitors of the oxygen they need to grow into a competitor at the enterprise level.
  - Lealen 5y ago
    It's probably not available because someone decided that it should be only available for enterprise customers, take a look: https://workspace.google.com/products/cloud-search/ https://workspace.google.com/products/cloud-search/
    - theptip 5y ago
      Thanks, I wasn’t aware of that feature (and I pay for Enterprise gsuite, so that tells you something about either my attention to Google product details, or the level of advertisement of this feature :) I do wonder if this is actually building a semantic knowledge graph of the content, vs. just providing a dynamic facade/aggregator for other apps’ search APIs, and doing “old style” text indexing/searching within Workspace services. It looks like the former based on a cursory read of the docs. It would be more challenging to build a knowledge graph over {drive,slack,Jira,…} documents, but if they just build a knowledge graph within Workspace that could provide more reason to use Docs vs. Notion/Confluence, or Google Chat over Slack. So there is actually a strong product/market reason to build this as a native feature even if you can’t solve it for other apps.
- pradn 5y ago
  A feeling of progress is hard to convey to users if the iceberg is mostly invisible. I assume much of the work on Google Docs is harder to see like backend improvements/scalability, rendering compatibility across platforms, file-format compatibility with MS Word (both being able to read/write with high fidelity and supporting the useful features). But if we look at release notes for the past year, we see a sequence of smaller features.[1] These include ML-driven quick replies for comments, being easily add smart links to people/docs/lists, being able to add image watermarks, and Japanese grammar suggestions. These announcements are in small blog posts [2], and are usually covered by the tech media [3] (largely summaries with a bit of flavor or - cheekily - instructions on how to turn features off). It is hard to feel like there's major progress in Google Docs when features, even useful ones, trickle out like this. Perhaps the big release every year model isn't that bad, for communication purposes. It's just not in the DNA of Google or any online service, however. If you look at the roadmap for Google Workspace, it's very much about collaboration.[4] This plays to the brand and strength of the online-first vision of Google Apps - it's easy to jump in and collaborate on docs, the suite works well together. I think companies that choose Google Workspace do so to transform the way they work. It's not really about just replicating the Microsoft experience on the web. That said, I think Microsoft has done an amazing job pulling their apps to the web and adding collaboration/sync. Their online version of Word has basically no caveats, and their realtime editing is even better than Google Docs in some edge cases. So its unclear which way the market will go. Perhaps Microsoft has effectively fended off the online-first threat and can use its inertia and muscle to keep Office at the top. In any case, we'll move to a more heterogenous world where many suites or even individual tools are viable businesses. [1]: https://support.google.com/a/table/7314896?hl=en https://support.google.com/a/table/7314896?hl=en [2]: https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2021/10/easily-add-to-google-docs-with-new.html https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2021/10/easily-add-t... [3]: https://9to5google.com/2021/10/20/google-docs-menu/ https://9to5google.com/2021/10/20/google-docs-menu/ [4]: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/workspace/the-future-of-work-with-google-workspace https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/workspace/the-future-... Disclaimer: I work at Google and used to work in the division that develops Google Docs. These are all my opinions.
- benhurmarcel 5y ago
  I find it incredible that Docs is still unable to number headings. And they're trying to sell it to large organizations...
  - rwmj 5y ago
    Also no line numbering! I can't believe they have any lawyers as customers since line numbers are essential for them.
- zelphirkalt 5y ago
  It is just the bare minimum, that most people using a word processor, can understand. They probably made it to grab some market share and then stoppen right there. It is nowhere close to being a workhorse to build upon for anyone, who has any professionalism in their workings with WYSIWYG word processors. Professional documents do not make use of direct formatting. One does not simply click a "bigger font size" button thrice or the "bold" button or whatever. Google Docs is a toy and I wont consider any document created in it in any way professional.
hughrr 5y ago
Yeah even Pages is better.
bushbaba 5y ago
or QUIP. I've seen QUIP quickly gain adoption in the F500. QUIP is an easy addition that augments Microsoft's suite, and expands their existing salesforce relationship. Kudos to salesforce on a great tool, and great enterprise positioning.
xhrpost 5y ago
I've been ignoring Dropbox Paper at my company but will now try using it on my next doc. What major features would you say Paper has that GDocs lacks?

dna_polymerase 5y ago

Great, personally I'd prefer to properly format letters (DIN 5008-B, anyone) without the need for invisible tables. Insert graphics without them looking like the page did not load correctly and have some sort of macro, variable system to make proper use of templates. Also, I'd love to upload my company's fonts or something a simple as proper numbering in lists with lists in them, but that probably just me trying to use their business product as an actual business user. Docs largely feels like an abandoned product, newer features don't address actual issues people have. They just add nice to haves that I could use if it wasn't so embarrassing to use docs in the first place.

mattzito 5y ago
FWIW, the fonts issue isn’t a technical limitation, it’s a legal/licensing one. Font foundries license by the seat, and scenarios like docs where documents can be shared outside an organization and the font travels with it are against the rules. Office online has the same issue for the same reasons. There are exceptions, where a company has developed a font internally and owns the font directly, but those are far and few between. Even when a company has commissioned a font from a foundry, they’re usually licensing it from the foundry rather than owning it themselves as a work for hire. (Source: googler, used to work on workspace, and through a random series of events ended up working closely with the google fonts team on this problem) EDIT: also, you should be able to use apps script to do document generation from templates, that’s a pretty common use case.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
Veen 5y ago
The missing feature I find most irritating is the lack of sophisticated paragraph and character style options. Normal text plus a bunch of headings isn't sufficient for the sort of documents I need to write.
- nyanpasu64 5y ago
  My #1 complaint about Google Docs formatting is the lack of inline/block semantic code styles, and my primary complaint about Markdown is having to spam backslashes to escape variable names and math expressions outside of code blocks (I also wish it had multicolored highlighting like Google Docs, but that's just my idiosyncratic way of taking notes on code and color-coding values by type/origin).

lewisjoe 5y ago

I'm in the business of building an online word processor - https://www.zoho.com/writer https://www.zoho.com/writer It's interesting how the documents industry is moving from print oriented legacy softwares (Google Docs, Word) to block based, app-ish, smart canvases (Notion, Coda, etc). Also both Microsoft & Google have adopted completely different strategies to compete in this market. Microsoft launched Loop as an entirely new app while Google is incorporating these blocks as smart chips in Google Docs itself. Both strategies have their own pros and cons. My bet is on Google Docs style, because this means a group that's already invested in traditional document making skills (legal professionals, academic professionals, etc) will be able to incrementally step up their game without their workflow being completely destroyed. Sure, this will slow down the pace with which Google Docs can innovate and evolve - but overall it helps the older generation to smoothly transition over to the new age document editing, which is great.

k__ 5y ago
What's the benefit here? Seems like it's touted as an innovation, but the only thing I see is that page breaks are gone. Which isn't bad, I mostly use Google docs for online articles and to maintain a todo list, so things are now a bit cleaner. But it doesn't seem like a big change...
- JoBrad 5y ago
  Right? Isn’t this just the Web Layout view that MS Word has had forever?
- polote 5y ago
  It looks prettier, it allows you to put blocks bigger than the content. For example you can have the content to be fixed sized 800px and then inside the content put a large table or an image that is full width, and it can also feel like a static website. That what Notion does, you can "publish your page to the web" that gives a public URL that anyone can visit, without feeling like they are inside Notion
- jrochkind1 5y ago
  When creating docs only meant to be consumed online, the page breaks have gotten in my way before many times. Splitting up paragraphs because they don't fit on a page etc. So I can see this change having a big effect on consumers. If by "how big a change" you meant "would anyone even care", I think people will care, yes. Including me. How big a change was it to implement? I don't know. Note in addition to not having page breaks, it appears to have several "responsive" features added too (from the OP description, I haven't played with it yet myself). Lines wrap at whatever your screen size is (including zoom level), and there is apparently some screen-size-responsiveness to at least some images too. I couldn't say how difficult this was to implement, having no idea what the code is like, and knowing that large legacy codebases can make naive predictions of how difficult a given change might be unreliable.

734129837261 5y ago

Finally. I had a custom CSS plugin setup to do exactly this. Took me 3 minutes to figure out.

wslh 5y ago

Seems like they are looking closely at brainstorm tools more than typical document writing. Things such as https://www.mural.co/ https://www.mural.co/ and OneNote?

kbrannigan 5y ago

Hello Ms wordpad

esjeon 5y ago
Exactly. RTF has been around for ages. Also, it's pretty shocking that people forgot the term "rich-text".

lopis 5y ago

I thought it would be a more functional, but it seems mostly cosmetic. We don't have page boundaries, but actually they are still there. I can't place text or images outside those boundaries. It's nice, but it looks better with the vertical boundaries, and I think it's more accessible from a cognitive POV to have a boundary too.

foxbee 5y ago

I keep trying to write markdown. I can't get use to this!

togaen 5y ago

Google just reinvented HTML documents. Great.

falcor84 5y ago
I for one kinda liked MS FrontPage.
- mxuribe 5y ago
  google: You see, consumers can now scroll left/right as well as up/down, and content is more flexibly viewed. observer: You mean...like a web page? google: no, no...its like...its like...well, its...Um, content that can be authored by non-techies which consumers can view online with lots more flexibility and freedom...Hey, these consumers can increase/decrease font sizes, etc. Cool, right? observer: So...Um, its like MS Frontpage? google: No, no, its more sophisticated than that. Um, maybe we're not explaining it right. Its more complex than what somrything like Frontpage can make...or well, actually its just easier for content creators to use...i guess. observer: Oh, so its like Dreamweaver circa-early-2000s?? google: Yes, exactly! Oh wait...crap. /s ;-)

samwillis 5y ago

As someone who has worked with "contenteditable" and the various javascript rich text editors, I find it quite amusing that they have made this change now. One of the hardest things to implement with contenteditable/DOM is wysiwyg page splitting. Now, just after Google abandons contenteditable/DOM for its own text editor/renderer implementation they add support to disable one of the hardest features they had to implement in the old version.

lewisjoe 5y ago
You are right. Implementing line breaks and pagination algorithms that work well with tables and images - is one of the hardest problems in implementing a word processor. Basically, the newer gen folks want to leave the paper layouts behind and as a result the softwares are becoming simpler to architect - could be a good thing!
polote 5y ago
I dont think hardest things to implement is something Google cares of. They dont have any resources constraint
zelphirkalt 5y ago
To be expected: Later they will post some statistic, which supposedly states, that "no one is using the old way anyway" and that it will be removed in the future.
Andrex 5y ago
> Now, just after Google abandons contenteditable/DOM for its own text editor/renderer implementation Minor note, they actually made that switch 12 years ago. https://drive.googleblog.com/2010/05/whats-different-about-new-google-docs.html https://drive.googleblog.com/2010/05/whats-different-about-n...

ryankrage77 5y ago

It removes the gaps between pages vertically, but it's not an infinte canvas horizontally like OneNote. You also can't place text in arbitrarily-placed text boxes wherever you like.

nyanpasu64 5y ago
I've been using Pageless for a few days. It replaces a fixed page width with dynamic horizontal width adapting to window size, with a viewer-defined maximum width by right-clicking the unmarked horizontal ruler. I find this to be a useful feature for the most part, though it's unfortunate that showing the outline makes the room leftover for text narrower.

topicseed 5y ago

I really am happy to see the direction Google is taking with enhancing the productivity suite — from the new integrated view in Gmail, to linked embeds in Docs, to Smart Chips, and soon Tasks in Docs. These are major updates but aren't too intrusive. Project management is still not really available the same way it is on Asana, ClickUp, and the likes, but it's really making us do more in Google Workspace.

cs702 5y ago

A "pageless document that lives online" is also known as... a web page. Instead of creating web pages in html, css, and js, people will now create them using familiar "word processing" and "spreadsheet" apps on Google Drive. And these web pages come with nice fine-grained access controls -- authors can specify who is able to view, comment on, and edit their documents with a few clicks. Makes perfect sense.

da39a3ee 5y ago
Yes. Html/css/js is to a first approximation only usable by professionals anyway. It makes no sense to require normal people to employ professionals to simply make web pages.
deanebarker 5y ago
This is exactly what I was thinking. I read that page, and at the end, I thought "...so HTML then?"
- raldi 5y ago
  How do three nontechnical writers collaborate on an HTML document?
  - wongarsu 5y ago
    In the real world typically with Wordpress if the target group is outside the company or Confluence if the target group is inside the company.
    - monkeybutton 5y ago
      I prefer the process of writing up a short document describing a feature proposal or small project using Google docs over confluence. Its self contained, limited (focused) in scope and the highlighting/commenting/editing feedback loop between multiple authors is way better.
prepend 5y ago

ithkuil 5y ago

I like to be able to ditch the page splits. But I'd love to have an option to keep the "paper" shape, albeit an infinite strip (toilet paper style). All this white horizontal space distracts me

falcor84 5y ago
I know that's not what you meant, but I just want to say that I would probably fight to the death against a redesign that would remove the page splits from my toilet paper.
- thfuran 5y ago
  But think of how much less paper you'd throw away in switching to one of those endless towel rolls.
  - 3np 5y ago
    I'm not so certain you'd be saving. Unless you get a TP holder with sharp metal teeth and consistently use it to get straight cuts to avoid wasting a good part of each roll on those angle tears.
    - thfuran 5y ago
      Cuts? No: https://www.domesticuniform.com/product/smoked-continuous-roll-towel-cabinet/ https://www.domesticuniform.com/product/smoked-continuous-ro...
      - 3np 5y ago
        ...I'll stick to my Japanese washlet, I think.
hnra 5y ago
Is "View > Print layout" what you're looking for? It replaces page splits (header/footer whitspace and page margins) with a dashed line.

BrianOnHN 5y ago

But content still can't be collapsed/folded below headers [1]. Because of this, docs could already able to be too big to be useful. "But outlines..." Not helpful since you can't specify to leave out sub-headings. Which means manually editing the outline every update. That's why I've moved 1000+ pages of docs to Obsidian.md this year. I highly recommend, especially if you might be adhd. Edit: to anyone interested, this YouTube channel[2] is a great primer on Obsidian. [1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/24190618/collapsing-elements-in-a-google-doc-with-google-apps-script-is-this-possible https://stackoverflow.com/questions/24190618/collapsing-elem... [2] https://m.youtube.com/channel/UC85D7ERwhke7wVqskV_DZUA/videos https://m.youtube.com/channel/UC85D7ERwhke7wVqskV_DZUA/video...

JoBrad 5y ago
I’m guessing you can’t have a very wide section of the doc, either. Which is honestly a good thing, in my opinion.
- dudus 5y ago
  You can cheat and create a very wide 1 cell table with a 0pt border and put your wide content in there.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

k__ 5y ago

Google Docs remembers this pageless layout across all of my documents. Would be cool if it did so with the zoom. I always use 125% because things are too small otherwise and it always switches back to 100%.

prepend 5y ago

I find this an interesting edge case in writing (mostly engineering docs and strategy for work) that maybe 1% of my audience wants to print out or save as a pdf. And it’s hard to go back and restyle a document to print after it’s written. As a result, I write in page mode as a hedge against the people who like pages since it’s easier to write in page mode than to do the boring reformats after the writing is done.

prima-facie 5y ago

Isn't this how Google Docs worked back in the day? I remember it didn't have page breaks by default and it took them a while to implement that.

danielvaughn 5y ago

Finally. Every time I create a new doc, the first thing I do is make each page seamless, although it still has a line between each page. In some cases page breaks make sense, but definitely the majority web use case is a long running single page.

chewbacha 5y ago

Neat

pete_nic 5y ago

I keep all of my notes in a single Google Doc called “notes”. The top contains an index with bookmarks to different categories eg health, business, etc. It’s so big and bloated and is barely usable. I am optimistic that an “infinite surface to work on” will help make my notes usable again.

xnx 5y ago

Glad to see this feature return after being removed years ago after Writely was absorbed into Google.

tomasreimers 5y ago

I'm aware this isn't their primary use case, but the biggest feature missing from GDocs that moves me to notion / etc. is the lack of built in support for codeblocks. If they had that I really feel I would move most of my doc-writing here.

glmdev 5y ago
I use an add-on called Codeblocks. It lets you select a block of text and will format it as monospace w/ syntax highlighting in various themes. Not quite as good as native support (e.g. doesn't update dynamically), but otherwise it's pretty solid.
bushbaba 5y ago
The way I've gotten around that is to create a table that's 1 cell, add inner-padding, and format it with consolas & 12pt ft...etc. Total PITA to do each time you want to copy in code.

mgerdts 5y ago

I tried this the other day. I had a document with some tables that could use extra width, so I switched to landscape mode and reduced the margins. I then adjusted the width of the tables so they looked decent at 10 inches wide. Later, I turned on pageless mode. Now the tables all had horizontal scroll bars. From TFA I see that I could change the view to medium or wide, which is a personal setting. Thus, if I use pageless mode with wide tables my view may be fine. Everyone else has a miserable experience until they find this setting.

kyrra 5y ago
Pageless mode is a global setting on that document that the editor of the document sets, and it applies to all viewers of the document.
- mgerdts 5y ago
  Pageless mode is indeed a global setting. I turn on pageless mode on my document with wide tables and everyone sees scrollbars with the wide tables. I use "view > text width" to change the text width to medium or wide. This is a personal setting. It looks better for me but is still miserable for everyone else. Suppose I forget that I changed "view > text width" and some time later I go about creating more documents that require this setting. Now, I'm unintentionally creating content that is difficult for all others to read with no idea of the misery I'm spreading until someone complains.

rmbyrro 5y ago

> If your document contains elements like footnotes, headers and footers, or watermarks, and it is converted to pageless, those elements will not be visible. Headers and footers are print-oriented, but losing footnotes is not ok. They could have displayed on the side, or highlighted in some way to display on mouse over or click. Whatever, just make them available...

polote 5y ago
Then don't use the pageless feature and you will not have any issue
- zarkov99 5y ago
  Pageless is great, except for the loss of footnotes. Why not fix that and have the best of both worlds?
- rmbyrro 5y ago
  If footnotes are essential, I really won't use. But I don't think this should stop us from discussing a way to possibly improving a product.
kyrra 5y ago
(Googler, opinions are my own) I've used the new pageless style for a while and losing footnotes was a little annoying at first, be we adapted. I don't have a perfect solution to it, there are alternatives you can do (glossary or something at the end, with a bookmark on each item, so you can link directly to it). If you make heavy use of footnotes, don't use the new feature (as others have said). It's a tradeoff, and I mostly prefer pageless, especially when embedding images that are larger (width wise).
- jer0me 5y ago
  Just spitballing, doesn't seem like you're on the team, but a possible solution could be a little popup when you hover over a footnote like Wikipedia has. Or maybe an option to put all the footnotes at the bottom of the document, except when printing.

sequoia 5y ago

I'm not a huge google fan but I write a ton and I use google docs extensively, and I have to say I'm crying tears of joy seeing this update. Just yesterday I was complaining to a colleague about how a table he put in a google doc was hard to read because a page-break in one of the rows made it look like two rows when it was only one. Ask and you shall receive! Thank you google docs devs!!!

patrickwalton 5y ago
Except, the article says tables aren't supported, right?
- Hates_ 5y ago
  Not from what I can see. Seems only features that are reliant on there being a "page": Some features are not available on pageless docs: columns, page numbers, headers and footers, page breaks, etc
- scoopertrooper 5y ago
  Well, in the Google Workspace post there is a picture of a table. So it probably supports them. https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/workspace/delivering-new-innovations-in-google-workspace-with-smart-canvas https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/workspace/delivering-... They also feature a table in a little GIF they have on that page. https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/original_images/Docs_Pageless_Format.gif https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/origin...

llaolleh 5y ago

This is the most innovative feature Google Docs pushed out in the past 5 years lol.

kaashmonee 5y ago

when the teacher says 6 pages double spaced

analogdreams 5y ago

so.... a mural clone? currently sitting through a 2 day training class that is using mural and i do not get the obsession/love of this tool at all.

notagoodidea 5y ago

Ok nice, can we have a sane way to add a caption to a table or a figure now?

CodeIsTheEnd 5y ago

Is there a WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get [1]) document editor that is built on a foundation of HTML/CSS, and explicitly surfaces operations that map to CSS features, like flexbox? Changing the base style just means writing CSS rules for the `p` tag! And it could maybe even encourages component / class-based styling? I imagine it could be used for creating things that may get printed out, but will also see a longer life on a web page. You could even have explicit media queries to apply only when printing! [2] I think of something like creating a good looking resume, which may include light graphic design elements like divider lines, and might not have a strictly linear layout and put some information in a sidebar. Making something look good in Word can be really frustrating, and require jiggering with margins and column layouts. It may fall apart when you try to add a new job. It's almost a joke that if you want a good looking resume, you should use LaTeX, but that's incredibly inaccessible. So many more people know basic HTML and CSS! I think a lot of website builders (like Webflow [3] ?) expose a lot of underlying HTML/CSS, but I suspect they also support a lot more ad-hoc graphic design elements that can really make the underlying HTML document a total mess. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WYSIWYG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WYSIWYG [2]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@media#print https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@media#prin... [3]: https://webflow.com/ https://webflow.com/

tommoor 5y ago

I'm in the industry – have been building Outline (https://www.getoutline.com https://www.getoutline.com) as a collaborative team knowledge base for the last 5 years. We went digital-first with the page-less style and implemented optional page control by having a "page break" element that you can insert anywhere in the document which honestly works well.

qnsi 5y ago

Great job google docs team! The amount of innovation comming from this team is extreme! No competition in Sillicon Valley and worldwide

dwighttk 5y ago

OpenDoc?

kaliszad 5y ago

It is still linear/ rigid in a way. We try to break this approach with OrgPad (https://orgpad.com/ https://orgpad.com/) and propose an alternative way of working with and thinking about information. In OrgPad, you have cells (nodes/ vertexes) and connect them with one or more directed or undirected connections (links/ edges) or can leave them without a connection. This is all done using a mouse and dragging or clicking. 7-year-olds don't have a problem doing that. The cells have optional title and optional content, yes, they can be empty which show just a little square. If the cells have a title, you can hide the content, which is visually suggested by raising the cell so it drops a bit of a shadow. The cells can contain anything, text, images, files even whole websites in iframes. You can add pages inside the cell, useful e.g. when learning vocabulary. If there is only an image in the cell, we analyze it for alpha color and render a bit differently so there is no extra canvas and the image pops out more. We support links on such images too. With this, it is possible to build simple websites actually and OrgPad can mostly replace e.g. Linktree. We will improve this even more in the coming days. Of course, when you have created an OrgPage, you have split the problem into atomic ideas mostly contained in singular cells or a groups of cells. You can with a few clicks create a presentation by basically setting up a path of views on your graph. There you go, Prezi is also covered sufficiently well. Then you add our physical animations, just the overall clean design and powerful keyboard shortcuts and you can do pretty much the same work like with Google Docs Pageless, Miro, Padlet just a bit differently and we feel with less hassle.

chipgap98 5y ago
This just seems like it is solving a fundamentally different problem than Google Docs/Microsoft Word. When I'm using one of those I usually want to express my ideas in a linear fashion. I see the value in your product but I would never consider it to be a replacement for a document editor

renewiltord 5y ago

(Disclaimer: not a Googler, my opinions are not my own and should be seen as the official position of my employer, this comment is confidential and is meant only to be read where it is posted) Perhaps footnotes should convert to notes like the ones you have on Google sheets.

gnicholas 5y ago

Does anyone know of a gdocs alternative that uses DOM-based rendering? Google recently transitioned from DOM-based rendering to canvas-based rendering, which prevents extensions like BeeLine Reader [1] from working. This has created problems for people with disabilities, who rely on it. I'm the founder of BeeLine Reader, and we are looking for an alternative platform that we can steer our customers (which include major universities) toward. 1: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/beeline-reader/ifjafammaookpiajfbedmacfldaiamgg?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/beeline-reader/ifj...

dorianmariefr 5y ago
WordPress?
dataangel 5y ago
it's not web based, but how is the accessibility of open office? in theory it might be possible to compile it to WASM and get it running inside a browser
Seirdy 5y ago
HedgeDoc is a FLOSS self-hostable collaborative markdown editor in the browser: https://hedgedoc.org/ https://hedgedoc.org/

rahimnathwani 5y ago

"In this setting, there are no page breaks, images adjust to your screen size" I created a doc just now with three different pieces of content: 1. Text - stayed within the text margins, as expected 2. Table with lots of columns - used the full window (i.e. ignored text margin) 3. Wide image - stayed to the right of the left margin (i.e. ignored only the right text margin) So the image only used 60% of the browser width.

tus666 5y ago

I am sure Docs had this years ago (like maybe a decade ago) - and I recall being really annoyed when all these artificial pages appeared in documents I just didn't think of in a paginated way. It's nice to have it back. But why is there such a huge left indent of text?

robbrown451 5y ago

It's about time. I curse the stupid page breaks every time I use it. The chance of me ever printing a document has been near zero for decades now. I run into the same thing with Inkscape, where it seems to assume I am drawing on a piece of paper and I have to jump through hoops to not see the stupid page borders.

reilly3000 5y ago

Having been on a bit if a documentation spree of late, this is extremely relevant and I’m glad to see it. Pages are a constant distraction to composing content. I’m always trying to format and write my ways towards clean page breaks. I’ll get it right across a multi-page doc, then need to add another piece of important info to the first page and cause cascading chaos below. I’ve tried to get better at using page breaks, but they have their own quirks and aren’t really visible nor intuitive in the typical editing flow. Confluence is among the pageless-natives, but their PDF export looks horrible and there’s no way to fix that as a user. I reach for it when I need to, but I almost always use https://docs.new https://docs.new when I’m ready to start capturing an idea or notes. So I’m happy to see Google Docs offer pageless and their recent additions of slash commands. I’d rather publish more Docs and less Confluence content. Having both at a large company does create a fair measure of bifurcation but neither seems to be able to replace the other.

smusamashah 5y ago

I was expecting that it will allow writing anywhere on the pageless screen like OneNote does and will have blocks similar to OneNote. It doesn't. It's still restricted by the page size limit. Don't understand how it's an infinite page for screens.