The new feature enables you to select multiple blocks of text at once and then apply actions to them – not just formatting, but delete, copy and paste too. If you’ve ever had to fix the formatting or remove headings from a big document you’ll appreciate how much of a time-saver that can be.
The upgrade is in Google Docs now, and the official googworkspace says it’s enabled by default so you don’t need to do anything to get it. Easy peasy.
It’s definitely a case of better late than never here – the same feature is in so many of the word processing and writing apps I use that I’d forgotten Google Docs couldn’t do it – but I’m glad to see it.
I’m also glad to see a small but useful change to Google Drive too: keyboard shortcuts for cutting, copying and pasting files. You might’ve through it already existed, but no! It’s only been added this week, as Google announcement explains. Provided you’re using Chrome you can use the standard Ctrl/Cmd + C / X / V commands for file operations.
Google isn’t doing this in a lazy way: the future, which should have rolled out to everybody by the beginning of July, works across different tabs and there’s an additional shortcut to open a folder as a new Chrome tab (Ctrl/Cmd + Enter). If you also hold Shift when you paste it’ll insert a shortcut rather than the file itself, which is useful if you want to avoid duplication. And if you copy a file and paste it into a Google Doc or Gmail message, it’ll automatically include the file title and link.
I know these updates aren’t exactly going to have got crowds dancing in the streets, but they’re worthwhile improvements to already very useful apps – and given the huge number of users Google has, the changes are going to make a lot of people’s workflow that little bit better.