Google Docs New Feature: Pageless

I'm one of the original authors of Writely / Google Docs, and worked on relatively heavy-duty word processors in an earlier life.

I'd agree with you, and add that there are are a lot of other details that make Notion nicer to use. We made the move from Docs to Notion at work a year or two ago, and I've recently switched for personal use as well. Some of the differences are power-user things (e.g. easier to manage certain types of formatting from the keyboard), but a big thing for me is that Notion makes it a lot easier to manage multiple pages. Both the left-hand navigation list, and the ability to nest pages, are game changers when you're trying to manage a large collection of information.

Also Notion just feels cleaner; I haven't really tried to analyze why. And it seems like pages load faster, though I'm not sure whether this is literally true or just something about the experience makes it seem that way. Either way, it makes a difference.

As a word processor, Notion is still pretty immature. It's not very good at handling cross-block selections, using cut/paste to manipulate bullet lists often results in a dropped bullet, etc. There are a lot of little fit-and-finish touches that are table stakes for a mature word processor, but don't seem to be a focus for Notion. I'm hoping, but not confident, this will improve over time. Docs is better at this (ever since they threw away our our original hacky contenteditable code and built the entire editing experience in JavaScript), but that's not enough to make me switch back from Notion, just enough to make me wish Notion would put some energy into this.

For certain type of softwares, there is no fear of "not adopting". Text and document software is one of them. Every tool has their own offering and nothing makes them obsolete.

Let's say, text editors. In the last 2-3 years we have been told AI driven auto-complete or code companions will "disrupt" the entire experience of writing text and code. Before that we had the plugin saga of VSCode and Jetbrains and what not telling us more features means more convenience. Before that we had GUI and cursor based text editors that were simple to use. Before that we had VI and emacs.

But is there any kind disruption? Not really. People still like what the use and feel comfortable with. They don't need to switch environments but they can comfortably add features that they think is necessary. For people who are comfortable with Vi text editor the process is Vi > VIM > Neovim and not Vi > Notepad++ > VSCode > Github Copilot.

porn list?

> It feels like they made the "Export to PDF" in a weekend

Ah well, I built it in my first week or so as part of a hiring trial process, back when the company was 16 people in a remodeled auto body shop. Before that, the “PDF Export” feature just opened the browser print dialog.

One fun thing about working at a startup is that you solve a problem for 90% of your users, but after a while of user growth and demographic shift, that remaining 10% ends up being bigger than the original 90% was in raw numbers.

You are right. I’ve been in Notion heavy companies almost since its launch, and I’m not sure I ever tried to print a page ever.

Sharing has been done in two ways as far as I remember: straight making the page public when it was open information, or using Notion as a common draft and reformatting the text in Docs (+ adding headers etc.) before sending it to the partner.

I think instinctively anything “serious”, like a legal contract for instance, goes into Docs, even if Notion or another tool is used as a first step for collaboration.

I am not a big fan of notion, but printing a document (even as a pdf) is an increasingly niche usecase in an increasingly digital-only world and I can totally understand if they don't put in much effort into it.

I don't recall the past time I tried to print any document. And given that I don't own a printer and haven't been to the office in years, it must've been a while.

That's the point though. If you frequently have to convert documents to PDF or print them then you shouldn't be using Notion. Not having to worry about these use cases gives these news apps a huge amount of flexibility to evolve their UX. Otherwise every single document editor will continue to look and work like Word, as they have done for the last 30 years.

Export ignores filters on database views! -_-"

Haven't printed a document in four years now. I think the number of people who print is getting smaller and smaller.

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.

Right? Isn’t this just the Web Layout view that MS Word has had forever?

Our org does a lot through google docs. Every single doc I created I had to fight the stupid page breaks. Like, I was never gonna print the thing so knock it off, google!

So yeah, I welcome this change big time.

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

The last time I printed something written on google docs was probably 2012 or so, a printed copy of my resume

Limiting my docs to a IRL format doesn't make much sense to me, page breaks make no sense, with H1/H2/H3 etc you can just navigate the doc that way, and internal links work etc. No need to say "check out the flurple widget subsection on page 92" you just slack/email them the link to the subheader or H3 or whatever and bam they're there reading what you need them to look at, similar to markdown docs on github, but with all the manual formating GUI'd away.

Hi, sorry about the confusion. We didn't have a pricing page because the app itself is free for individuals (along with a bunch of other editors as well for spreadsheets and powerpoint presentations). You can sign up with your email account right away and start using.

We do have paid plans in case you need to onboard a team and want access to a bunch of other apps as well - https://www.zoho.com/in/workplace/

Because you have to buy one of their bundles to get this product, these are the ones I found:

https://www.zoho.com/workdrive/pricing.html

https://www.zoho.com/workplace/pricing.html

https://www.zoho.com/one/pricing/

FYI Zoho it is not only a nice site, they have 12k employees (per Linkedin) :)

I don't think we ever will or even should ditch paper formats. It will always have its place in legal or any other industry that relies on formal documenting.

My selfish reason: take the most popular paper format - PDF. A PDF created thirty years ago, is viewable today and will be preserved intact and viewable thirty years from now. I won't be able to say the same about a Coda or Notion doc. With all that dynamic blocks pulling data from all over the internet, I don't even think it's possible.

Don't forget passing around Excel documents. I'm not a lawyer, but I've read accounts of this from enough to think it's a whole thing and not an isolated phenomenon.

I agree. I have over 50 US patents, and the multitude of patent lawyers I have worked with all use docs with change tracking enabled.

EDIT: parents -> patents

Not to mention that having any kind of client-related document on an online service like Google that's indexing the content (at the least) is probably a violation of attorney-client privilege.

The breadth of Zoho apps is incredible, the price is unbeatable, but the quality is bad enough to make it not worth it, as of late 2019.

I implemented the full Zoho suite a couple times at different companies, in 2016 and 2018-2019.

What hurt most are the endless papercuts on the core CRM tool. Ultimately the pains for my users weren't worth it.

Surely once you've got a block inside a block you're back to the XML model again?

How is Latex XML?

My comment was not meant as criticism. I'm not sure why anyone would interpret it as such.

How do three nontechnical writers collaborate on an HTML document?

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.

Maybe the team behind pageless sees footnotes from a print-oriented perspective.

I would look at them as sort of a content enrichment. Like a comment applied to the text.

Pageless has comments. Why would it be so bad to place footnotes alongside with comments? Or perhaps on the left side, below the headings index?

Have you ever heard the term "analysis paralysis"?

Pageless is great, except for the loss of footnotes. Why not fix that and have the best of both worlds?

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.

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-...

They also feature a table in a little GIF they have on that page.

https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/origin...

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

But think of how much less paper you'd throw away in switching to one of those endless towel rolls.

The dashed line is distracting and confuses when you are using dashed lines deliberately elsewhere. Why can't we just have an infinitely long canvas of a specific width? That's what I was expecting when I heard of pageless. Was disappointed. I'm not sure why I'd want to be able to set a minimal text width and then be left with infinite margin.

This kinda works but it very half assed.

- It breaks tables that cross pages in weird and confusing ways.

- It messes up spacing that crosses pages.

- It interacts poorly with footnotes.

- In results in weird gaps when images need to get pushed to the next page.

It is what I used before, but it is clearly a quick hack rather than a proper solution of actually not having pages.

yeah I use it and it works quite well but then people use footnotes and they look weird there; disallow footnotes and make that dotted grey line go away and I'm sold

You can cheat and create a very wide 1 cell table with a 0pt border and put your wide content in there.

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.

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.

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.

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...

I find it incredible that Docs is still unable to number headings. And they're trying to sell it to large organizations...

I think it's great as this gives new companies the opportunity to eat their lunch.

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.

Considering the fates of other Google products, that's a great outcome. At least it didn't end up like Gchat or Google Reader.

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

[2]: https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2021/10/easily-add-t...

[3]: https://9to5google.com/2021/10/20/google-docs-menu/

[4]: 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.

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).

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 ;-)