10 BEST Productivity Tips for Google Docs!

hey friends in this video I'm going over 10 extremely practical tips you probably aren't using in Google Docs but definitely should starting with tip number one use building blocks to save time if you're currently digging around the menu bar to access features like insert bookmark you should know there's a much better way simply place your cursor at the end or at the beginning of a line of text press the at symbol and followed by bookmark and then press enter and this inserts a bookmark directly drop a like if you didn't know about the ad command

and if you did click the dislike button twice the rule of thumb is that many of the features found under the insert format and tools Tabs are available through the at command but this can be overwhelming if you've never used this before so here are my top use cases in addition to inserting bookmarks first for longer documents I like to add a table of contents at table of contents enter and then I select the with dotted tab uh header option and pro tip I can also add to add a table select just one cell so

it looks like this type in table of contents and make this font size slightly bigger make this middle align change the background color to something more professional looking and this looks pretty nice second if we don't want to create a table from scratch we can type at product road map press enter to generate a a pre-formatted table and make edits directly for example select all the text and make the font size smaller uh replace project with workstream for example and if you don't like these this drop down these drop down options rather we can press

type dropdown to add our own selections and finally my favorite one by far is to type at line to add a horizontal line to indicate the end of a note section there might be a slight learning curve but if you're a regular Google Docs user like I am using the at command instead of the menu bar saves so much time over the long run and let me know your top use case in the comments productivity tip number two for Google Docs enable pageless mode for maximum flexibility so check this out if I go to format

and switch to pageless format let me zoom out to show you how this looks like we just removed all the pages in your Google doc document and doing this unlocks some real useful features first let's create another table at product road map and as you can see since we're no longer constrained by the page width we can drag the cells out as far as we want if we want more space if we want to take this a step further we can go to view text width select wide or full and this lets us really take

advantage of all that extra space I find this most helpful when I'm in more of a brainstorming mode my favorite feature by far though though is heading toggles if you look to the left here you can see that I can actually collapse this heading collapse this heading and collapse this heading and this is only possible in pageless mode and if you create a heading first for example uh I'm typing normal text right now so there is no option for me to toggle this right but if I type pound pound pound Pound I should probably cater

to gen Z #h space this is heading to this is normal text I can now collapse this if I wanted to this even works for something like # times 5 space this is heading five this is normal text and I can collapse this as well another quality of life feature within patience mode is if you or someone else leaves a comment on your document you can actually minimize it by clicking the right arrow here and you can still expand the comment by hovering over that comment bubble Google Docs tip number three set and save font

defaults for new documents if you've been following along you might have noticed I have different font settings for heading 2 heading three heading four and normal text I did this on purpose to make my document more readable and when I have the outline open on the left easier to navigate for example I can click into the key materials heading to and then click back down to notes if you want to save some time and just copy my defaults do this first open up a new tab type doc. new enter to create a new empty Google

uh doc document #h space this is heading two that looks okay #h space this is heading three and whoa this does not this doesn't look as good as Jeff's version heading four heading five so on and so so forth next you can grab this Google Docs template I created completely for free uh by signing up for my workspace toolkit I'll leave a link down below if you scroll all the way down here you can cop select all this First Command or control C to copy go back to your document command and control V to paste

now highlight my heading 2 go to the drop- down menu here heading two update heading 2 to match go down to my heading 3 heading three heading three update heading 3 to match heading four rinse and repeat update heading four to match heading five go all the way down update heading five to match and finally normal text here normal text update normal text to match and once all that is done last step without highlighting anything go back to the drop down menu options options save as my default Styles now when you create a new Google

doc the default font settings for headings 2 to 5 and normal text should be updated for example oh this is heading to it worked wow Jeff is definitely the best and I highly recommend you spend a few minutes today to update your default fonts since this little bit of upfront effort will probably save you a bunch of time over the long run Pro tip after you update and save your default Styles you can open up an existing document that's still using your previous font like this command on control a to select all the text go

to the drop down menu here go to options and use my default styles to update all your fonts productivity tip number four link to headings and documents if you watch my other videos you know one of my very unpopular opinions is that when colleagues don't complete their assigned tasks 90% of the time it's our fault for not making it easy enough for them to take action for the remaining 10% of the time they're just idiots just kidding so if you need your teammate's input for a specific section in your Google doc move your cursor to

that heading right click copy heading link and insert that hyperlink as part of your request in this email for example similarly if you want to point to a specific comment in Google Docs you can click the three dots here and get link to this comment speaking of spoon feeding our colleagues tip number five for Google Docs is to preview suggested edits most of us are probably familiar with the suggest feature which we can enable by going to the top right and click clicking suggesting and this allows us or other people to make suggestions on our

document which we can then accept or reject this is obviously super useful for collaboration but if there are a lot of comments it's very hard for the owner to visualize how the end result would look like so we can actually go to tools review suggested edits select preview accept all to see how the final version would look like and if everything looks good we can just click the accept all button here Pro tip we can use a keyboard shortcut control option t on a Mac or alt t on Windows to quickly access the tools menu

productivity tip number six restore version history let's say you use the preview suggested edits feature we just talked about and you clicked accept all edits by mistake don't worry though not the end of a world because we can just go to file version history C version history and within this view we can actually restore a previous version Pro tip for important documents I would usually name the latest version for example this one I would usually name this to something like before manager before sending this off to my manager for review just in case you know

they screw up just kidding my manager would never screw up he's he's the best the smartest the most intelligent the funniest the most Charming um the best manager ever tip number number seven compose and send emails from Google Docs directly now that we've written a Flawless com dock for this new product we want to write a short and humble email announcing this product launch to the rest of a company we can create a new Google Document doc. new and within this blank document type at uh type in email draft select the email draft building block

and for subject line let's use the same clickbaity title every single AI publication uses game changing AI product just launched and type in an email and now we can actually just tag our colleagues from the marketing and PR teams to come in here for review obviously if you're the only person responsible for composing this email don't do this this is a waste of time just draft it in your own Gmail inbox right but if there are two or more people involved it's best to have everything confirmed in Google Docs make sure all the right people

are included in the two and CC fields and when everything is finalized you can just click the E email icon here wow and this brings up a new compose window in uh Gmail by the way if your Google Drive is a mess especially given all the new documents we created in this video you might want to check out my workspace Academy course where I share a systematic workflow that helps you eliminate digital and mental clutter for example I teach you how to set up an Automation in Google Drive that automatically organizes all new files and

documents into a drive inbox folder I I also teach you step by step how to develop and maintain a simple yet reliable file management system so that you can find files within seconds instead of minutes you can find out more using the link down below productivity tip number eight for Google Docs email in PDF format once the document is finalized we all know that we can go to file download and download this as a PDF document right but we can actually save the hassle of downloading this and attaching the PDF to an email by staying

within file go to email email this file uh we can input recipients add a message and a pdf version of this document will be sent to the recipients another nice feature is under file email email collaborators and this allows me to email everyone who has access to this document in one go uh for example if I want to remind them to leave feedback in this document this way I don't have to tag them all individually or input their emails one by one in Gmail tip number nine is related to something very few of us like

to think about in Google Docs and that is tables first if we have two rows like this and we want to only add another cell to the right in the second row we can rightclick within this cell here split cell increase the number of columns from 1 to two and click split and now we have 1+ one two two cells we can then make small adjustments like this paste in an image like so and uh this is one of my favorite formatting uh tricks in Google Docs under table Options under color table border we can

select this to be zero and now the Border disappears but the table structure Remains the Same allowing us to copy this into another location like Gmail where it's still neat and tidy and all your colleagues would be like oh my God that's so amazing that's so cool how' you do that that's exactly how my colleagues treat me at work by the way I'm not lying it's a truth I'm actually cool I've grouped the last few tips together since they're all quality of life features for example if you only want to receive notifications meant for you

in a Google doc you can go into the uh email notification click into the notification settings here and select for you instead of all next up by default the last part of your Google doc URL will always end with the word edit but what you can do is to replace edit with the word copy before before you share this with someone else next time and now the recipient when they click into this link will be prompted to make a copy of the document instead of opening it up similarly if you replace edit with a preview

um your teammates will open up a clean version of the document with no comments no suggestions and no option to make edits and lastly if you replace edit with export question mark format equals PDF uh recipients will be prompted to download this document as a PDF F directly Oh and before trying this out make sure you have shared the appropriate level of access let me know down below if I missed a tip or feature that you use all the time feel free to share this video with all your other super cool colleagues and you might

want to check out my top productivity tips for work next see you in the next video in the meantime have a great one