Google Docs adds new Smart Canvas features including Summaries and Pageless formatting

Google’s “Smart Canvas” update for Docs, Sheets, and Slides provided a much-needed boost to collaborative flexibility and tools in the company’s ecosystem last year, and it’s still reimagining what it looks like to work together with others in a more efficient, interconnected, and rich way to this day.

Building off of that announcement, Google has now revealed a few new features for Docs that should make your workflow and that of your organization more intelligent and interactive. First, a new “Summary” can be added to your document to give readers a high-level overview of its contents without them having to read the entire page upfront. Just hover over the document outline and press the summary icon as shown below to begin typing one out. Some Workspace Editions will be able to have these summaries automatically generated in specific cases.

More impressively, Docs are getting improvements to their “flowing text”. It’s being called “Pageless format”, and it will allow you and your team to collaborate without interruption or worrying about what page number something appears on. As you can see, any text, images, tables, and more will “re-flow” automatically based on the size of the screen or device, and things like tables will magically have a scrollbar on them instead of being cut off if the horizontal space is not sufficient.

For added context, using a document with traditional paging means that you’ll have page breaks, headers and footers, footnotes, page numbers, and more. You can also adjust page settings like the orientation and page size. With pageless formatting, you’ll be able to continuously scroll without page breaks. Images will also automatically adjust to the size of your screen and line breaks will auto adjust as well, even as you zoom in and out.

To get these into the hands of the Workspace tiers found below, Google is going with an extended rollout for both Rapid Release and Scheduled Release domains, so it could take upwards of 2 weeks starting today.

All Workspace Tiers
Legacy G Suite Basic and Business

Availability

Essentials
Business Starter
Business Standard
Business Plus
Enterprise Essentials
Enterprise Standard
Enterprise Plus
Education Plus
Frontline
Nonprofits.

Summary Suggestion Availability

Google Workspace
Education Fundamentals
Nonprofit
(Google lists Nonprofits as both available and not available for these suggestions, so we’ll update this article later for clarity when they fix what seems to be a typo.)

Summary Suggestions NOT Available