G Suite users to get new comments UI for Docs, Sheets, Slides

With a lot of offices now working remotely, collaborative tools are pretty much in-demand. G Suite users have a great set of tools in the form of Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, and of course Google Drive. Now Google is bringing an improved comments UI for you so commenting and collaborating on your documents will become easier. This will be available on Android for G Suite costumers and users with personal accounts only and not for just the regular users of these cloud-based apps.

If you’re working on a document and there are a lot of comments from your bosses or team members, you will now be able to see more comments because the thread viewer UI is more compacted. The thread navigator meanwhile is now at the header of the comment box instead of at the bottom previously. You can also now use gestures to scroll through the comments. You can even respond to multiple comments at once, although they didn’t exactly say how you can do that.

In the comment entry view, you now have a dedicated @ button so you can easily mention team members you need to call attention to or to assign action items for specific team members. Google says these changes are important since commenting is actually one of the most powerful ways that you can collaborate with teammates, especially now that you’re probably working away from each other.

G Suite admins do not need to do anything as this feature will roll out on its own. There are also no admin controls for this one. The new comments UI is turned on by default. All you have to do is tap on a comment when using Docs, Sheets, or Slides on your Android device so you can see the difference.

The update is already rolling out to G Suite end-users. They started last June 9 and it should take up to 15 days for full feature visibility. Hopefully, we get more new features for G Suite apps soon since we’ll be spending a lot of time with them now.