I’ve got a bit of an addiction to Google’s new Smart Canvas features. After the company introduced the dynamic, modernized Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides tools that were created to help you increase your productivity and add a bit of creative and personalized flair to your files, I tinkered a bit, but never really gave it much thought.
Now, I’m all in, and I’ve been playing around with every aspect of the new system. From setting a timer and stopwatch for writing right in a Google Doc to injecting people, place and file chips, as well as tasks, and more, I’m realizing that this is quickly replacing Keep for me as well as my own journal!
Today, I wanted to gush about something I feel has transformed Google Docs for me in a way that most will likely either not understand or scoff at – Pageless view. I’ve spent years working in writing and publishing, professional corporate environments and so on where pages were very important for formatting. However, now that I’m mostly laid back, working on things just for myself in Google’s Workspace ecosystem, and not really printing anything out, I’ve started toggling ‘Pageless view’ in Docs for every document I create.
In addition to ridding my workspace of that retro feel (I’m a millennial, okay, sue me) laden with sharp, boxy corners and page breaks, Pageless view truly does make me want to use Docs more than I have in the past. As stupid as it may seem, there is a psychology to UX design and how appealing a product is to use, and Docs is now my new favorite Google service. That’s right, I’m saying that I like Docs more than my previous favorite tool of all time – Google Keep.
To enable Pageless view for yourself, simple start up a new document and click File > Page setup and click the ‘Pageless view’ tab at the top of the dialogue box. Then, click the blue ‘Okay’ button to wrap it up.
Pro tip: If you’d like for every document you set up to be ‘Pageless’, there’s a ‘Set default’ option in this menu that you can select. It sure beats having to switch every document to this format the moment you create it.
It truly does fill out the entire work space and having an open, boundless canvas to work on is helping me to release my creativity and thoughts. It feels much more ‘distraction free’ for writing, and paired with the Smart Canvas features like smart chips, gorgeous headers (which you can also quickly switch to via the ‘@’ symbol), the document outliner to quickly jump around the canvas, and more, Docs doesn’t really feel all that much like Docs anymore.
As someone who’s all about being forward-thinking, I’ve realized that Pageless view in Docs is the very thing that helped me make the leap to start dumping information from Keep and other locations into it to make sense of it and flesh it out. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that by keeping all of my thoughts in Keep, I’ve been restricting myself since it suffers from a lack of rich text editing and other smart features. Perhaps one day, Google will add Smart Canvas features to Keep, but I’ve pretty much already made the switch.
I’ll still use the company’s popular notetaking app for quick capture, especially since I can drag and drop notes and their content in to a live document from the side panel, but ever since Google nixed Calendar reminders for Keep notes, I’ve kind of jumped ship. I know most of what I’m saying isn’t directly related to Pageless view in Google Docs, but rather the bigger picture of Google’s tools and how they operate as a system, but going pageless triggered something in my brain as a creative who pretty much stopped using a printer a decade ago that’s welcomed me in to using Docs regularly as a viable option for many, many things, and not just opening it when I need to do something stiff and stuffy for business.
More Pro tips: You can change the width of your pageless canvas to ‘Narrow’, ‘Medium’, ‘Wide’, and ‘Full’ by going to view > Text width. Keep in mind that Pageless view will get rid of headers and footers, so depending on what you’re doing, it may not be ideal for you. If you print the document, you’ll still get pages, of course, but they won’t be divided perfectly where you’d like them to unless you manually insert a page break. Page breaks you insert before converting to Pageless view will be retained on your canvas.
What I’m saying is that Google Docs is slowly transforming into something that I can use to express myself, journal, capture and reflect with. I don’t agree with a lot that Google does, but I am falling in love with Docs all over again, and it’s clearly doing something right. While I didn’t go deep into the details of how I’m using Smart Canvas in this article, I will be writing a ton about it over the next little while, so expect to see me gush about specific use-cases and interesting implementations of these tools. For now, I just wanted to speak on the psychology of what’s happening here – it’s pretty significant, and I hope you’ll agree once you play with these features more for yourself.
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