Google Docs was missing these features... so we built them

In my personal life I use Notion for keeping organized on side projects, journaling & habit-tracking. They've done a great job at innovating on what a document editor can be as well as some of the micro-interactions of how we create and format documents.

At work though, we're primarily a gSuite company so all my writing happens in Google Docs. Nearly everyday while writing in Docs, I found myself hitting the forward slash (/) key expecting to find the formatting shortcuts I've become used to.

We surveyed other Google Docs power users – many of whom had never heard of Notion – and they thought the idea of inline formatting in Google Docs was brilliant, some even compared it to Markdown formatting.

For them the benefits were clear:

• No need to remember tons of keyboard shortcuts
• People hate searching for icons in the busy formatting menu
• Don't lose focus by leaving your line, and thus your train of thought
• Saves you time

This also led them to ask for a ton of additional shortcuts that we can add to our menu :)

It was a much harder engineering challenge than expected to achieve the speed and fluidity that we wanted for our inline menu, but finally we've gotten it to a great place. We're excited to get feedback from Google Docs users on our little extension. In the coming weeks we plan on adding new shortcuts to increase the power of our pop-up.

We're currently in a closed alpha, so if this looks interesting to you and you'd like to test it out, leave a comment or message me on twitter and I'll share a private link.

Onwards,