A quick way to create Google documents.
#productivity#google#discuss
Mark Nicol

Mark Nicol @mark_nicol

About: I have been coding for too many years. You can find me on Twitter as @mark_nicol I live in Ormiston and work in Edinburgh

Joined:
May 2, 2017

A quick way to create Google documents.

Publish Date: Nov 3 '18
16 12

A question - triggered by a quick productivity tip a colleague showed me this week.

If you are a Google Drive / Documents user you can create a new document by typing the document type followed by .new in the browser bar.

This creates and opens a blank document of that type in your Google Drive.

The ones I've seen documented are:

  • Docs: doc.new, docs.new, document.neworms: form.new, forms.new
  • Sheets: sheet.new, sheets.new, spreadsheet.new
  • Slides: slides.new, deck.new, presentation.new
  • Sites: Slides: slides.new, deck.new, presentation.new

Do any other tools have anything this neat - that I've just missed?

Refs:

Quartz at work: Google has a .new timesaving tip

Comments 12 total

  • Meghan (she/her)
    Meghan (she/her)Nov 3, 2018

    ⌘ is the replacement for CTRL in pretty much every shortcut on macOS

  • Meghan (she/her)
    Meghan (she/her)Nov 3, 2018

    Works in Firefox too 🤔🤔🤔

    • Mark Nicol
      Mark NicolNov 4, 2018

      Yes, you are quite right, digging a wee bit it looks like it should work just about anywhere.

      The 'magic' seems to be in the '.new'. What it seems to be doing is requests are redirected to a google document creation URL. (e.g. doc.new becomes a request to docs.google.com/document/u/0/create) - which from the quartz article was an older hack for the same thing.

  • kaelscion
    kaelscionNov 4, 2018

    I saw this post and it got me thinking. You can totally do this programmatically with Python. The script below is Python 3, but this would work with 2 as well without the 'f' string:

    
import requests
import webbrowser

def open_google_doc(doc_type):
    r = requests.get(f'https://{doc_type}.new')
    webbrowser.open(r.url)

open_google_doc('sheets')

    Something tells me this has potential of some sort, but I have no idea what it would be. Let me know if any of you could think of a reason to use this :P

    • Mark Nicol
      Mark NicolNov 4, 2018

      That is an interesting thought. I'll now be pondering that one too, but I have no good answers.

      A very crude way of logging when an event happened?

    • kaelscion
      kaelscionNov 4, 2018

      For me, my inner web-scraping wonders if there are other browser commands that can be exploited in a similar way. Perhaps the correct json data in a header for requests could open and append data to a new document. Then, a different request could read it back. Perhaps this could be used for a quick notes web app, or filtering system for data you currently have in a spreadsheet, or retrieve a particular slide? That way you can do quick, one-off reads and writes from a front end UI that leverages the in-place cloud infrastructure of the g suite rather than building your own? Then anybody who can collaborate on those docs could do the same, no Docs API key necessary. Hmm....would this be the type of framework any web devs would find useful?

  • Mark Nicol
    Mark NicolNov 4, 2018

    Yes. I've found that one super useful in the past when you already have the app open on another doc. Is there any smart keyboard shortcut for opening one of the office apps? - I know you can use windows key or cmd-r and then select the application.

  • Mark Nicol
    Mark NicolNov 4, 2018

    Thanks, I've not tried Clavier+. Will take a look. You've reminded me that I used to find a similar tool called KeyText dead handy for quick scripts in Windows.

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