Google Docs and Notion are 2 completely separate products that happen to have a bunch of overlap.
- Google Docs is a document editor, used for creating... documents
- Notion is a highly flexible app that is mainly for productivity and note taking, but can be adapted to do just about anything
Notion has been gaining popularity, due to its flexible nature as well as its minimalist design. People online like to compare the Google Docs and Notion interface, because once you start typing, the only interface Notion has is your page content. Notion is so lightweight in fact that it takes like 2 seconds to load a page, and you should probably just use Obsidian instead (unless you're me).
Obviously, Google started to notice this, and they wanted a piece of the pie.
Also, real quick note, Microsoft doesn't come into this story at all, because they already have a Notion clone that is such a Notion clone it's unapologetic.
So it Begins
In 2021, Google announced Smart Canvas, the "future of work". I'm focusing on the features for Google Docs, however features were added into the other G Suite (or Google Workspace if you really care) products as well. The initial features of smart canvas were honestly an improvement. They were obviously Notion inspired, but they were good.
For example, the primary way to add content onto a Notion page is through slash commands. This made its way onto Google Docs, but you use the @ symbol instead. So instead of having to go to Insert > Horizontal Line, you could just type @Hor, press enter and insert a horizontal line. The setting to use markdown formatting was also added, which is nice, as that's what I use.
Checkboxes were also introduced. I don't have much to say about them. They're a box, and you can check it to mark it off. Cool if you're into that sort of thing.
The big feature however was smart chips. You can now mention people, files, places, dates, whatever in your document. And when you mention someone, clicking their name will give you their contact card. I don't know what mentioning a date does, other than place it into a bubble. At least with Notion you can use mentioned dates to set reminders, but with Google Docs I guess you'll have to use Google Keep for that. Probably. You can also use dropdowns, which probably has some use, just not one I can think of.
The final thing that was added were building blocks, which are templates with special features. I don't like these, they're extremely situational and just feel a little forced. Also, most have exclusive features that you currently cannot use outside of that building block, so what's the point?
Pageless
The next big change was the addition of a pageless mode. Pages are becoming less and less important in documents. The only thing pages are useful for are for printing and as a relative unit of measurement. So because of this, a pageless option only made sense for Google to add.
Google really wanted people to use this. They included a prompt for all users that wouldn't go away until acted upon notifying of the new setting. New features at the most just get a little New badge, so this was definitely a change. You could also set it so all new documents would use pageless by default.
This was obviously the biggest Notion inspired change yet. However, it once again wasn't that big of a deal because you could just choose not to use it.
Document Tabs
Every change so far has been alright because you can simply ignore them or are genuine improvements. But this next one is where I start to get a little confused at where Google Docs is heading.
Recently, Google launched a feature titled tabs. It works the same way that pages work in Notion. Each tab is a page, and you can add nested pages. You can even assign a cover image and emoji for each tab, just like Notion.
The main thing is that this feature affects how the outline feature works. For large documents, the outline feature makes navigating through the document much easier and faster, however this has been replaced with tabs. Sure, the outline is still displayed under the tabs, but the tabs just add much more visual clutter.
Why?
I'm happy that Google is trying to compete with Notion, but my biggest question is why put it in Google Docs? People are in Docs to make highly customizable documents, not make productivity planners and to-do lists. Why not just make your own Notion clone?
But the thing is that Google knows that nobody would care if they actually did that. Because the only people who use Google Docs professionally are students, YouTubers, and startups. But the thing is that Google has the budget to make this a thing. They recently launched Google Vids, an alternative to Adobe Spark. The team is there, but Google knows the product will just end up in the Google Graveyard.
However, the thing is that once you add features to a document editor, you cannot sunset them without breaking everything.