Google’s productivity apps, whether you call them Google Workspace, Google Docs, or the online Office search engine, are one of the most used options in terms of office automation solutions and productivity in the cloud. Of course, there is no shortage of reasons for this, as they offer a huge number of features, relatively easy handling and, very importantly, excellent integration with other of the many online services offered by the company. Thus, although they may not have been as visible as other of its services, they have become a necessary tool in the daily life of many people.

As I said, one of the keys to its success is the integration of a large number of functions that are present in all applications, but probably especially in spreadsheets. However, and this is something that is remarkable in a company that tends to value usability so highly, this growth over the years has led to sometimes finding a specific function can be much more difficult than it should.

Of course, this doesn’t happen with the functions we normally use, but it is true extremely common with those we only need occasionally and that we therefore do not remember which menu or toolbar they are in. And this, while not a major problem, can not only steal time that we would otherwise spend doing what we want to do, but can also have the effect of “slowing down” what we are doing.

In response to this problem, and as we can read on the Workspace blog, Google has added a new search tool based on artificial intelligence. Its function is nothing more than to interpret natural language in such a way that we can “humanly” express what we want to do, and for the system to be able to identify the function or tool we need to put it at our fingertips .

Until now, with the search function integrated into the interface of document editing windows, it is necessary to use the specific name of the tool that we want to use, which is not always possible, because on many occasions we remember its function, but we cannot your name. However, with this new search that Google has already started deploying, we will be able to provide a description of its function.

Google provides an example of typing “who last viewed this document” which will automatically open an activity panel with details of people who have viewed the document, but also works for easier searching such as “remove column a” or “change text background color”.