Google Docs kills page breaks, gains new document summary with Smart Canvas

Google Workspace supercharges its smart canvas platform with new productivity features.

What you need to know

• Google has announced new Smart Canvas features for Google Docs.
• The productivity service now lets you add a brief overview to your shared document with a content summary.
• Google Docs also now includes a new pageless format, which eliminates the traditional page boundaries in documents.

Since releasing its Smart Canvas platform to the best laptops late last year, Google has rolled out a few helpful improvements to it such as the ability to insert various types of rich content into your document with the universal @ menu. The search giant is now pushing a handful of new updates to Smart Canvas meant to make it significantly easier to work on shared documents at the same time.

Smart Canvas now includes the ability to summarize a document in Google Docs. This feature allows you to include a helpful content overview in your document to help readers quickly understand what it contains.

There are two ways to insert a summary in Docs, depending on your Google Workspace edition. All Workspace, legacy G Suite Basic and G Suite Business customers can manually add a summary.

Meanwhile, automatically-generated summaries are available on Workspace Essentials, Business Starter, Business Standard, Business Plus, Enterprise Essentials, Enterprise Standard, Enterprise Plus, Education Plus, Frontline, and Nonprofits tiers. An AI-generated suggestion is automatically created when you hit the Summary box.

Furthermore, Google is making it much easier to work on wide tables and large images by introducing a pageless format for Docs. This feature removes the traditional page breaks and margins from Docs, allowing users to create documents without regard for page constraints. Of course, if you prefer the traditional view, you can always return to a paginated format.

All Workspace customers, as well as legacy G Suite Basic and Business users, can use pageless formatting. These features are expected to be available to everyone within the next two weeks.