Gemini Workspace upgrades deliver new drafting and editing tools

For all the flashy stuff AI can do, like generating 3D worlds from scratch, it’s arguably at its most useful when it’s targeting a much lower bar, looking to help automate the sort of routine tasks that cross our desks over and over again. This week Google is sharing a whole lot of Gemini updates for Workspace that absolutely fit that bill, trying to make creating and editing files as stress-free as possible.

How many times have you started a task by opening a copy of an old document? Maybe you want to borrow the structure, or refer to it to check on the formatting you’re supposed to use. Well, what’s good for the goose is good for the gander, and Gemini in Docs is working on perfecting that same trick itself. When drafting something new, you’ll be able to point it to old docs for sourcing either content or structure. You can even explicitly use “Match doc format” when you’re looking to treat an existing doc as your template.

Once you have at least a draft put together, you can further use Gemini in Docs to refine it, highlighting passages and describing tonal tweaks you’d like Google’s AI to perform.

Spreadsheets are frequently a headache for all but a few die-hard enthusiasts, but Gemini in Sheets aims to make them much more accessible by making them as hands-off as possible. That means you can just describe the sort of information you want in a Sheet to Gemini, and it will set it all up for you — it can even pull data from the web in order to start populating fields, saving you from a lot of copy-and-pasting. And just in case you’re worried about the quality of that data, Gemini can show you where’s it’s getting it all from.

Google’s bringing this same kind of approach to Gemini in Slides, giving it tools for better awareness of other slides when creating new ones, or simply editing them for more consistent tone and appearance. The company teases even more powerful Slides capabilities coming further down the pike, creating entire decks from scratch based on a simple prompt.

We can’t forget about Drive, and just like Gmail did, Drive is getting AI Overviews for crawling through your files and answering questions based on them. When you want to analyze a few in specific, you can select them and use “Ask Gemini in Drive” to get targeted responses — it’s getting a little late now, but Google suggests this could be a great way to go through all your tax docs as you prepare to file.

All told — a nice-sounding selection of tweaks that should make Gemini a little more useful for creating and editing documents. Access to the upgrades gets started in beta for AI Ultra and Pro subscribers, which hopefully means these might start becoming available for the rest of us in some form a few months from now.