New Drive Access and Gemini Features You Need to Know for an AI-Powered Google Workspace

Upcoming change to drive sharing permissions. It almost feels like we never get any news that's not related to Gemini anymore. And so updated permissions.

If you change access to a folder, let's check out exactly what this says. With this update, you will stop allowing restricted access specific files and folders within a shared folder. Okay.

So, what it means is if you set parent level permissions, it's going to get a bit technical, but for some people this is really important, particularly IT managers who have lots of users and are very diligent with sharing settings. If you're changing settings at a parent folder, so basically if you don't have permission to change, if you don't have the authority to change the permissions, you're going to see your options grayed out. Effectively, if someone with more permission has already shared a folder, you're not going to be able to unshare that folder.

I don't know exactly why Google made this change, but these are the kind of changes that people with large Google drives really care about. So for me, I try and keep the permissions pretty simple for us. We have a series of shared drives.

There's a shared drive for each area in the business. We have a set of groups for each area in the business. And then we share those groups to those shared drives.

Someone comes on board, they're on the finance team, they get added to the finance group, they automatically get access to the finance shared drive. Refine, remember I said refine is coming to everywhere. refined Google chat messages with Gemini to communicate with confidence and clarity.

And maybe English is not your first language or whatever language is not your first language that your company is in. You bang out a message and you decide, "Yep, I want to refine that. " Google's going to give you the option with one button there to refine your messages.

I do really like that. This can be useful when composing an important message to a large space or a senior stakeholder. There we go.

Or communicating in a second language. That was my tip there. So, I'm hoping this comes out immediately.

Uh, there we go. But yeah, full roll out is not going to be for a couple of weeks. So, look forward to that.

It does look like business standard and plus are getting it only. So, if you're on the basic edition or starter it's called, then you're not going to get it. But, I really like that feature.

Nice work, Google. Making the internet more accessible for everyone. Next up, generate data with AI function in Sheets is now available in seven additional languages.

This is just a language roll out, but I wanted to mention it again because this is a great feature if you've not yet used it. If you now, funnily enough, it's giving me the Spanish option, but when you are working with a cell or a row of data, you can have a plain text transformation instruction added and Google will run through and automatically update each of your cells based on your plain text instruction. So you might say make this text more exciting or I mean I'm thinking copywriting because I'm a marketer but for you you can choose whatever you want to do with the data in those cells just by typing in plain text and it's going to do it automatically.

This is being rolled out to a bunch of new languages which is pretty exciting. All right, thank you Google for that one. Rolling out soon.

Oh, another one here inside of Sheets. And in general, Google's getting a lot better with Gemini in Sheets. It was pretty average for the first few months.

I asked it to create me a pivot table. It didn't create me a pivot table, but now it's got pretty darn good and you're now getting a lot of insights there. So, my recommendation would be as much as possible, keep that little Gemini co-pilot open in the side window there.

Speaking of co-pilot, Microsoft had this well before Google. So, they're really trying to catch up and make sure that you have a great experience inside of Sheets. Try that one out and let me know how you go.