Here is a small but very useful (and long overdue) update to Google’s G Suite apps: Docs, Sheets, Slides and Forms are getting support for creating custom, reusable templates that you can share with your co-workers.
While you may not use templates much in your day-to-day G Suite life, this is a necessary feature for businesses. You don’t want to have to recreate your report or newsletter layout every time you start a new one, after all. For the most part then, the addition of template support in Google Docs is yet another example of Google trying to make its service more attractive to business users as it gets serious about the enterprise.
Google notes that G Suite for Business and Education will be able to require their users to request approval before their templates appear in the domain-wide template gallery. In addition, they can restrict who can even submit templates to begin with.
Google launched professionally designed templates for its G Suite back in March.
It’s worth noting that Google already offered a somewhat similar feature and template gallery for Google Docs in the past. The old gallery was also never updated and still featured Google’s pre-Material Design look.
The new gallery and template creation process looks to be far more integrated with all of Google’s G Suite apps than the old process ever was. As a Google spokesperson told me, the old templates gallery will shut down in early 2017.