Creating, organising and undoing

There are two front doors to a new document. You can start from the Office hub, opening the product you want and pressing New document, New spreadsheet or New presentation. Or you can start from Drive’s New menu, which is more natural when you already have the right folder open, because the document is created where you are standing.

The row menu

Each document in a list has a menu with Open, Make a copy, Rename and Delete. You can also select several documents and move or delete them in bulk, which is how you tidy up after a project rather than one file at a time.

Make a copy is the underrated one. Anything you produce more than once — a monthly report, a proposal, a client letter — is worth keeping as a clean version to copy from. It gives you templates without any template feature to learn.

Inside the editor

The editor page shows the document title, and a View only pill when you are in view mode. Seeing that pill is the answer to “why can I not type” — you have been given read access, not edit access, so ask the owner rather than assuming something is broken.

Full screen hides the surrounding application, which makes a real difference to long documents and to presenting from Slides.

The editor menu holds Rename, available in edit mode only, and Versions.

Versions

Office keeps earlier versions of a document, and restoring one requires edit access. This is the safety net for the everyday disasters: a formula overwritten, a section deleted, a whole afternoon of changes that turned out to be the wrong direction.

Because versions exist, it is safer to edit boldly than to keep a trail of files called “final” and “final v2”. One document with history is easier to work with than five documents with none.