Materials you redesign in Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides for the web

Materials that inspired a redesign of Google Docs, Sheets and Slides on the web were officially announced last month. began to appear for some workspace clients.

The most noticeable change for longtime Google Docs users is the completely redesigned toolbar. Ditching its formerly rectangular design, the Material You Styled toolbar now has an elongated disk shape across the width of your web browser. There’s a new bit of padding on both sides, and the strap and all of its buttons are now thicker than before. Changing the font size is also a bit easier, with new plus and minus buttons for quickly pointing up or down one point.

Each app compensates for the change in toolbar density in its own way while also taking advantage of, in Google’s words, “reducing clutter.” For example, Google Docs previously offered four individual buttons in the toolbar for paragraph alignment. It is now reduced to a dropdown list. Meanwhile, the Sheets toolbar comes relatively unchanged.

In other notable tweaks, all buttons now use a specific icon style, rather than being filled in. The previously multicolored Google Meet button in the upper-right corner is now a simple outline. Also where Google Docs previously showed the last edit time of the current document – which you can also click to view the editing history – the material you redesign switches that button to a new button without text in the upper-right corner.

As seen in the original preview, comments within the document have been given a facelift, using the same shade of blue as the updated toolbar.

As usual, since the web doesn’t support Material You’s signature dynamic color schemes, the new look for Docs, Sheets, and Slides makes heavy use of Google’s default shade of light blue. For better or for worse, this choice makes the apps visually compatible with Gmail’s Material Redesign.

Notably, while the editor views have been updated for each app, we still see the file selection tool’s previous design. In addition, it appears that the redesign is currently only available to those using a Google Workspace account on a shared domain at “Quick release. The new look may not arrive in regular Gmail/Google accounts until around March 22, when most other Workspace accounts (designated for “scheduled release”) are set to update.

More on Google Workspace:

Check out 9to5Google on YouTube for more news: