I just finished reorganizing my documents and spreadsheets using the new interface for Google Docs & Spreadsheets. I must say that now that I am done, I feel it is going to be MUCH easier to find the things I am looking for.
The changes that Google rolled out last night are basically interface changes that help you to organize and find your documents easier. The new interface consists of a folder pane, a folder contents pane, and a toolbar with commonly accessed file management tasks.
Google has changed the name of the tags to folders. You can still assign multiple “folders” to a document or spreadsheet making it is still the same tag functionality with a different name. I like this method for organizing the documents, and I think most users will find it to be very familiar. I had made quite a mess out of my tags before the upgrade, and I think the folder structure allows me to more easily group documents. I have decided to go with an average of two tags for each document, the first tag being as specific as I can about the document, and the second being a very generic tag. For example, I am working on an adventure for D&D to run through with my gaming group. My documents relating to that adventure are tagged The Castle Ruins specifically, the name of my adventure, and roleplaying more generically. It seems like it will work well, and I now have a nice, concise list of all of my documents. They have included an items not in folders option which looks like it will work real well for the short documents that I write and typically then delete.
The actual contents pane for the documents is a simple list displaying the name of the document, who has access, the creation date, and an option to flag the document. The view is grouped by date so that you can see when a document was created/edited using natural language identifiers. Each folder gets a name, and can include a description of what is to be found in the document.
I would really have liked to see the ability to share an entire folder. The ability to share an entire folder would allow me to create a document library that I could share with friends. In the case of the roleplaying game mentioned earlier, I could dump all of the player reference material into the one folder, share that folder with all of the players and provide them a single source to find information. It would make sharing very easy since anything I put in the folder would become visible to those I had shared the folder with.
Overall, it seems to be a nice upgrade. I am still anxious to see what they do with the presentation software.