Saturday 16 April 2022

A minor Google Drive annoyance

 I'm not sure how you use Google Drive, but I usually keep a tab open in Chrome, purely because the documents I've got on Google Drive are 'live' documents which are edited frequently - dot pointers, live notes, some spread sheets etc. Basically I use it as a set of scratch pads.

This isn't a new thing, I've been using Google Drive pretty much since it first came available, and I've been keeping a tab open for pretty much forever, especially as I used to be a linux user in the early days.

As a way of working this works pretty well, especially as last four most heavily worked on documents appear as 'Suggested Documents' at the top of the window.

Now, you would think that you could go to the window and click on the document you wanted. 

Not in the land of Google. 

When you click on a document in the open window it does a refresh and sometimes reorders the documents in the 'Suggested Documents' list.

Which wouldn't really be a problem, except it honours the position of the click, and opens the document that has been reordered to that position rather than the document you clicked on:

So if your 'Suggested Documents' list showed

DocA DocB DocC DocD

and you clicked on DocB, but at the same time the document list reordered itself to

DocD DocA DocB DocC

you get DocA not DocB

which personally, I find incredibly annoying. 

I can see a logic to it - after all you (or someone else in the case of a shared document) may have been working on some of the documents from a different machine, and therefore the list of most recently modified documents may have changed since your window was last refreshed.

I'm pretty sure that the behaviour changed sometime in the last year or two, but I can't pinpoint when ...

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