Workspace feature drop: 4 new ways to help you do your best work

While you’re busy building the next big thing or growing your business, the Google Workspace team is developing new tools and capabilities to improve how your team works and collaborates. In February’s Workspace drop, we’re highlighting four new features that make research and analysis a snap:

• Google Sheets: Powerful new AI analytical tools, including AI-generated charts and insights in the Sheets side panel

• NotebookLM: Your new favorite research assistant, now included with Workspace 

• Gemini Deep Research: Deep, multi-step research capabilities come to the Gemini app

• Google Drive: Find the moment you’re looking for with searchable video transcripts

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  Get to insights faster with AI in Sheets 

  Now, to help you get to insights faster, Gemini in Sheets is leveraging powerful new AI capabilities based on advanced multi-step code generation. With these capabilities, Gemini can now generate deeper insights about contextual trends, patterns, or correlations between different variables in your data. And to help you visualize these advanced insights, this same AI capability can also generate advanced chart types, like heatmaps, which go beyond the standard charts in Sheets.

  Some examples: 

  • A marketing manager analyzing campaign performance can ask Gemini to "provide insights and create a chart about my top 3 performing channels by conversion rate," and then receive a detailed breakdown with supporting visualizations like distribution plots and heatmaps to highlight channel performance.

  • A small business owner managing cash flow can ask "Predict my net income for the next quarter based on historical data" to proactively identify potential shortfalls. 

  • A financial analyst investigating inventory trends can ask Gemini to "identify any anomalies in inventory levels for Product X" to uncover potential supply chain issues or unusual demand patterns. 

We’re also releasing improvements that significantly boost the performance of everyday actions in Sheets:

• Accelerate your workflow with paste speeds improved by up to 50% when copying data between spreadsheets.

• Up to 50% faster filter menu loading for large datasets with many unique values, significantly improving your data exploration workflow.

• Get to your data faster — existing spreadsheets now open up to 30% quicker.

NotebookLM is now supported as a core Workspace service

NotebookLM is a powerful AI-powered research assistant that helps your teams accelerate learning and uncover more insights. Grounded in the sources provided by your organization — documents, PDFs, Google Drive files, videos, audio recordings, and more — NotebookLM becomes an expert in the data, enabling employees to generate insights and create a centralized knowledge hub. This helps teams stay up to date with the latest information, accelerating learning with AI generated podcasts. Teams can also take learning on the go with Audio Overviews, podcast-style conversations with AI hosts highlighting key takeaways.

NotebookLM and NotebookLM Plus are now included as core services for Workspace Business and Enterprise customers. All the sources you upload, including insights and prompts used by teams in your notebook, are covered under your Google Workspace terms of service. As a core service, NotebookLM will have the same enterprise-grade data protections and level of technical support as other core Workspace apps.

Gemini Deep Research now available to Workspace customers

Gemini Deep Research, now fully rolled out to customers, explores complex topics on your behalf and presents its findings in a comprehensive, easy-to-read report, bringing hours of research to your fingertips in mere minutes. Dive into industry trends, understand the competitive landscape, research customers ahead of a sales meeting, or even get help as an educator with grant writing and lesson planning.

After you enter your prompt, you can review the proposed multi-step research plan and revise it as needed. Gemini will then begin analyzing relevant information from across the web on your behalf, continuously refining its analysis as it learns. Once complete, a comprehensive report of the key findings is generated, which you can export to Google Docs and share with your team. It’s neatly organized with links to the original sources, connecting you to relevant websites and organizations you might not have found otherwise so you can easily dive deeper to learn more. You can also ask follow up questions or refine the report further. 

Drive helps you find the information you need in videos

Last year we announced that you can automatically generate captions for any video uploaded to Google Drive, improving the accessibility of videos and saving the effort of manually creating captions. Building on this feature, we’re introducing video transcripts to make it easier to discover and reference useful information in your video content stored in Drive. 

Now you can view and search transcripts for your videos with captions in Drive. The transcript appears in a sidebar next to the video player and highlights the currently spoken text. This update makes it easy to find specific moments, follow along with the content, or jump directly to the part of the video you need.

We’re continuing to roll out new features that fuel all the ways your teams connect, create, and collaborate. Watch this space for more highlights, and check out the Workspace Updates blog for deeper detail on the latest updates.