How to Actually Open a New Google Doc Quickly

Photo: Monticello (Shutterstock)

“I’m always doing some terrible workaround to try to get to Docs quickly,” our Senior Technology Editor Jake Peterson told me this morning. “It’s never quick.” But science has now accomplished what we all thought was impossible: an actually fast, simple way to open a blank Google document when you need one. And best of all, there are matching hacks for getting a blank spreadsheet, starting a video meeting, and more.

All you have to do is type “docs.new” to get a new Google doc. This works in any browser, since “.new” is equivalent to “.com”—basically, there are a bunch of top-level domains that each point to a page that lets you start a new file or project. Try these:

The document (or sheet, or meeting) will open in your currently logged-in Google account. If you’re logged in to multiple accounts, you can use a number to choose the account: docs.new/3 will open a new document in your third account. Confusingly, this is the same account that will appear with “/u/2” in the URL for a regular Google Docs page, since those start counting from zero. But once you figure out which is which, you can create a bookmark in your browser for whichever shortcut you’d like even easier access to.

The .new shortcuts work for more than just Google products, by the way. You can find a whole list of them here. Microsoft’s online products are included: word.new for a new Word document, excel.new for a new Excel spreadsheet, and so on. There’s also playlist.new for a new Spotify playlist, photoshop.new to create a new image in Adobe Photoshop, and a ton of coding shortcuts like js.new to create a new Javascript project in CodeSandbox.