How to Actually Open a New Google Doc Quickly

“I always come up with some terrible workarounds to get to the Docs quickly,” our Senior Technology Editor Jake Peterson told me this morning. “It’s never fast.” But now science has done what we all thought was impossible: a really quick and easy way to open a blank Google Doc when you need it. And best of all, there are the right hacks for getting a blank spreadsheet, starting a hangout, and more.

All you have to do is enter ” docs.new ” to get a new Google Doc. This works in any browser, because “.new” is equivalent to “.com” – in fact, there are many top-level domains, each of which points to a page that allows you to start a new file or project. Try these:

• docs.new to open a blank Google Doc
• Sheets.new to open a blank Google Sheets spreadsheet.
• Meeting.new to start a video meeting with yourself in Google Meet (it contains a link that you can copy to invite other participants).
• cal.new to create an event in your Google calendar
• form.new to create a new Google Form
• slides.new to create a new slideshow in Google Slides

The document (or sheet, or meeting) will open in your current Google account. If you’re signed in to multiple accounts, you can use the number to select an account: docs.new/3 will open a new document in your third account. Oddly enough, this is the same account that would appear with “/u/2” in the URL of a regular Google Docs page, since they start counting from zero. But once you figure out which is which, you can bookmark your browser for any shortcut you need even easier access to.

By the way, .new shortcuts don’t just work with Google products. You can find their complete list here . Microsoft 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 for creating a new image in Adobe Photoshop, and lots of code shortcuts like js.new for creating a new Javascript project in CodeSandbox.