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Introducing the new Confluence integration with Google Chat

 Confluence by Atlassian is designed  for teams to store and share ideas, docs, and knowledge. Workspace customers can now use Confluence for Google Chat to bring relevant project context and information from Confluence directly into Chat conversations. This integration, which is part of the Atlassian add-on, enables teams to work more effectively by connecting real-time collaboration with source-of-truth documentation. 

Key features include:

  • Rich link previews: View page titles, summaries, and author name when sharing Confluence links in Chat 
  • Personal notifications: Be notified in real-time for @mentions, comment replies, or changes to Confluence pages you own
  • Shared pages updates: Receive automated notifications when changes are made to shared Confluence pages 

This enhanced app enables Workspace customers to use Google Chat for team collaboration while keeping Atlassian as their system of record for knowledge management.


Getting started

  • Admins: Admins can install the Atlassian add-on on their users’ behalf. Visit the Help Center to learn more about installing Marketplace apps for your organization.
  • End users: End users need a Confluence account to use this app. They can also search for the Confluence add-on in Google Chat under Apps > Find apps. Visit the Google Workspace Marketplace to learn more and install the Confluence Chat App as part of the Atlassian add-on.

Rollout pace

Availability

  • Available to all Google Workspace customers, Workspace Individual Subscribers, and users with personal Google accounts
  • A Confluence Cloud account is required to use the integration

Resources

Land your apps on Googlebook with adaptive development

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Posted by Fahd Imtiaz, Senior Product Manager, and Loryn Hairston, Product Marketing Manager, Android Developer


Googlebook introduces a new category of laptops built on a shared Android foundation. High-performance hardware from partners such as HP, Dell, Lenovo, Acer, and Asus, combines mobile convenience with desktop power. Googlebook offers high-resolution OLED touchscreens, dedicated keyboards, and precision trackpads with all-day battery life and OS-level Gemini Intelligence. With Googlebook, users can transition fluidly from quick interactions on their phones to rich, immersive sessions on their laptop.

Bringing your app to Googlebook opens up valuable opportunities for you across the Android ecosystem. Google Play highlights optimized titles with dedicated badging, enhanced search, and featured spots across curated store homepages. Delivering this level of quality also prepares your app for the Apps Experience Program, where you can enroll to unlock a new program rate card designed to drive business growth. Even better, when users set up their new Googlebook using their Android phone, optimized apps are prominently highlighted for easy transfer, giving your app day-one presence on their new device.

Optimized for desktop badging and dedicated collections on Google Play.

The best part? You don't need to build a separate app from the ground up to take advantage of this reach. Adaptive development is how modern Android apps naturally scale across large displays, new device postures, and emerging form factors. If your app already embraces adaptive layouts, it is primed for Googlebooks. By building on your existing foundation of adaptive UI, window size classes, and multi-input support, you can deliver an optimized experience.

Adaptive layouts reorganizing mobile views into a multi-pane experience.

Anchor your app in desktop fundamentals

On a laptop, your app operates within a desktop environment where user expectations shift toward higher information density, precision input, and active multitasking. Following desktop development and design guidance provides the principles needed to make the most of this experience. Instead of simply stretching mobile interfaces across a wide screen, an adaptive layout reorganizes content into functional groupings.

Adopt a multi-pane architecture to allow your UI to expand, reflow, or reveal richer detail as window boundaries change. With Navigation 3, you can implement adaptive scene strategies to coordinate multi-pane layouts directly from your back stack. Use ListDetailSceneStrategy and SupportingPaneSceneStrategy to enable side-by-side layouts when expanded window space is available. Scene decorators let you wrap screens with persistent desktop navigation rails. Pair these patterns with layout primitives like Grid and FlexBox, and soon alongside experimental MediaQuery and Styles APIs, to organize complex content and adjust visual styles dynamically for desktop displays.

Representations of width-based window size classes.

In free-form desktop windowing, app windows can be resized dynamically at any time. Your layout decisions should respond directly to the available window space using window size classes rather than the physical display dimensions.

Desktop design also accounts for ergonomic viewing distances and precise pointer targets. Adjust your type scale for comfortable viewing across larger displays, set layout max widths to keep line lengths readable, and define explicit click targets to prevent misclicks. Explore complete design patterns in our design principles guide and discover real world inspiration in the desktop design gallery.

Deliver differentiated experiences for Googlebooks

Once your core layout is adaptive, you can enrich your app with differentiated features that take full advantage of a desktop environment. Everyday productivity in these setups relies on versatile input methods. Jetpack Compose natively supports physical keyboard navigation and pointer selection. Elevate your app’s usability by integrating contextual cursors that provide visual feedback for text entry, pane resizing, and tool selection. Implement right click context menus and hover states; make your shortcuts discoverable through the Keyboard Shortcuts Helper.

Task switcher displaying multiple open windows and app instances.

On Googlebook, apps run in free-form windows where users can tackle multiple tasks simultaneously. Unlock side-by-side workflows by enabling multi-instance support, giving users the ability to launch independent windows for comparing content or managing multiple documents. Pair this with drag and drop to let users move text, images, and files fluidly between windows or even drop items onto an empty workspace to spin up a new task.

Multi-window multitasking with cross-window drag and drop.

Go all in and customize your window frame. In desktop windowing, apps include a caption header bar that you can style with custom backgrounds, search bars, or tabs while respecting system window controls.

Beyond individual app windows, Continue On keeps experiences connected across phones, tablets, and Googlebooks with bidirectional handoff that lets users start a task on one screen and pick up seamlessly on another. Passing state through HandoffActivityData preserves context such as document position or active tabs, with optional web fallbacks to ensure smooth transitions.

Complement this by surfacing actionable information at a glance with customizable widgets. And, as you refine your app experience, benchmark against our comprehensive desktop app quality guidelines.

Developers are already bringing these patterns to life across the ecosystem. When bringing Notability to Googlebook, prior investments in tablets and foldables gave the team an immediate head start. Because their layout already relied on window size classes and adaptive scene strategies, their canvas and toolbars reflowed naturally during window resizing, while existing keyboard and trackpad support carried straight over.

"We had already been targeting first-class experiences for tablets and foldables," explains Ryan Shea, Android Engineering Manager at Notability. "So by the time Googlebook came along, scaling Notability up to a laptop-class experience was mostly turning a dial we had already built. That left us free to spend our time on the things that only make sense on a bigger screen or with the newer APIs, like Continue On, which hands a note off from your phone to the laptop, and optimizing the side-by-side app experience for studying."

Accelerate your workflow with dedicated tooling

Testing and optimizing your app for Googlebook fits naturally into your existing development workflow.

With the desktop emulator in Android Studio, you can run a virtual desktop environment directly on your workstation to test free-form window resizing, verify multi-instance interactions, and debug mouse, trackpad, and keyboard interactions. Download Android Studio Canary to set up your virtual device today.

Help speed up your layout modernization with AI-assisted development. The adaptive skill gives your AI agents the necessary context to help refactor mobile layouts into responsive Compose containers automatically. Install the skill directly through the Android CLI to streamline your implementation.

Realize new possibilities on Googlebook

The Googlebook family of laptops from ecosystem partners.

The Googlebook lineup marks an exciting new chapter for the Android ecosystem, giving your apps a premium platform to deliver richer, more capable experiences. By building adaptively, a single codebase ensures your app looks and performs optimally across phones, foldables, tablets, and Googlebooks while unlocking elevated visibility and badging across Google Play. Explore documentation at our Googlebook developer hub, review the desktop design guide, and start building for Googlebook today!

Manually reorder and custom sort pivot tables in Google Sheets

Google Sheets now supports custom sorting and manual reordering in pivot tables. Users can now drag and drop rows and columns on a pivot table to match specific presentation needs and custom business hierarchies, rather than being restricted to standard ascending or descending alphanumeric order. This launch includes the following capabilities:

  • On-grid drag-and-drop: Directly grab and move individual row or column headers with clear drop-zone indicators
  • Multi-item reordering: Select and reposition multiple rows or columns simultaneously
  • Hierarchical preservation: Automatically move nested child items alongside parent fields, maintaining structure across expand and collapse actions
  • Persistent sort states: Preserve custom arrangements across browser sessions, data refreshes, filtering, and layout adjustments

This update also delivers significant improvements for Microsoft Excel file interoperability. Previously, when importing Microsoft Excel workbooks containing pivot tables with manual or custom sort orders, Google Sheets defaulted back to ascending or descending order. Now, imported spreadsheets retain their pivot tables with the exact custom sort order preserved. Furthermore, exporting workbooks back to Microsoft Excel retains these sorted orders for seamless roundtrip compatibility.



User dragging and dropping row labels to manually reorder a pivot table in Google Sheets

Getting started

Rollout pace

Availability

  • Available to all Google Workspace customers and users with personal Google accounts

Resources

Study notebooks in Gemini are now available for Google Workspace accounts

Earlier this year we introduced study notebooks, a dedicated space that turns Gemini into an interactive, adaptive learning platform. They offer personalized lessons based on your learning goal, whether that’s tackling a school course or learning a new skill. Now, we’re excited to share that users of all ages who are signed into a school or work-issued Google account will also have access to study notebooks if the Gemini app and Gemini Notebook are enabled by their admin.

Here’s how study notebooks work:

  1. Create your study notebook: From the left sidebar in the Gemini app, select “New notebook”, and then the “Study and learn” tile. Tell Gemini what you are studying, and upload your class materials or other sources. 
  2. Assess your knowledge gaps: You can request progress check quizzes, helping pinpoint your strengths and weaknesses to create a tailored learning baseline.
  3. Study with personalized bite-sized lessons: Follow short, custom lessons with built-in practice quizzes. You can ask in-line questions at any point as you learn.
  4. Track your progress: Monitor real-time mastery via a dynamic dashboard that breaks your goals into objectives, categorizing topics into "Strengths" and "Focus areas," to recommend top-priority lessons.

With study notebooks, students’ learning is grounded in trusted class materials, ensuring that lessons from Gemini are consistent with their curriculum.

This expansion gives educational institutions and organizations a secure way to support more personal learning, reinforcing classroom instruction while keeping study material relevant and accurate.


Getting started

  • Admins: Study notebooks in Gemini are available if the Gemini app and Gemini Notebook are enabled. As an administrator of your organization's Google Accounts, you can control who can use study notebooks. Study notebooks are available to users who are in a group or organizational unit (OU) with both Gemini Notebook and Gemini set to On. Visit the Help Center to learn more about turning Gemini and Gemini Notebook on or off for users.
  • End users: There is no end user setting for this feature. Visit the Help Center to learn more.

Rollout pace

Availability

  • Available to all Google Workspace customers and Workspace Individual subscribers outside of the European Economic Area (EEA), as well as users with personal Google accounts globally. Study notebooks will roll out to users in the EEA in the coming weeks.

Resources

Long Term Support Channel Update for ChromeOS

A new LTC  version 150.0.7871.255 (Platform Version: 16700.65.0), is being rolled out for most ChromeOS devices. 

If you have devices in the LTC channel, they will be updated to this version. The LTS channel remains on LTS-144 until October 6th, 2026. 


Release notes for LTC-150 can be found here 

Want to know more about Long-term Support? Click here


Andy Wu

Google Chrome OS


Long Term Support Channel Update for ChromeOS

A new LTC  version 150.0.7871.255 (Platform Version: 16700.65.0), is being rolled out for most ChromeOS devices. 

If you have devices in the LTC channel, they will be updated to this version. The LTS channel remains on LTS-144 until October 6th, 2026. 


Release notes for LTC-150 can be found here 

Want to know more about Long-term Support? Click here


Andy Wu

Google Chrome OS


New manual calculation setting in Google Sheets

We’re introducing a new manual calculation setting in Google Sheets to give you precise control over when formulas and other references update. The new manual calculation setting allows editors of complex or data-dense spreadsheets to pause automatic recalculation, batch their edits, and trigger a sheet-wide update at the exact moment they are ready to review the results.

Manual calculation offers users of especially complex Sheets a more streamlined, uninterrupted workspace for advanced analytical workflows. This feature is particularly useful for things like:

  • Uninterrupted high-volume updates: When pasting or modifying large blocks of data in spreadsheets  containing extensive formula networks (such as multi-sheet lookups and aggregations), you can enter all updates smoothly without intermediate recalculations running after every action.
  • Structured scenario modeling: When adjusting multiple assumption drivers in financial or forecasting models, you can input your variables sequentially and recalculate once. This ensures you only view the complete, final state of the scenario rather than partial, intermediate calculations.
  • Stabilizing volatile simulations: For spreadsheets utilizing volatile functions (such as random generators or live timestamps), manual calculation lets you freeze the data state so your numbers remain stable while you analyze results or present insights to key stakeholders.

Enabling Manual Calculation Mode


Controlling when Sheets calculates

Getting started

  • Admins:  There is no admin control for this feature.
  • End users: This feature will be OFF by default and can be enabled by the user by navigating to File > Settings > Calculation Settings in their Sheet. Visit the Help Center to learn more.

Rollout pace

Availability

  • Available to all Google Workspace customers and Workspace Individual subscribers

Resources