Set your docs up right

Secret Weapon #006

16 April 2025

If you’re reading this then there’s a good chance Google Docs makes a regular appearance in your professional life.¹ I’m here today to implore you to set your documents up properly – for your own benefit but also for everyone else!

Here are my top three rules for crafting better docs:

Use styles for headings, not manually adjusted font sizes or weights
Use spacing in between paragraphs, not blank lines
Use a pageless layout, not a digital facsimile of A4 paper

You can find all of these under “Format” in the Google Docs toolbar.

CHART

These three rules are downstream of the most important principle of all for digital documents: separation of content and presentation.²

Working like this does require some upfront effort to master the tools and dial in your preferred settings. But once that’s done it pays off pretty quickly:

It’s faster to navigate within your document (e.g. using hyperlinks to headings)
It’s easier to make global changes to how your document is presented
It’s more comfortable working across different screen sizes / devices

The real win, however, is for all the other people in the document with you. Shared documents are where a lot of modern-day collaboration takes place. Your colleagues can do their best work if you make it easy to stay focused, so sparing them from fiddling with fonts and page breaks is a great gift to give – anytime of year.

Or Microsoft Word, everyone is welcome here! ↩
A similar principle applies to web pages, which use CSS to separate a page’s content from its presentation (e.g. layout, colours and fonts). ↩