Google Drive Release Notes

We're excited to announce a major improvement to Microsoft Office interoperability in Google Workspace: you can now edit Microsoft Office files that are password-protected, directly within Docs, Sheets, and Slides.

When a user attempts to open a protected file in Drive, they will be prompted to enter the password with the option to View or Edit. Selecting “Preview” opens the document in read-only Preview mode without removing the password. New with this launch is the option to Edit, which will open the file for editing in Docs/Sheets/Slides and remove the password from the file.

This enables better interoperability between Workspace and Microsoft, allowing users for the first time to edit password protected files directly in Drive. Prior to this, users would have to download and rely on third party applications to remove passwords or edit password protected Microsoft files.

Getting started

• Admins: There is no admin control for this feature.
• End users: Visit the Help Center for more info on using this feature.

Rollout pace

• Rapid Release domains: Full rollout (1–4 days for feature visibility) starting on January 13, 2026, and ending on January 16, 2026
• Scheduled Release domains: Full rollout (1-3 days for feature visibility) starting on January 19, 2026, and ending January 21, 2026

Availability

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

Resources

• Google Docs Editors Help: Edit an Office file directly in Docs, Sheets, or Slides

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What’s changing

We previously announced an open beta for migrating files from Dropbox to Google Drive in the New Data Migration service. This functionality is now generally available.

Admins can use the New Data Migration service to migrate data from Dropbox business accounts, including files, folders and associated permissions, helping organizations transition to Google Workspace quickly and easily.

Example of a running Dropbox migration

Additional details

• You can migrate data from up to 150 Dropbox users or team folders at a time to MyDrive or Google shared drives respectively.
• You can find comprehensive reporting on migration progress, including site and file counts (migrated/skipped). You can also export migration reports for error investigation and troubleshooting.
• Delta updates are available to migrate newly added or updated files.

Getting started

• Super Admins: You can find this new solution in the Admin console under Menu > Data > Data Import & export > Data Migration (New). Visit the Help Center to learn more about Dropbox to Google Drive migration and new Data Migration Service.

Rollout pace

• Rapid Release and Scheduled Release domains: Available now

Availability

Available for Google Workspace:
• Business Starter, Standard, and Plus
• Enterprise Starter, Standard, and Plus
• Essentials Starter, Enterprise Essentials, and Enterprise Essentials Plus
• Education Fundamentals, Standard, Plus
• Nonprofits

Resources

• Google Workspace Admin Help: Migrate files from Dropbox

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Google Drive is making significant improvements to the viewing experience of third party file formats, such as PDFs, videos, images, and audio files. With this launch, we are modernizing the interface to include:

• A new left rail for PDFs which will include a table of contents (where applicable) and thumbnails for easier navigation of documents
• A new file menu
• A new toolbar and app bar
• An option to search by transcript when looking at a video

This modernization will make it easier for Google Workspace users to navigate documents, and will be particularly useful for large documents.

Getting started

• Admins: This feature will be on by default. There is no admin control for this feature.
• End users: This feature will be on by default. You will see it when you open a supported file format in a new tab in Google Drive on the web. Use our Help Center to learn more about how to use Google Drive.

Rollout pace

• Rapid Release domains: Available now
• Scheduled Release domains: Full rollout (1–3 days for feature visibility starting on December 11, 2025

Availability

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

Resources

• Google Help: How to use Google Drive

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Overview

Last year, we announced the ability to automatically generate captions for English-language videos in Google Drive. Today, we’re expanding this feature to support 27 additional languages.

This update makes video content stored in Drive more accessible, inclusive, and easier to understand for all users, especially those who are deaf or hard of hearing, are in a noisy environment, or speak a different primary language. Automatically generated captions also save time by eliminating the need for manual caption creation and make it easier to search for video content.

When an eligible user uploads a video to Drive, this feature will automatically detect if the video is in one of the supported languages and generate captions for it.

The new languages supported are:

• Arabic
• Czech
• Dutch
• Filipino
• Finnish
• French
• German
• Greek
• Hebrew
• Hindi
• Hungarian
• Indonesian
• Italian
• Japanese
• Korean
• Malay
• Norwegian
• Polish
• Portuguese
• Romanian
• Russian
• Spanish
• Swedish
• Thai
• Turkish
• Ukrainian
• Vietnamese

Support for Chinese is coming soon.

Getting started

• Admins: This feature expansion will be ON by default for all eligible organizations and will respect your existing settings for automatically-generated captions. No new admin control is being added. You can control this feature for your organization at the domain, OU, or group level. Admins can choose to:
  • Have captions generated automatically when a user uploads a video (default)
  • Turn on the feature, but require users to request captions for each video
  • Disable automatically-generated captions entirely
• End users: For end users at organizations where automatic generation on upload is enabled, captions in these new languages will be generated automatically upon video upload. No action is required. End users who need to request captions (including users with personal Google accounts) can generate captions by doing the following: right-click the video > Manage caption tracks > Add new caption tracks. Visit the Help Center to learn more about automatically generated captions.

Rollout pace

• Available now

Availability

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

Resources

• Google Workspace Admin Help: Visit the Help Center to learn more about turning automatically-generated captions for videos in Drive on or off.

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Beginning today, a Drive item’s applied data classification values will appear across all views on Drive on the web, including Home, My Drive, Shared Drives, and Drive search results. Previously, users needed to either navigate to Details or open the file to know a Drive item’s classification state. Now, users will immediately see the applied classification values when navigating throughout the Drive product.

For any particular item, the highest ranked label with a badged list field will display the applied option. For items with more than one label applied, an additional label count icon will appear next to the badged value displaying the number of additional labels applied to the item. For items where only data classification labels without badged lists are applied, the Label name of the highest rank classification label will appear next to the file title with a non-colored badge treatment. It’s important to note that only options from badged lists will display within Workspace surfaces; a label without a badged list will display the label name.

Hovering over either the badged label value or the additional count icon will display additional applied labels in a tooltip. Clicking a label value will immediately open the Labels section of File Details.

Getting started

• Admins:
  • If you've been using classification labels, there are no changes to your experience beyond improved end user visibility of applied labels.
  • There is no admin control for this feature; however, you are able to adjust whether a label contains a badged option list and specify a color scheme within the Label Manager.
• End users:
  No action needed. Labels will start to appear on Drive items across all supported views.

Rollout pace

• Available now

Availability

Data classification labels in Drive are available to Google Workspace:

• Frontline Starter and Standard
• Business Standard and Plus
• Enterprise Standard and Plus
• Education Standard and Education Plus
• Nonprofits
• Essentials, Enterprise Essentials, and Enterprise Essentials Plus

Resources

• Google Workspace Admin Help: Get Started as a Classification label admin
• Google for Developers: Labels Overview

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Beginning today, the new Data Migration Service can be used to migrate files and folders from Dropbox to Google Drive. This allows organizations to transition easily from Dropbox to Google Workspace, by copying over files, folders and associated permissions securely.

You can start and complete a migration in a few simple steps:

• Connect to your Dropbox business account from which you want to copy data.
• Specify which users or team folders you want to copy from and which user’s MyDrive or Google shared drive should contain the copied data.
• Specify users and groups whose permissions should be copied.

Example of a running Dropbox to Google Drive migration

Additional details

• You can migrate data from up to 100 Dropbox users or team folders at a time to MyDrive or Google shared drives respectively.
• You can find comprehensive reporting on migration progress, including site and file counts (migrated/skipped). You can also export migration reports for error investigation and troubleshooting.
• Delta updates are available to migrate newly added or updated files.

Getting started

• Admins: You can find this new solution in the Admin console under Menu > Data > Data Import & export > Data Migration (New). Visit the Help Center to learn more about Dropbox to Google Drive migration and new Data Migration Service.

Rollout pace

• Rapid Release and Scheduled Release domains: Gradual rollout (up to 15 days for feature visibility) started on November 10, 2025

Availability

Available for Google Workspace:

• Business Starter, Standard, and Plus
• Enterprise Starter, Standard, and Plus
• Essentials Starter, Enterprise Essentials, and Enterprise Essentials Plus
• Education Fundamentals, Standard, Plus
• Nonprofits

Resources

• Google Workspace Admin Help: Migrate files from Dropbox (beta)

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What’s changing

We previously introduced the option to set expirations on files that reside in shared drives using the Google Drive API. Today, we are bringing the ability to set expiring access for files and folders in shared drives directly from the sharing dialog. This highly-requested feature brings the ease and security of My Drive access controls into your collaborative shared drives.

File expirations

You can now set expirations when sharing files in a shared drive. This lets you add an expiration date right in the sharing dialog for temporary collaborators, ensuring access is automatically revoked and eliminating the need for manual cleanup.

Add expiration while sharing files in shared drives.

Folder expirations

For shared drive folders, you can now apply an expiration date specifically to the Viewer role. This setting is easily accessible in the folder's sharing dialog, helping you automatically remove read-only access when a collaborator's temporary need is finished.

Consistent expiration behavior in My Drive

We're standardizing access expiration for files and folders in My Drive. The experience is now consistent with shared drives, making it more predictable for you to know when access will expire.

Old behavior:
If you granted someone temporary Editor access to a file inside a parent folder they could only view, they would lose all access to the file once their Editor permission expired.

New behavior:
When their temporary Editor access expires, their permission will revert to the access they have on the parent folder (in this case, Viewer). They will not lose access to the file completely.
Editor access expires, and reverts to Viewer access (user has Viewer access on the parent folder).

Getting started

• Admins: There is no admin control for this feature.
• End users: This feature will be available by default. Visit the Help Center to learn more about how to manage expiring access in shared drives.

You can only set sharing expirations on Web and Android phones. Expirations cannot be set on iOS devices in My Drive or shared drives.

Rollout pace

• Rapid Release domains: Gradual rollout (up to 15 days for feature visibility) starting on November 4, 2025
• Scheduled Release domains: Gradual rollout (up to 15 days for feature visibility) starting on November 18, 2025

Availability

Available to Google Workspace:

• Business Starter, Standard, Plus
• Enterprise Starter, Standard, Plus
• Enterprise Essentials, Enterprise Essentials Plus
• Education Standard, Plus
• Nonprofits
• Frontline Starter, Standard, Plus

Also available to:

• Google One AI Premium
• Google AI Pro and Ultra
• Gemini Business, Enterprise*

*As of January 15, 2025, we’re no longer offering the Gemini Business and Gemini Enterprise add-ons for sale. Please refer to this announcement for more details.

Resources

• Google Help: Share folders in Google Drive
• Google Learning Center: Set an expiration date for file access

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New features to help organizations minimize ransomware impact

We’re adding two new features to help organizations minimize the impact of ransomware attacks on personal computers. Specifically, we are adding these features in beta:

• Ransomware detection: When users have Google Drive for desktop installed on their computers, file syncing will be paused when ransomware is detected. The user will see a notification appear on their computer. Admins will see an alert in the Admin console security center. And notification emails will be delivered to both users and admins.
• File restoration: Users are able to restore their files to a previous version in Drive with ease, saving them time and money without paying a ransom. Users can select and restore multiple files prior to when ransomware infected their computer, making their files inaccessible.

Getting started

Admins:

• Ransomware detection will be on by default for users in your organization. You can turn it on or off at the OU level by going to Admin console > Apps > Google Workspace > Settings for Drive and Docs > Malware and Ransomware. If ransomware is detected for your users, admins will receive an email and get an alert in the Alert center.
• Drive file restoration will be on by default. You can turn it on or off at Admin console > Apps > Google Workspace > Settings for Drive and Docs > Drive file restoration.
• Install the latest version of Drive for desktop on user computers (v.114 or later) to enable the detection alerts (syncing will still be paused on older versions).
• Visit the Help Center to learn more about managing ransomware detection and file restoration for your organization.

End users:

• The availability of this feature will depend on your admin’s settings. If turned on and ransomware is detected, you will see the alerts and access the interface below.
• Use the Help Center to learn more about restoring files in bulk with Google Drive.

Rollout pace

Admin console setting

• Rapid and Scheduled Release domains: Full rollout (1–3 days for feature visibility) starting on September 30, 2025.

File detection and restoration features

• Rapid and Scheduled Release domains: Gradual rollout (up to 15 days for feature visibility) starting on October 14, 2025.

Availability

File restoration

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

Ransomware detection
Available for Google Workspace:

• Business Standard, Plus
• Enterprise Starter, Standard, Plus
• Education Standard and Plus
• Frontline Standard and Plus

Resources

• Google Workspace Admin Help: Detect ransomware and recover files in Drive for desktop
• Google Help: Restore files in bulk with Google Drive
• Workspace blog: Block ransomware proliferation and easily restore files with AI in Google Drive

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What's changing

Earlier this year, we announced that we would be updating the access experience in Google Drive. With this update, we will stop allowing restricted access on specific files and folders within a shared folder, starting September 22, 2025. Limited access should instead be managed consistently via the limited access folder setting. Users with permission to restrict access on the parent folder will no longer see the “update item only” option:

Users without permission to restrict access on the parent folder will see certain options grayed out:

For alternate ways to restrict access for a file only, refer to this Learning Center tips page.

“Editors can change permissions and share” setting
Starting on September 22, 2025, the “Editors can change permissions and share” setting will also change. Turning the setting off will still prevent users with Editor access from sharing the item directly, but if the owner places the item into a shared folder, any changes to the containing folder’s access will be applied on the item. Previously, those changes were only applied if the item’s owner was the one making the folder access change.

Starting on October 8, 2025, we will apply limited access to items that have this setting turned off. Due to the limited access, the owner will still be the only person who can share those pre-existing items. Limited access will not be applied to items that have the setting turned off after October 8, 2025.

What You Need to Do

No immediate action is required. This is a system-wide logic change that will automatically apply to all files and folders.

Rollout pace

Changes when restricting access

• Rapid Release and Scheduled Release domains: Gradual rollout (up to 15 days for feature visibility) starting on September 22, 2025

“Editors can change permissions and share” setting

• Rapid Release and Scheduled Release domains: Gradual rollout (up to 15 days for feature visibility) starting on September 22, 2025

Availability

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

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You can now see Gemini summaries directly within the suggested files surfaced on the Home page in Google Drive. These summaries will show on select Docs, Sheets, Slides, and PDFs in your suggested file list. You can click the “See more” button that appears on hover to view a more in-depth analysis, or ask Gemini follow up questions about the file in the Gemini side panel.

Getting started

• Admins: This feature will be on by default for all users with Gemini in Drive enabled. Use our Help Center to learn more about managing Google Workspace smart features for your users.
• End users: Navigate to drive.google.com to see file suggestions on Home and click the “See more” button that appears on hover to dig deeper. Use our Help Center to learn more about using Gemini in Google Drive.

Rollout pace

Rapid and Schedules Release domains: Gradual rollout (up to 15 days for feature visibility) starting on September 4, 2025.

Availability

Available for Google Workspace:

• Business Standard and Plus
• Enterprise Standard and Plus
• Google AI Pro for Education
  Also available to
• Google One AI Premium
  Anyone who previously purchased these add-ons will also receive this feature:
• Gemini Business* Gemini Enterprise*
  *As of January 15, 2025, we’re no longer offering the Gemini Business and Gemini Enterprise add-ons for sale. Please refer to this announcement for more details.

Resources

• Google Workspace Admin Help: Manage Google Workspace smart features for your users
• Learn to use Gemini in your Google Drive files

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