Open the document, click the Gemini icon in the bar at the bottom and type what you want, such as "draft a one-page care guide for new puppy owners from @Puppy notes". To edit, select text and choose Refine for options like Rephrase, Shorten, Elaborate or More formal. Gemini's changes appear as suggestions you accept or reject.
You need an eligible plan. On Google Workspace that means Business Standard, about $14 per user a month on an annual plan, or above; Business Starter includes Gemini in Gmail and the Gemini app but not in Docs. Personal accounts need a Google AI plan. The speed comes from giving Gemini your own material to work from, because a blank prompt produces generic prose you then spend the saved time rewriting.
Where Gemini sits in a Google Doc now
Google has moved things around more than once, so here is the layout its help pages described in September 2026:
- The Gemini icon in the bottom bar. Type a prompt to draft or change text. You don't need to select anything first, because Gemini reads the document for context.
- Refine, on the floating bar. Select text and Refine offers Rephrase, Shorten, Elaborate, Bulletize, More formal, More casual and a summarising option. You can also type your own instruction, such as "make the introduction more concise and professional".
- Sources, also in the bottom bar. Choose Add from Drive, or type @ and pick a file, to give Gemini your own documents, emails, Chat messages or web content to draw on.
- The side panel. Ask Gemini, at the top right, opens a panel for questions, summaries and longer drafting, with an Insert button to drop results into the page.
- Help me create. For a whole first draft, Gemini can pull context from Drive, Gmail, Chat and the web, and match the layout of a template document you point it to. Google lists it as desktop only for now.
The detail that changes how you work: Gemini's edits land in the document as suggestions, with Accept suggestion, Accept all and Reject all. That's a real safety feature, and it has one trap, covered further down. Google's write and edit help page shows the current screens.
Drafting from your own files instead of a blank page
Compare two prompts for the same job at an illustrative garden centre, a page for its autumn workshop programme.
Write a page about our autumn gardening workshops.That produces three paragraphs about "the joys of autumn" that could belong to any garden centre anywhere, with invented workshop names. The version that works:
Using @Autumn workshops 2026 (the sheet) and the style of
@Spring programme 2026, draft this autumn's programme page.
One entry per workshop: title, date, time, price, what to bring,
two sentences on what people will make. Use only dates, prices and
titles from the sheet. If anything is missing, write [CHECK].The second prompt names the source, the model document, the structure and the rule for gaps. In practice the [CHECK] markers are the most useful part: they show you exactly where the sheet was incomplete, instead of letting Gemini fill the hole with something plausible.
A garden centre's autumn programme, timed
Here is how the time worked out for that illustrative garden centre, whose events coordinator writes eight workshop entries, a booking-terms section and a short introduction each season. Last season she wrote it by hand. This season she used Gemini with the sheet and the spring programme as sources.
| Stage | By hand | With Gemini |
|---|---|---|
| First draft of 8 entries | 90 min | 10 min, including writing the prompt |
| Introduction and booking terms | 30 min | 10 min, adapted from spring's terms |
| Checking dates, prices and times against the sheet | 15 min | 25 min, because every figure needs checking |
| Fixing [CHECK] gaps and tone | n/a | 20 min |
| Manager's read-through and edits | 30 min | 20 min |
| Total | 165 min | 85 min |
So the saving was 80 minutes, just under half, and notice where the time moved: drafting fell from two hours to twenty minutes, while checking rose. Two of the eight entries came back with [CHECK] because the sheet had no price for the wreath-making workshop and no "what to bring" for the bulb-planting session, both genuine gaps that would otherwise have gone to print. The checking row is the part not to cut. Over a year of four programmes, 80 minutes a time is a little over five hours, which is worth having, but only if the checking step stays in.
Editing with Refine: a dry cleaner's notice, before and after
Refine is quickest on text you've already written. An illustrative dry cleaner had this counter notice about wedding dresses:
Please note that all wedding dresses and bridal garments accepted for cleaning are subject to inspection prior to acceptance and we cannot be held liable for any damage arising from pre-existing conditions, embellishments that are not securely attached, or fabrics whose care labels are missing or incorrect, and customers are advised that the process typically takes between two and three weeks.
Selecting it and choosing Shorten, then More casual, gave:
We check every wedding dress before we accept it. We can't be responsible for damage from existing marks, loose beading or missing care labels. Cleaning usually takes two to three weeks.
Much easier to read, but "we can't be responsible" is a legal statement, and shortening it changed its scope: the original also covered incorrect care labels and pre-existing conditions generally. The owner put back "or incorrect care labels" and asked a solicitor whether the wording still did its job. The rule to take from this: Refine is for tone and length, and anything with legal or price meaning gets read word by word after it runs.
Summarising meeting notes without losing the actions
The summarising option under Refine is the one people use most and check least. An illustrative optician's practice manager had six pages of notes from a meeting with a frame supplier and wanted five bullets for the team. The first summary read well: new ranges arriving in November, a price rise on two brands, a change to the repair turnaround, a display refresh, and a training visit. What it dropped were the owners and dates: "[first name] to send stock counts by Friday" and "manager to confirm the training date by the 15th" had been folded into "stock counts and training to be arranged".
Nobody noticed until Friday passed without the stock counts. Summaries compress, and actions are usually the first detail to go, because they're short and scattered. Selecting the notes and giving a custom instruction instead of the one-click option fixed it: "Summarise in five bullets, then list every action separately with its owner and deadline, exactly as written." Two extra lines of prompt, and the summary became something the team could act on.
Help me create with a template: an optician's leaflet
Help me create is built for first drafts that should look like an existing document. An illustrative optician's practice wanted a patient leaflet on getting used to varifocal glasses, matching the layout of last year's contact lens leaflet. The prompt:
Create a two-page patient leaflet on adapting to new varifocal
glasses. Match the layout and headings of @Contact lens leaflet 2025.
Use only the advice in @Varifocal notes from Dr [surname].
Plain language, short sentences. End with when to call the practice.The illustrative draft followed the layout well and was mostly faithful to the notes. One sentence wasn't: "Most people adapt fully within a few days." The optometrist's notes said adaptation varies and gave no timescale, so Gemini had supplied a common claim from outside the sources. Health information is exactly where that matters. The fix was to delete the sentence, add "If something isn't in the notes, leave it out" to the prompt, and have the optometrist read the whole leaflet before printing, as they would with any leaflet. Keeping every draft to the facts you provide is the idea behind a product glossary AI must use in every draft, which works for clinical terms too.
Numbers pulled from the wrong column
Drafts that quote prices need their own check. An illustrative picture framer asked Gemini, with @Price list 2026 as the source, to draft a quote for framing six prints for a café. The draft looked right, but four of the six prices came from the trade price column, not retail, because the prompt said "use the price list" and the sheet has both. The difference was about $95 on a $560 job, in the customer's favour and the framer's loss.
It surfaced because the framer checks every quote total against the till's own calculation, a habit worth keeping. The prompt now names the tab and column ("Retail tab, column D, 'Price inc. glass'"), and quotes above $300 get a second person's look. Catching made-up figures in AI-drafted proposals has a fuller routine for this.
Accept all, and the price table that changed
The suggestion system has one trap. On a long document, Accept all is tempting, and it accepts everything, including edits you didn't notice. An illustrative pet shop owner asked Gemini to "tidy the formatting and tighten the wording" of a 12-page puppy care handbook, then clicked Accept all. Among the tidied headings, Gemini had also "tightened" the vaccination schedule table, merging two rows so that the second-injection timing now read as a single range. A customer pointed it out a fortnight later.
Two habits prevent it. Never ask for wording and formatting changes across a whole document in one go; do it section by section. And anything containing numbers, dates, dosages or prices gets accepted one suggestion at a time, reading each change. Accept all is fine for a paragraph of prose you've just watched change.
The side panel for questions about a long document
The side panel works like a chat about the open document and any files you add. The same pet shop owner, reviewing a new supplier's 14-page terms, asked:
List every clause about returning damaged or short-delivered stock:
the clause number, the time limit, and what evidence they require.Clause 7.2: report damaged goods within 48 hours of delivery, with photos. Clause 7.4: short deliveries must be noted on the delivery note at the time of delivery. Clause 11.1: returns are credited, not refunded.
Useful, and quick to verify: searching the document for "7.2", "7.4" and "11.1" confirmed each one in under a minute. The check found that clause 7.2 actually said "48 hours" for chilled goods and "5 working days" for everything else, a distinction the summary had flattened. The rule: use side-panel answers to find the right clauses, then read the clauses themselves. Also note that the panel forgets the conversation if you refresh the browser, close and reopen the document, or go offline, so copy anything you want to keep into the document or a note.
Prompts worth keeping for everyday Docs work
These cover most small-business documents. Save them in a Doc of their own and paste as needed, replacing the @ file names with yours.
Draft from notes:
"Turn @[notes file] into a one-page [document type] for [audience].
Use only facts in the notes. Mark gaps with [CHECK]."
Match a house style:
"Rewrite the selected section in the style of @[good example doc]:
same sentence length, same level of formality."
Tighten without changing meaning:
"Shorten the selected text by about a third. Keep every figure, date,
condition and exception exactly as written."
Check a draft:
"List every number, date and price in this document with the
sentence it appears in, so I can check them against the source."
Explain for customers:
"Rewrite the selected paragraph for a customer with no technical
knowledge. Keep it under 80 words."If the same prompt and sources get used every week, a Gemini Gem (becoming a skill from November 2026) can hold them for the team; building Gemini Gems for repeat business tasks shows how.
When Gemini doesn't appear in your Doc
A common first experience is opening a Doc and finding no Gemini icon. Work through these in order; most cases are the first or second:
- Plan. Business Starter doesn't include Gemini in Docs. Check which plan the account is on in the Workspace admin console, or ask whoever manages it.
- Admin settings. A Workspace administrator can switch Gemini features off for the organisation or for some users. If colleagues on the same plan have it and you don't, this is the likely cause.
- Wrong account. If you're signed in to a personal Gmail account in the same browser, the Doc may be open under that account. Check the profile picture at the top right.
- Device. Some features, Help me create among them, are desktop only for now, so they won't show on a phone or tablet.
- Language. Gemini's writing features support a set list of languages that varies by plan; Google keeps the list on its Workspace help pages.
One example of the third cause: an illustrative music teacher running her studio on Workspace couldn't find Gemini on the term letter she'd drafted, because she'd created it months earlier from her personal Gmail account and shared it with her work account. Moving the file into her work Drive, owned by the work account, brought Gemini back, and put the letter where the rest of her business files live.
If your business runs on Microsoft 365 rather than Workspace, the equivalent tool is Copilot in Word, with different plan rules and a different way of referencing files; drafting proposals with Copilot in Word walks through it.
Plans, privacy and the checks before you rely on it
Gemini in Docs comes with Google Workspace Business Standard and Business Plus (about $14 and $22 per user a month on annual plans, with flexible billing costing roughly 20% more), and with the Google AI plans for personal accounts. Confirm the figure on the Workspace pricing page for your own account, and see what Gemini includes on each Workspace business plan for the full split. Some features, such as matching a writing style from a Drive document under Tools, Writing style, sit in Google's Workspace Experiments programme rather than the standard product, so don't build a process around them until they're generally available on your plan.
On privacy, Workspace business plans don't use your business content to train Google's models by default, which is one reason to keep business drafting in a work account rather than a personal one. Gemini can only use files the signed-in person can already open, so the usual sharing hygiene in Drive applies. Whether that's enough for confidential material is a separate judgement, covered in whether Gemini is safe for confidential business data in Workspace. Before a team relies on Gemini for any recurring document, agree two things: which source files it may use, and who checks figures before the document leaves the building.
Further reads
- How to Use Gemini in Gmail to Clear Your Inbox Faster — The same assistant applied to your inbox.
- Gemini or ChatGPT for a Google Workspace Business? — Whether Gemini or ChatGPT suits a Workspace business better.
- Gemini Notebook (Formerly NotebookLM) for Small Business Teams — For questions across many documents at once.
- How to Write Business Proposals Faster With AI — A proposal workflow you can run inside Docs.
- AI Content Approval Workflow: Draft, Check, Sign Off — A simple sign-off step before AI drafts go out.
- Claude vs ChatGPT for Business Writing, Proposals and Reports — How other assistants compare on business writing.
- Gemini in Google Sheets for Small Businesses: 10 Practical Uses — Ten practical Gemini in Sheets jobs, from building a tracker to the =AI() function and the scheduling solver, with prompts, sample results and limits.
- How to Use Take Notes for Me in Google Meet for Client Calls — Settings, consent wording and a notes-to-quote routine for using Google Meet's Take notes for me on client calls, with the sharing option to pick first.
- AI Tools and AI Development: The Complete 2026 Guide — the AI hub, including every tutorial in the AI-for-business series.
Sources: Google Docs Editors Help (Write and edit with Gemini in Docs; Write with Gemini in Google Docs; Collaborate with Gemini in Google Docs; Create documents with Gemini in Google Docs), Google Workspace pricing, checked September 2026.