Getting an answer that's buried in a Google Drive document

Somewhere in a folder of meeting notes, project docs, and old proposals sits the answer to a question that comes up again days or weeks later. Finding it means remembering roughly which document it's in, opening Google Drive, and searching by whatever keyword seems most likely to match.

What normally has to happen to find one detail

• Remembering which document the information was even written down in.
• Opening Google Drive and searching by a keyword that may not match the exact wording used.
• Opening several candidate documents to check which one has the answer.
• Reading through a document to find the specific detail, once the right one is found.
• Giving up partway through and just asking a colleague who might remember instead.

How Quin handles it

Quin can search your Google Drive when a question might be answered by something already written down. Ask something like "what did we decide about the Q4 budget," and Quin searches your files and pulls in the relevant information directly, rather than pointing you toward a document to read yourself.

Say a decision about a project timeline was documented in a planning doc from a few weeks back. Asking Quin about that timeline searches Drive for the relevant content and surfaces the answer, instead of requiring a guess at which document has it and a manual search once it's open.

Why this matters

Information that's written down somewhere is only useful if it can be found again, and a lot of useful detail effectively disappears once it's buried in a folder nobody thinks to check. Being able to ask a direct question, instead of reconstructing where something was written and searching for it by hand, is what keeps a document from being effectively lost the moment the meeting that produced it is over. The information was never gone, just unreachable without more effort than most questions are worth.

Getting the most out of it

• Ask specific questions using keywords likely to appear in the document itself.
• Rephrase a question with more specific detail if the first attempt doesn't surface the right file.
• Check that a file isn't restricted by special permissions if Quin can't find something you know exists.
• Confirm the file format is one Quin supports, like Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, or common document types.

Setting it up

Connect Google Drive under Settings, then Integrations, and grant the permissions Quin requests during setup. From there, asking a question that might be answered by a Drive file searches it directly.