My favourite MCPs: Google Docs

Get clued up on speaker notes and document comments, right from inside your AI.

Not sure what an MCP server is or how it’s used? Check out my explainer here.

A Google Docs MCP server connects an assistant to Docs, Sheets and Drive. It can read a document’s full text, restructure sections, write rows into a spreadsheet, search the drive, file something into a specific folder and set who can see it. That last part turns out to matter more than the editing.

My own second brain is thousands of markdown files, which is ideal for me and useless to everybody else. Anything with a second human at the other end lives in Google instead, and there are three things I use it for constantly.

The first is checking what a collaborator and I have actually written together. On a joint piece of work spread over several documents, I can ask what we’ve covered and who wrote which part, rather than opening five tabs and reassembling the picture in my head each time.

The second is reading the notes under someone else’s slides. Speaker notes are where the real content of a deck lives, and they’re miserable to read in the presentation view. Pulling them out as plain text and asking questions of them beats clicking through eighty slides.

The third is filing receipts for my accountant. Every invoice that arrives gets recognised, named and dropped into the right per-quarter, per-supplier folder in a shared drive while my mail is being processed, rather than in a panic each quarter. My accountant opens the folder and it’s all there.

That last one comes with a mistake attached, and it’s the useful part of this post. I once wanted to know which business expenses were missing their receipts, so I counted the documents attached to each expense in my invoicing system and reported back that eighty-seven had none. The number was accurate. The conclusion was wrong. Every one of those receipts existed, already collated and already sent, sitting in the shared Drive folders where my accountant needs them. The invoicing system holds the amounts; the folder holds the paperwork. I’d counted the wrong thing and made my past self redo finished work.

The lesson generalised better than the specifics: for anything shared with another human, the shared folder is the system of record, whatever your internal tooling thinks. If the accountant can see it, it exists.

Making it repeatable

The one-off ask:

File this invoice into the shared drive under this quarter and the supplier’s name, then tell me the folder path you used.

The standing version lives in a skill — which is just a text file of instructions the assistant reads when the job comes up, written in English rather than code:

When filing or editing anything shared:
- The shared folder is the system of record. Never conclude
  something is missing from a count in another system.
- File by quarter and supplier. Name files so a human can find
  them without me.
- Edit the real document in place. Don't hand me text to paste.
- Read speaker notes as text rather than describing slides.
- Mail stays in my mail client. Don't route inbox work through
  this server.
- Tell me the path and who can see it after any write.

The last line is there because a shared drive is the one place where getting permissions wrong is worse than getting the filing wrong. And the mail rule is there because I have accounts this connector genuinely cannot see, so letting it near my inbox produces confident, partial answers.

The quieter benefit is that Drive is a decent bridge between systems that don’t otherwise talk. My e-ink tablet exports handwritten notes as PDFs into a Drive folder; something picks them up from there, transcribes them and appends the text to that day’s note. Two devices that share no protocol, connected by a folder they both understand.

Setting one up needs a Google Cloud project and an authorisation step, which is fiddlier than an API key. There are several implementations to choose from.

Last quarter’s receipts filed themselves, one at a time, as the emails arrived. I didn’t open a file manager once.