Smart feature in Google Docs

Google has announced the Smart update, they have been adding some really cool features to Google Docs.

If you use Docs for school work, the collaboration experience just got so much better. If you’re a Google Docs user, this new function basically means you never have to hunt around for a tool in the menu bar ever again.

So let’s get right into it. To access what Google is calling the Smart Chips feature, all you have to do is type the @ symbol within Google Docs, and you see a dropdown menu, with all the suggestions.

Using the Smart-chip you can directly do all the following from Google Docs

• Use hyperlinked bullet points up here.
• Tag someone
• Email the document
• Message them
• Schedule an event
• Make a video call di

Using Smart Chips in a google document, you can stand out in the workplace. And here is how that document might look like after using Smart Chips. If I wanted to tag someone, I will press @, type their email, and now, by hovering over this Smart Chip, I can now see their basic information. I can email them, message them, or even schedule an event with them, directly from Google Docs.
The same can be done for files. This includes Google Docs, sheets, slides and even folders here. And others, for example, like images, tables, drawings,  and charts.

As you can probably tell by now, one of the main benefits of the Smart Chips, other than making the entire document look very prettier, is that everything you tag becomes dynamic. The title of the original file changes? That will be reflected everywhere. You wanna change a date? Well, it’s only one click away. And pro tip. Press the settings icon, here, to change the formatting of that date, or click this button, to book a meeting directly, via Google Calendar.

In a way, this Smart Chips feature is where Google really gets to showcase the power of their ecosystem and get something that’s greater than the sum of its parts.

Note – taking : If you’re a Google Docs user, I’d love to hear your initial impressions down below. Another great use of this is for note taking, especially for recurring meetings. For example, the team that I’m on, we have a meeting every two months with our director, and we, as a team, have this shared meeting notes document. I’ve already added some very realistic Smart Chips here and scrolling down, we used to have to manually Copy/Paste this note taking template for every meeting, right?

Now, we can just delete all of this, type in @ meeting notes, select the calendar invite that corresponds to this meeting and boom!

Google Docs automatically pulls in all the attendees and generates a note section and an action item section. The best thing is, by hovering over the meeting title, you can now choose to attach this document to the calendar invite. This is especially useful if your team prepared a one-off presentation, that you don’t need to attach to every single recurring meeting. Pro tip. For those of us with taste, you can type @ line, and choose a horizontal line to separate this meeting notes from the next one.

Save your time: Saving the best for last, here are some features you used to have to dig around the menu bar for, but now, with Smart Chips, takes less than five seconds. First up, page numbers. @ page number, after selecting this, you can immediately choose where you want the page number to show up, like so. Same thing goes for other page components, such as headers, footers, footnotes, watermarks, and bookmarks. These are the menus which I use the most.

Create Table of content: You can actually create a table of contents automatically, by using the title’s and heading’s Smart Chips. So let’s say I’m putting together a team structure document, I’m gonna use heading one and put Product Marketing as the first big team and another heading one, Growth Marketing as the second biggest team, under Product Marketing, heading two, put in B2B marketing, for example and under Growth Marketing, heading two again, and put in User Acquisitions, pod, or something.

Now, if I click the icon here, you’ll see that a dynamic table of contents has been generated, this is especially useful for longer documents. For example, the central repository I was talking about earlier. Going through Google’s official announcements, there seems to be a lot more exciting features coming to Smart Canvas and Google Docs, so make sure you’re subscribed to learn more. In the meantime, you might enjoy this video on the top 10 overall tips for using Google Docs, have a great day.