How to maximize your productivity with Smart Canvas and Google Docs

all right hello everyone I hope you are all having a wonderful day thank you so much for joining our event today maximizing your productivity with smart canvas and Google Docs we are so excited to have Google product manager Dennis who with us today um and I just wanted to say thank you so much before we get started and jump in um again wanted just to say thank you for joining I know your time is valuable and precious and really appreciate you joining today my name is Carissa and I am a program

manager in the workspace Community um and again joining us today is Dennis and he is going to be taking you through content and answering question your questions today um we encourage your questions so please feel free to add those into the YouTube chat box um and we'll be sure to get them into the chat answered um and we do have a priest a few pre-submitted questions thank you so much for those who did um submit those questions ahead of time Diamond we'll cover those as well then for any questi

ons that we don't get to live we do have a recap Post in the Google Cloud community and there will be a link to that in the YouTube description all right everybody with that we'll hand it over to wonderful Dennis um thank you so much Dennis for your time and I'll let you introduce yourself great thanks Theresa hey everyone uh my name is Dennis I lead our product team for Google Docs I'm very excited to be here today to speak with you all I really do appreciate you all taking your time um and als

o being some of your early questions as well very helpful for us to obviously see obviously the input um from all of you and I'm going to be walking through today uh how to maximize your productivity with smart canvas and Google Docs um it's a very exciting um uh product feature within our Google Docs product um that we launched in 2021 um and really it was gauge to really push Google Docs towards the next evolution of collaboration for Google workspace um our goal with smart canvas when we laun

ched it back in 2021 was really to make our documents more intelligent more helpful and more actionable as well and you can see here just some of the actual um articles that actually came up over uh the last couple years I would say as we've continued to evolve and innovate on top of what we've launched with smart canvas it's very exciting I know some of you all have have said you did not know what smart canvas was so hopefully today will be a great introduction to those of you that do not know

yet what smart canvas is and have not been using it and then though for those that have been using it I hope today is a great refresher as well as some great insights into how to use it even more um so let me start with really kind of what is Smart canvas um I think often at times uh folks have likely heard about smart canvas or maybe seen smart canvas on other documents that you've been working on but may not actually realize what exactly is it um so the goal of today really is to show you all

more in terms of what that is and how you can start using it and how you can show your organization how to better take advantage of the capabilities that we have built within Google Docs um so smart canvas really in a nutshell is the collection of components that really boosts collaboration and productivity by connecting objects and creating seamless Journeys across workspace what does that actually mean well really at the end of the day it's really two core components that I'll be talking about

today the first one specifically being what we call Smart canvas building blocks and I'll walk you all through that and then the second component being smart canvas smart chips which again I'll also walk you all through that so if there's really two things to think about when you when you when you when you leave today's uh session when and when people ask you about smart canvas tell them it's about smart canvas building blocks and tell them I learned a lot about smart canvas smart chips as well

um so let's dive in um building blocks will be the first kind of key area that I'll be diving into and really you can think of building block smart canvas building blocks as the ability for users to really quickly and effectively start their document um building blocks uh we've built it so that they can integrate directly and seamlessly in between workspace apps as well and of course I'll I'll show examples of this but really it starts to expand the basis of what a doc is you know I think hopef

ully folks have all seen the continued evolution of how people actually use docs in their workplace each and every day and you know not even maybe five ten years ago people are still printing still printing a lot of things um and and bringing them into meetings and you know of course as folks continually adopted onto cloud-based uh products like Google Docs the idea of printing became less and less a necessity and what then happens is that users can now stay in this digital canvas in this Digita

l World a lot more and what that allows us to do Within products like docs is really expand that basis of what a dock is and start to create a lot more Dynamic and interactive experiences oh my light just went off um and so uh really what users can do with these building blocks is really start to uh quickly start drafts for emails uh they can do brainstorming sessions we can take quick notes um and it really starts to bring together a lot of these connected and differentiated experience as well

uh within the product so I'm going to go ahead and start walking you all through more around how you can take advantage of these building blocks and how you can take advantage of smart canvas in your everyday workflows so the first key thing to note here is uh our at entry point again hopefully folks have seen this and hopefully folks have been starting to do this if not you can even try doing it right now go ahead and hit at in a Google doc if you have it open and you can actually see what we c

all this uh entry point dialog that allows users to start to select options that basically give you the ability to select those building blocks or those smart chips and the ability for you to do at is is really anywhere within the dock it's going to be the quickest and fastest way for you to get to Smart canvas users can also go into the insert menu and actually insert building blocks as well as smart chips directly into through the dock that way but I like to prefer to to use the at sign it's a

lot quicker and a lot easier for uh um for me to actually get to what I need to do um in addition to Smart uh canvas building blocks as well as smart chips you'll also have the ability to um get access into some of the other most commonly used formatting options as well so let's say you wanted to insert a table for example you can actually do at table as well or you wanted to actually insert a heading you can actually do at heading to actually get to some of these quick things as well so really

think of it as a quick way uh for you to get access to some of our most powerful features within Google Docs okay and definitely feel free to play with it you'll actually see a lot of cool things that I'll be showing you today and I'll always probably discover a bunch of things that I don't have time to go through as well um so the first smart canvas building block that I want to walk you all through too is what we call the smart canvas Gmail draft or the email draft building block the use case

s for this really are when you think about when you need to send a big email out to a wide group or maybe an executive audience right and typically when you need to do those often at times you need to collaborate with your colleagues on figuring out what to actually send out proofread it make sure you you actually have everything covered and so the way to do this is to to take advantage of the collaborative features that we have built into our editors products and specifically within docs so wha

t we have here is if you actually do at email draft what will pop up is essentially this table that you see on the right hand side that will essentially allow you to draft an email you can essentially you can put in the actual people that you want to actually send it to you can have your CC your BCC um and then you can start writing your texts and within starting writing your text you can take all the advantages of all the things that we have built within docs like smart compose um grammar check

Etc that'll help you again create hopefully the best email that that you can send out then you can also share the doc you can tag users into doc you can take advantage of our commenting features within the docs to actually collaborate then with folks before actually sending out the email um the last thing I want to mention here though that is really kind of the the icing on the cake if you will is that we've integrated this directly into Gmail as well um so on this particular button that you se

e over here on the upper left hand side once you click on that you'll actually be taken directly into a Gmail uh dialog that essentially allows you to just send the email you can continue to make tweaks obviously if you need to but we'll take everything that you've populated within um the actual dock within the draft and then push it directly into Gmail so you don't have to do any more copy and pasting if that's what you're doing today you don't have to look at who you're actually sending it to

because everything is actually pulled from Google Docs into Gmail the next uh building block that I'll talk about here is um calendar draft so this is something new so some of you all may not have yet seen this but we did announce this and it is coming out quite soon and um it's similar to the email draft that I walk through just now but think of it now as creating this calendar draft and again these use cases are typically going to be when you need to schedule a big team off site maybe a summit

you got a lot of people coming together to collaborate again on planning what that Summit is or what that off site is and so it's a really again easy way for users to collaborate on calendar events um within the calendar event you can set your title you set your guess you set your start time your end time your location description and we have the same type of direct integration back into calendar as well so again this takes away hopefully some of the mundane tasks that users do likely today aro

und copy and pasting from one document to an another or one document to calendar or into Gmail and it directly puts users in to the actual product that we've integrated directly with and again allows you to take advantage of all the collaborative features that you've got built with into docs today um very exciting to have this uh going out very shortly the next um one over here uh for building blocks that we'll talk about today is meeting notes and this one is honest honestly probably one of my

favorite building blocks that I use pretty much every day if not multiple times a day um and it's often the question that users ask when you're in your meetings today hey did anyone take notes well really I would say at the end of the day every meeting should have notes and we've made it super easy for users to actually create these notes uh within docs so that we have a general template so that users can then just fill in obviously then the notes as well as the action items uh that appear withi

n this template what we've done with meeting notes and I'll show an example later live is that users can actually go into your doc hit your at sign say at meeting notes and be able to select from a number of upcoming meetings that you have on your schedule and what we do once we pull it into this particular building block is that we obviously have the date we have the title to uh what your actual meeting is we also pull in the attendees we know who's attending we know who's not attending um as w

ell as pulling the attached files right so all of these things that you're likely doing on a manual basis today we do it one simple action for the user to do which is just at meeting notes um I should mention there's also a couple of other ways to actually trigger this and hopefully users have started to see this already but you can also trigger meeting notes directly from the calendar invite as well it does the exact same action that you would do whether you started the doc first if you don't h

ave a dock already for those meeting notes and you get ready to actually join your meeting from uh from calendar you'll see a take meeting notes and you can actually click on that and it creates the same thing creates a brand new document directly for users to actually see so really at that point the meeting notes attached now to the calendar invite it's also attached um along with all the files that are associated to the calendar and users can essentially collaborate and take notes in real time

uh and and what again I hope many of you folks are already taking advantage of the ability to actually collaborate directly in real time with meeting notes is an awesome feature that a lot of our users take advantage of the other thing I should mention specifically on meeting this is that we've done a lot of improvements from the initial release that we've did with with meaning notes as well we now support actually recurring meetings as well so again a lot of you all may have one-on-ones for th

ose one-on-one meetings or maybe it's the quarterly board meetings that happen you can now actually use this same document and leverage the meeting notes template that we've built in through the building block and actually trigger off recurring meetings as well so again not having to go scramble not having to go create a new document but leveraging the actual menu within here it's actually triggered directly through these three dots over here that allow you to then select the upcoming meetings t

hat will be happening here as well um the other uh key thing that we've launched recently this year was the ability to actually attach further files so take for example an instance where you joined a meeting somebody presented but that document or that slide presentation that was presented in the meeting was not actually attached into the calendar invite so what then happens in that particular case somebody's taking notes and then they attach it into the notes well in this particular case now we

can actually do by uh you know syncing both ways directly with docs as well as calendar and so users can actually attach the file directly within the meeting notes and then we can actually sync it back into calendar as well so again just trying to take away some of those uh instances where you have to navigate uh between multiple tabs a lot of people have multiple tabs as well and they can't find certain things so we try to make it as easy as possible for you to kind of complete these workflows

as quickly and efficiently as possible very exciting again one of the things that I would say uh hopefully everyone on this call will likely use if not have already used or will use on a daily basis and again I think I forgot to put in the actual trigger sign it's just at meeting notes and you should be able to see it all right let's keep going so the next uh building block that we have is uh our project roadmap building block so really this is if you think about scenarios where you have a docu

ment and you actually want to actually use that document to track the actual status of all the projects that are going on within your organization um I would say this is fairly basic project management tracker building block uh it's got basic tables it's got drop downs that are built within the actual tables and users can obviously update and modify these tables uh as needed as well um the great thing about using project roadmaps within docs is that oftentimes user has a number of other things t

hat are actually put about the actual project within a single document so now you can start to consolidate all the different areas where you're actually managing projects into hopefully a single document the next one here we have is our smart canvas building block review tracker um and this review tracker think of it as when users are asking if everybody's actually approved a document uh something that's commonly done I would say in the workplace today um and again it creates a fairly straightfo

rward table here that allows users to add in reviewers track a status as well as add additional notes to this as well and you can start to think about how these building blocks can also apply directly into your daily workflows because a lot of users today are maybe doing things like you know highlighting a particular comment or going in and highlighting the the actual title of the document commenting someone in saying you want to assign it and say hey would you mind actually reviewing this we've

tried to formalize this a little bit more for users so that you can start to take advantage of of how the document works and how the document interacts with the folks that you need to collaborate with you can still do the same thing here as well you you can create this table put in a reviewer add a particular reviewer in the actual reviewer list and then tag them in the same way that you've been doing comments as well but again structures it now in a way that makes it a lot easier for users and

your collaborators to hopefully see what they need to do and take the action on the things that they actually need to do as well super excited and something that I honestly use obviously all the time as well um I think the last one over here is a really exciting feature that uh we are also just about to launch and have just started actually launching uh this week and it's custom building blocks so what I walked you all through just now is a number of different building blocks that we within Goo

gle have actually set up within docs have actually set up for users knowing that we think and we believe and we see that users are actually leveraging a lot of these key features and workflows and tasks uh to actually help in their everyday uh workflows um but you know we we know that we can't cover every single use case that every single person wants in this world so what we've done here was build the ability for users to actually create their own custom building blocks um and really again thes

e key use cases think of the scenarios or think of all the times when you're constantly recreating maybe sections in a document maybe it's a particular way you need the document to look and feel and you have certain sections that then have tables underneath or different uh summaries underneath that or text blocks underneath that and you need to use that over and over again well what you can do now is you can actually create your own building blocks within Google Docs assign it a particular name

give it a quick description and then actually access it in the same way that I've been talking about through that at sign those building blocks so that you can use it in all of your docs going forward as well as your docs in the past um what I've seen a lot of users do is often you know simple tables as well maybe it's that project uh project uh tracker table that I that I showed earlier but instead of having those four columns you actually have five or six columns and you have different ways th

at you want to actually format it and so what you can actually do is say hey I want to create my own project tracker task list and create yourself highlight it save it as a custom building block and then have the ability to just use that building block going forward um what we've also built within the custom building blocks feature is the ability for you to fully manage that building block as well so for whatever reason let's say you don't need that building block anymore you don't want to clutt

er the list of building blocks that you have available for you actually use um you can actually go and delete that building block let's say you wanted to update it because maybe instead of status now you want to call it you know review tracker and what you can do is you can actually go into the instance of the building block that we've saved for you actually edit it directly and then use it again going forward with the updated uh building blocks functionality so again very excited to actually la

unch this this is something that has been asked I would say by a number of customers as well again just knowing that you know we're never going to be able to to actually build every single use case that the users want but now we're going to give you all the control to actually take advantage and build these building blocks yourselves uh to really again increase your productivity and um you know boost how you actually accomplish a lot of your workflows today very excited to get this out and hopef

ully folks will start seeing this soon all right so um that was building blocks um the next part of smart canvas really focuses around what we refer to as smart chips and within smart chips again hopefully folks have started to see some of these things especially with things like file chips and people chips essentially think of smart chips now as a uh it is essentially a structured data type that allow users to really connect objects and also have potentially non-text interaction as well so goin

g back to what I mentioned earlier in terms of the evolution of how users are using documents you know you can't interact necessarily with a piece of paper but you can very much interact with a digital canvas you can start to actually trigger different things for users to actually do to help you collaborate and I would say at the end of the user it's also Delight your users as well with things like voting chips which I'll talk about later on as well but really what we've done here with smart chi

ps is we've started to bring together a lot of different types of data into Google docs to really Drive collaboration and connection between products um these chips can allow you to really see also connected metadata so things like when you hover over a particular chip or maybe when you click on a particular chip you can actually start to see more than just the person themselves but also the details about who that person is um other things that I mentioned earlier as well we can make these and w

e have made these chips um uh very much interactive as well you can see here with the example in the upper left hand side it's a timer chip and what users can do is they can actually insert chips and then actually hit the start button and actually interact and actually do a full countdown and it'll actually let the user know when the actual timer then runs out so I'll walk through a number of these things but think of smart chips as this collection of individual components that can now actually

even live within your building blocks or just within a document by itself so I'll walk you through some of the most uh popular drop down chips as well as some of the chips that we have uh uh coming up launching very soon so the first one uh that I'll be walking through is uh drop down ships um drop down chips is pretty much what you think it probably is which is the ability to create drop-downs very quickly and very easily within Google Docs drop down chips typically are used to you know do thin

gs like update statuses of a document maybe it's a project or maybe you just have a set of options of things that you want to allow users to actually choose from what we do now is allow you to essentially build and customize these drop down chips however you want you can add more I think we default dependent upon some of the default chips that we have things like project status will default to a certain set but you can always add you can always edit you can change the color of these and you can

make this you know whatever you actually need it to be to accomplish the thing that you need to get done but really drop down chips something that I think folks don't realize how often it can be used until you start using it so definitely in the next document give it a shot try it out maybe just again status of document uh is is a very basic one that a lot of our users use today um the next one here is one that hopefully you've all seen um and that are people chips um really you know at the end

of the day collaboration is done with your colleagues and you work with your colleagues each and every single day and um one of the most popular trips that we have today um are these people chips uh the way that users can actually insert people chips again use that at sign once you hit the add sign you can actually just type in the name of the person you want to actually reference and it'll actually create what we call these people chips that have the ability to pull in the additional metadata t

hat I mentioned to show you more information about that particular user so again think of these use cases now of maybe the meanings that you're in um and there's you know 10 people in the meeting and you don't know who everybody is well now in that meeting notes template that I showed you we actually take advantage of these people chips and we'll actually show you all the people that are in it you can actually hover directly over maybe somebody like Chris and immediately now see oh this is the u

ser experience designer that I've been meaning to get a to actually set up a meeting with um so instead of you now having to go maybe to your company intranet or go ask another person hey who is this person you can actually now start to see a lot more of this information and really get quicker access into potentially things like oh maybe I need to reach out to Chris as well uh so we have SIMPLE uh quick actions like email uh chat you can start a meeting or you can schedule a calendar invite as w

ell directly with these users all from within this chip um very exciting I would say Obviously it also depends on the data that is stored about that particular user as well within your organization so the more information that you have within the organization about who that person is the more information that we can actually show when the user actually does that hover state right so things like title things like location phone number uh Etc all things that are basically pulled in from how you ma

nage your company and your organization's users uh and your contacts so that users can actually pull and and directly access these people cards directly from the doc um so the next one here that I'll be talking about are uh file chips um file chips uh again another popular chip of ours um they can be created both again also from that at but also directly when you paste a URL into a document um so again you're starting to probably to see that Trend right everything is triggered through the ad and

what we've also started to build within the app are some basic search capabilities uh within the app to allow users again to more quickly accomplish the tasks that they need to right so let's say you're writing a document about this test and you need to actually reference it what you're likely doing today is you're either you either have that tab open maybe in a different tab so you got to go find it or maybe you don't have it so maybe you go to drive or maybe you go to the docs home page and y

ou go look for this test document right once you go find that test document then you likely open that document copy the URL go back to your original document and then paste it in right and you can see just from that it's a task that is done over and over and over again likely for most of our users that we saw the ability to really boost and improve your productivity by allowing you to just reference that document directly when you're in the actual document that you're actually working on and so

um really the actual benefits also that you get from inserting these file chips are also going to be things like a preview State as well so what you see here is an example of what happens when a user actually hovers over that test document and so they can instantly see now the test document there's actually a copy URL link that tells you who the owner is it tells you when the last changes are actually done and it gives you a little snapshot of what that document is so that users can actually ref

erence it a lot quicker as well um so really cool feature I would say um you know the next time I would say that you're thinking about hyperlinking a particular file to it to a text string try using a file Chip as well right and we've also done a number of things knowing that users sometimes will actually just paste the URL and a lot of these things you know users have to get used to using smart chips and smart canvas components so we know that when users Pace we have Smart logic to actually det

ect oh hey this user actually pasted a URL of a document and so users can actually hit the tab which is which is is what you see on the top here to actually replace that URL stream um with the actual file Chip as well um all right the next one uh to walk through is uh date chips and so date chips uh really is a quick and easy way for you to add dates directly into your document uh these dates can actually be interactive so that you can actually check um to see um you know or actually change the

dates as needed um and then you can also do you know basic date ranges as well for for quick inserting you can do things like oh today's date you can do tomorrow's date you can do next week and we'll actually do quick logic based off of what the user puts in we've also started to add things like time as well so you can start thinking about how this is useful for things like calendar event drafts so not only do I obviously want to have a date but I also want to have a time for when the meeting is

obviously so users can now start to combine both date and time directly into this and start to reference a lot of this as well for users the next one here um is a chip that we call calendar event um so these are chips that directly reference uh meetings calendar events that you have already set up within Google Calendar and each of these chips now directly uh uh go and Link directly to calendar typically I think what we'll be seeing is these are perfect for managing when you have a large set of

events so again let's think back to the um to the summit example that we talked about earlier imagine now you have a summit you have a summit calendar you've got two weeks of of meetings and uh and events now you can actually create a document that actually has a store of what all of these meetings are going to be throughout your summit and then use smart chips as quick references for ways for users to actually access those meeting events directly so it's very easy to actually do this you can j

ust do at the event name if you remember the event name as well so you can just do at l-u-n-c-h and it should pop up and you can actually select it one other thing that we've actually built into this feature as well knowing that users may actually reference this with maybe even a single meeting knowing that I have a lunch meeting with Shirley maybe I start a document so I can start click taking some quick notes well what we do is once you actually trigger this lunch meeting with Shirley we'll ac

tually ask you to as well if you want to create a meeting note building block as well so again trying to adjust and trying to be contextual with our users in the moments that they actually need it to leverage a lot of these key functionalities and features that we want our users to really discover and and to use so having these tie in are just natural components of how we can see users really taking advantage of all the all the neat building blocks and smartship features that we have the next ch

ip that I'll walk through is what we call our Maps chips um so really this is again now the creating the ability to have simple map chips this is when you need to reference a location for example we actually have a direct integration into Google Maps so you can reference really literally any location I would say uh in the world these locations are searchable directly through um the at sign as well so again I can just do at Paris Baguette which is one of my favorites uh bakeries um and you can th

en just select it um go ahead and what it does is it creates an actual chip that when the user hovers again over it or clicks on it they can actually see things um like uh actual preview uh directly from Google Maps you can actually do directions as well so it's a great way to say again going back to that summon example now I've got my Summit draft ready I've got all the events now planned out and not only do I have the events but I also have the locations of all these events directly accessible

directly within this document and if users need to now get directions to where they need to go maybe for the company dinner users can actually just go straight from here click on a link takes you directly into Google Maps where you can see quick quick directions to how to get there so really fun really really powerful direct Integrations as I mentioned earlier as well um the next one here is uh what we refer to as tasks really and it's the ability to assign tasks I think many users hopefully ar

e using our checkbox features directly within Google Docs today and what we've decided to do really with tasks is start to integrate our checkbox ability um with Google Tasks and really think of it as the ability for you to hopefully boost how you manage your action items and your to-do's um you're in a meeting note uh document uh and you're actually in the meeting you're taking your notes and maybe you have AIS and you have next steps that you need to actually Define you can start adding that d

irectly within the meeting notes building block and as you're adding each of these particular checklist items into the meeting notes what you'll start to see now is the ability for us to actually convert these uh action items or next steps into actual Google Tasks and so what happens is again a two-way integration or you can actually assign uh these AIS to a particular user within your organization you can actually even sign a due date as well for that particular user and then what it does it th

en will create a actual Google task for the user to actually accomplish and to do you can create these not only just for yourself but you can assign these in very much the same way that you can assign comments today you can assign it to a colleague of yours as well well we've also done as well with uh the task integration as you can see here on the right hand side we'll also attach the actual document where it originated from uh and that again starts to boost how users can get things done you kn

ow I'm sure often many of you have created AIS and created tasks and it was like okay identify project owners but then you don't exactly remember which project you were actually working on because you don't have a reference to what the document was so what we've done here is directly integrated it all so that as these tasks get created it also attaches and links directly to uh the document where it came from so it's a lot quicker users can then actually accomplish those tasks directly from um ac

tual Google Tasks or they can actually close it out directly from within the document as well so you can actually check it from within Google doc will actually push it directly to Google Tasks or vice versa really neat integration as well the next one here is uh timer chips so really these are one of those interactive chips that I mentioned earlier today as well users can now actually do quick countdown timers and it's really great for um what I've used it in the past now for brainstorming sessi

ons collaborating means um where you essentially have breakout groups right and Within These breakout groups you say okay everybody's got five minutes to actually come up with as many ideas as possible um so you can quickly now just do at timer um well default I believe to five minutes currently today but you can adjust it to anything that you want it to be maybe it's 30 minutes maybe it's 10 seconds um and uh it's quick once it's actually done an actual toast does come up on the bottom of the p

age to let the user know that the actual timer is done um very neat very interactive as well like as I mentioned and something that just couldn't be done before um uh so super excited to get this out I believe it should already be out um currently today and then we also have stopwatch chips which is again similar to timer but now we're counting up versus counting down and what we've seen a lot of the use cases for things like this are particular things like let's say you're doing a big presentat

ion like this one right now um and I need to practice I need to practice going through the actual deck I need to practice going through what I'm actually going to say so I've actually narrated exactly what I want to actually say in a Google doc and then I'm actually going to go through it and so what you can actually do is trigger a stopwatch chip and within that stopwatch chip it does exactly what you think it probably needs to do which is just starts a timer uh then once you're actually done y

ou can hit stop and you can actually see the overall time so again just taking away some of the things that we've actually seen many users do um where maybe I have a document I'm presenting and then they open up another website that just so how happens to have a basic timer chip or just so happens to have a stopwatch chip and then they have another tab open and they started over there they get back into the dock uh and then they do what they need to do and then they're constantly tracking the ot

her tab we've brought it all together we've made it a lot easier for users to actually do all this within the context of docs to again boost that productivity um oh this one's a fun one so this is what I like to call emojis everywhere um one of the things that hopefully you all know noticed uh over the last couple years is that people love emojis it's a great way for users to express how they think how they feel uh how they want to react to certain things within a document so we've got things no

w um like comment emojis which is what you see over here as well but we've also got things now called voting chips um and the ability for actual users to actually create things like a table and maybe it's a brainstorming table and within that brain State brainstorming table you now have a column that you want to call voting and you invite 20 people into the document now instead of users having a you know type in yes I like this one or type a comment and say plus one to this they can just easily

now have voting chips um and so this example over here you can see uh like a thumbs up users can just click on this it is one vote per user right so we track all that for you you can actually unvote if you accidentally voted something but you can't vote for somebody else either and it's quickly referenceable to directly to the person that actually actually did the Voting right um we also do support I would say some default emojis like thumbs up um like the plus I uh uh Emoji but we also do now a

llow users to expand and use any emoji that you want to as well within the document so you can see all the different fun examples of of how emojis also bring a little bit more I would say life to your document as well a little bit more of that Delight that I mentioned earlier um that makes it just a lot more I would say fun uh if that's the right word when you're collaborating with your colleagues um and so super excited we're going to continue to push I would say emojis through a variety of dif

ferent areas within the documents and this is just obviously one one quick start of where we're going to be um I think this may be almost the last slide but um one of the other upcoming launches that we're doing that actually it's rolling out I believe this week is variables something that I hope folks have seen or have heard about now and um um and users now will have the ability to actually insert Dynamic variables into your document um so I believe this is an example of an invoice or you have

you know let's just say five different products you reference it directly into your actual invoice itself but then it's also referenced later down below here as well on your uh thank you comment as well so this is just one basic example of how variables can potentially be used it's great for things like contracts honestly as well where you have things like customer names or you have address that's referenced in multiple places in a document you can now actually do at variable and actually creat

e uh these placeholders essentially for users um and and for the collaborators to essentially say okay hey here's here's the customer name that I want to have uh here's the overall template or the draft of what the actual contract is going to look like and then once the customers come in now I have a single document or I can just replace customer name each time time and then export it out directly for users to actually use and and share with folks as well so very exciting for us variables is a b

ig big project something that I think our users have asked for as well quite often and it really I would say starts to open the doors to a lot more of how your document can be more Dynamic can be more useful for your daily workflows I know one other colleague of mine like loves to use variables uh for performance reviews um you know it's a great way to have kind of standard things that you have to do and then you're inserting who you're actually talking to obviously then customizing it with the

additional things but it gives you that base template of things that you know you have to go through each and every time to make sure that you're kind of uh checking all your lists um very excited to to get this out a lot more that we're going to be doing with variables I would say as well going forward and folks should start seeing this out hopefully in the next couple weeks as we start rolling this out all right um the last slide here uh is what we've been referring to as 3p smart chips um thi

s is very exciting for us as well because we understand and we know that as users are using products like Google Docs um you're also probably using other 3p products as well you're probably not doing everything just in workspace as much as we would love for you to do that um you're probably also working on things like let's just say Salesforce or or Asana or different tools out there that um help you do things like bug tracking for example well what we've done now is created the ability for uh p

artners and developers to create what we're calling 3p smart chips as well so if you think back to what I mentioned earlier about file chips and how users like to just paste URLs into documents this is an example here where now let's say a user is just pasting your own to a document that is of a 3p integrated a product that we have within docs it'll actually directly detect that this URL is in reference to a particular 3p object convert it into a actual smart chip and then it brings all the bene

fits of what smart chips gives to you now which is this ability to have hover States this ability to actually take action even over these hover States as well so that users now don't have to navigate and switch back and forth between tabs when you're working on things so again you can see the example here user actually does a paste I think right here then gets converted directly into a smart chip and then users now all your collaborators users who actually have access into this document can now

actually see and see that preview for what they actually disapproved cleaning materials actually does the way this is integrated is that users do have to add on the workspace add-on so you would actually add on that particular add-on once that add-on is in workspace we then have the ability then to say oh hey let's quickly check all these URLs that are being pasted in um to see if we can actually convert it into a smart chip all right um I'm going to pause right here on the q a i there were a nu

mber of questions that came up but before I do this I was told that folks love to see demos so what I have here actually is uh a quick demo for you all for you to see actually some of this and how it's used in real time right it's great to obviously see sometimes um the deck and see these examples but it's better to even see how this actually can be used so one of the quick things so if we think back to when I started everything is triggered through the at right so when you're in a document or y

ou start a new document often at times users are not sure it's like oh I actually really need to take those meeting notes well now users can actually go in here right and you can now start to see once I hit that at sign this is that dialogue that pops up and once that dialog pops up you can now start to see those components that I've just walked you all through with those smart chips as well as those building blocks but what I want to do here is I want to do meeting notes right one of my favorit

e ones that I mentioned so you can see here that if I type in m-e-e meeting notes becomes the top and I can go ahead and hit enter oh no these thoughts found I thought I did have some meetings set up one second let's make sure that uh I have my meetings all set up in here all right here we go meeting notes all right I can actually even see uh one quick thing here that I I think I mentioned earlier how you can even just type in the actual meeting uh event itself and so you can see here that I hav

e a lunch meeting with Shirley and let's see if this comes up now okay great um you can now start to see hey here's all the meanings that are coming up uh for me I have this lunch meeting with Shirley today I'm going to go ahead and click on that and what you can see now here is this instant building block that has been just been popped up for you um the user can actually see now that I'm actually in this meeting Shirley is also in this meeting there's a test document that is uh linked to the ac

tual calendar invite that we pulled in directly into here and then I can immediately now start to take notes I don't have to think about setting everything up right I can immediately now start to take notes you know presentation made for smart canvas right um I also talked about action items earlier today right uh and about these tasks and the ability to actually assign it so prep for a board meeting on Thursday right and I'm going to go ahead and click on this button right here and I'm going to

assign it to myself okay and I'm going to say hey board meetings on Thursday better have it do so I'm going to go ahead and assign a task and what happens here too is you can see now we start to pull in other information to show that this is actually now a task that's assigned to a user right I can say get back ready for sales meeting right on Wednesday and for this one I'm going to go ahead and assign it Charlie and so similar things here you can start to see all these interaction patterns rig

ht that I mentioned earlier with this advantage of being on a digital canvas and you can now start to see how all this stuff ties together right so how does this all translate into Google Tasks you may ask well great well this is my task list and you can see now prep for board meeting on Thursday now has popped up directly into my Google Tasks you can see my due date that I set earlier for May 25th and you can also see the actual link to the Google Doc that references where it is and as I mentio

ned I can go ahead and close my task here I can go ahead and clean my task over here but it talks to each other right so if I go ahead and click on that task over here you can see that it instantly actually referenced and changed that taskback over here as well so we're always going to be where the user is and not necessarily always have to force the user to be where they may need to be so in this particular case I was in task maybe I was doing something else but I was able oh yes I'm done I'm d

one prepping for the board meeting I can just close it directly here within Google task um other things that I mentioned earlier as well recurring meetings right so how do I actually set up recurring meetings well because that meeting is already set up as a recurring meeting within Google Calendar we know that and I have a weekly meeting with Shirley for lunch and you can see here now I've got another one for next week and what I can quickly do now is also just reference that recurring meeting s

o I can start to pre uh to actually um uh prepare for that meeting as well a couple of other things that I mentioned uh earlier too is maybe for my next week meeting it looks like I have this test prezo um attached to it but I no longer have the test document that's a mistake right so we have abilities now for users to actually add an attachment here and what you can see here is that once you add it we will actually prompt you and say hey do you actually want to attach this back to the meeting i

nvite as well and I said yeah absolutely um so what this does again two-way being where the user is and uh really again helping users be more productive I would say at the end of the day too um and the last thing I'll go ahead and show you all is email drafts right so two things so you can see here what I did email draft now you start to bring together everything that I've just mentioned uh that I've mentioned to you all right so what can I actually do well I can do at surely which then referenc

es the people chip let's say I want to send it to myself as well so I'm going to go ahead and send it to myself uh prep or board meeting on Thursday okay and then now what I'm actually going to do is start to insert my text so since this went over to the next line let's actually [Music] okay and then we can say things like you know hey on at May 25th I think there's a Thursday we have our board meeting and you can actually do things like referencing documents right so let's say in here I want to

reference this text document right that I mentioned earlier it's the best place for us to start drafting our back right sounds good enough for now well so what we've done here is now we've drafted it right I can now tag users in I can say hey actually you know surely would you mind check this right I can go ahead and comment in here so all of the same collaboration capabilities that you are all used to hopefully using within docs you can now take advantage of right so I can collaborate with who

ever I need to and then let's say once Shirley is done with this um we want to actually uh send this email out right so this is what I mentioned earlier with the preview in Gmail and so if I go ahead and click on this I think you may not be able to see it so I may have to reference it back here now so hopefully now you can see uh the preview so now what happens is we've actually created a uh dialog um that's basically Gmail that we pulled over all of the content directly from the document along

with who it's needs who it needs to be sent to the the actual subject as well as other content and the and the great thing that you can see here too is that like we've actually done the conversion as well we know that these are chips and in Gmail right now we don't yet support chips so we're going to go ahead and convert these into actual text objects but the hyperlink as well also works right so within uh the actual file Chip we've converted that fault chip now into a actual hyperlink for the u

ser to actually do so then at this point I can go ahead and hit send um and it will actually send the email all right um I believe that was what I wanted to cover for the demo um let's go back really quick to some of the questions and I'm cautious of time so hopefully we'll be able to answer some of the questions now that we've seen uh come up all right oh sorry increasing the font size sorry I think things are a little small on that so I apologize uh um for that um so a couple q a I think uh I

I went through a list of questions uh specifically that we saw come in and I kind of pulled together what I saw as some high over High overarching themes um in terms of what people want to learn and know a little bit more about so I think one of the quick uh initial questions about compatibility and expansion I think there were some questions around 3p there were some questions around how do you integrate now and the compatibility with other products so all of what we do with with smart canvas a

s you saw with the Gmail example as well just now with the Gmail example you saw that we actually will convert these particular chips when we know we need to convert them into things like hyperlinks into things like back into URLs or back into text objects as well so let's say you actually want to take a particular doc file and then move it into word those those smart canvas uh smart chips will actually be converted back into objects that then work and obviously understand now going by vice vers

a we don't have that ability just yet but it's something that we're working on um another question oh and then sorry on the expansion front as well um as you saw with the last example on the smart ships we are expanding with 3p so there's a lot more exciting things that we're actually going to be doing uh with 3p um that we'll be announcing hopefully later this year um will you support this on mobile uh straight answer I would say is yes um currently today we do not support um a lot of the smart

canvas features but a lot of those features will be coming uh throughout this year um what new and exciting features are coming I don't want to spoil all the fun but as you can imagine here uh smart canvas is a huge part of what we are doing within docs we see this again as an evolution of how users collaborate and boost productivity within docs so there are a number of new smart canvas building blocks number of new smart canvas smart chips they're going to be coming out uh in the near future a

nd for a long time uh we're very excited about the potential where it can go I mentioned the 3p earlier as well it's a lot of opportunity there again as you start to think about how users use uh documents today how to use it within their daily workflows and how can we actually improve those daily workflows for those users uh going forward so stay tuned um for those of the folks obviously on on NDA you can start to see some of those features popping up in our in our overarching roadmap but very e

xcited for us to continue to boost and I would say push the boundaries of how users collaborate and work day to day um the last thing I wanted to bring up was discoverability I saw a lot of questions uh that popped up in the sign up sheet around just I don't even know what smart canvas is uh I want to just learn how to actually use it better and so you know this is something that we're actively addressing you know as you saw with some of the features that we're doing with um the contextualness o

f when users paste their URL and then actually being able to do tab we want to actually show a lot more of what these components and these building blocks and these smart chips are capable of doing I can probably guess that even if a number of you all were using the smart canvas meeting notes building blog a lot of you all probably didn't realize that you can also use it for the recurring meetings a lot of you all probably didn't realize that you can also send the email directly from those meeti

ng notes as well so a lot of these things are going to be on us as the Google Docs team to really uh you know bring to the Forefront really find those opportunities to help you learn right uh and then again as users start to see it you know hopefully this will trigger all the folks on this call to become those initial users within the companies to start using smart canvas um and then as you start using it then your colleagues start to see it and when they start to see it they're going to be like

oh wow what's this neat drop down what's this neat people card that I see now and then you can help be that trigger for the further discoverability and Adoption of smart canvas within your organization as well um and again we're going to do a lot of stuff on our site we're going to lean on you as well to be those Advocates um uh for us going forward as well um I think that is it um I'll pause really quick just to make sure if there are any other open questions that were posted I think most of t

hese questions were answered by Jeffrey thank you so much Jeffrey for for helping to answer a number of questions here um anything else let me see uh oh got a couple of other questions here okay when are these coming to Sheets yes so great question um smart canvas and what you see in sheets today you've started to see a little bit of this already being announced I would say over the last couple of months this is coming to Sheets uh it's coming very soon so I would say stay tuned again check out

our roadmap but a lot of these capabilities and these functionalities as you can imagine will work great in sheets as well um any other questions Jeffrey I'll do a quick check again all right will there be a multi-select option for chips yes and and so this is specifically when with those drop down uh abilities right so yeah so I think we're we're looking at a variety of new Chips I would say constantly um you're gonna see a lot more chips coming out through the year um I think continue to provi

de and ask these types of questions because it gives us a sense also of what our users want to see uh and use on a daily basis but again these are going to be a lot you're going to see a lot more chips coming out uh in the in the near future all right any other questions all right uh I think that may be it well I I wanted to uh say thank you again uh for everybody who uh dialed in and and hopefully learned something new about what smart canvas is how to actually use it how to boost and maximize

your productivity and again hopefully be those Advocates within your organization to start using smart canvas as well uh because it only takes one and as we all collaborate um hopefully folks can learn and and again be more productive in your daily workflows um I'll hand it back over to you Carissa and we'll wrap it up awesome well I just want to say thank you so much Dennis for that amazing presentation I learned so much and took notes and really really enjoyed it so thank you so much for your

time thank you um Jeffrey who's another product manager helping us out answering questions um just some next steps I we put in the chat there the feedback form link so please take please fill that out for us here we truly value your feedback um also mentioned in the chat that if you want to stay up to date on the community events I put in the community event link you can also subscribe to that page from the top right in the topic Ops and options so you get email notifications with the events um

I also put in some courses um that for Google that you can take to help out with Google Docs but also just admin and end user learning for workspace and yeah that that wraps up our our presentation today last last thing I did want to mention was that we will have a post for the general workspace can Community with a recap and then for those NDA specific questions that were asked we will have a follow-up in the customer connect as well and we put instructions on how to how to sign up for that if

you're under NBA as well so thank you so much we truly appreciate your time we hope you learned a lot don't forget the feedback form we'll see you in the community thank you so much have a wonderful day bye everyone