Google is launching Smart Canvas, a set of new features for Documents, Sheets, and Presentations to make them more flexible, interactive, and smart.
In this article we want to summarize the most interesting new features that Smart Canvas is introducing that can be useful for your work. We will focus on the new implementation of Google Sheets, the drop-down chips, a perfect tool for checking the progress of your team's projects.
These new features make it more agile and easier for colleagues to connect, people can stay in touch by adopting tools that are ever closer to your needs.
The constant updating of the Google Workspace suite applications continues to offer business continuity, richer and more functional experiences.
With Smart Canvas, it improves collaboration and sharing among teams
Hybrid work is constantly evolving, offering challenges and just as many opportunities that need to be met with agility.
Working in unison with teams and colleagues who are not in the same office is definitely one of the main needs. The goal of Smart Canvas is just that, to create deep connections through Google Workspace to improve communication among all users.
The latest features released include that you can mention -- using the @- a user on Documents and, thanks to a smart chip, access additional information, such as the user's location.
Both from desktop and mobile devices, your employees can quickly scroll through meetings and associated people or preview linked documents, all without changing tabs or contexts. An update to Google Sheets mentions is also planned.
Google is working to simplify project management and control as well. Now on Documents you can assign checklist tasks to other people, these items will show up on Google Tasks, making it easier to manage assigned tasks.
Another new feature are the new table templates in Documents, now featuring the product roadmap, the revisions tracker, theproject resources, and the content trackers,useful to help you stay focused on goals and statuses.
Sharing ideas and better connecting people are key for Google. Building integrations between communication and collaboration tools is valued and vital to being able to put content into conversations and conversations into content.
One of the latest implementations of Google Meet allows you, for example, to present business content during Meetings directly from the Document, Sheet or slide you are already working in.
Skipping between collaboration in a Document and a live conversation without wasting time helps the team stay focused on the project, improving and optimizing collaboration.
Subtitles and real-time translations are also enhanced in Google Meet, because they improve understanding and communication between people while working. In fact, live subtitles in English translated into Spanish, Portuguese, French and German will be introduced soon, other languages will be added later.
Working smarter and safer
Google Workspace puts artificial intelligence to work to make the most of users' own time and attention: there are more than two billion grammar suggestions on Docs or smart file shortcuts in the Priority and Quick Access features of Google Drive, which reduce search time by 50 percent.
To help everyone work more efficiently, additional assisted writing features will be introduced in Documents in the coming months. This includes warnings about offensive words and language, as well as stylistic suggestions to speed up editing and help make your writing more impactful.
Teams can now go directly from a discussion on Google Chat to creating content together, creating and editing Sheets or Documents directly, while they are conversing.
Assisted analysis capabilities will also be added to Sheets, with formula recommendations that make it easy for all users, even those who are not specialists, to derive information from data. The intelligence of Google Sheets helps create and solve computational problems, speeding up data analysis and reducing errors.
Optimize information by leveraging drop-down chips on Google Sheets
The addition of drop-down chips on Google Sheets marks an important step for communication between users, you now have a custom formatting feature, already available in Documents, that allow you to easily indicate the statuses, start or end of a project you are managing on Sheets.
This feature will be on by default, inserting it is very simple, you just go to Insert > Dropdown or type "@" followed by "dropdown".
Modifications have also been made to the workflows for creating and managing all data validation rules, including drop-down chips and checkboxes.
Now you can view and edit all the existing methodologies that have been created in a specific Sheets tab and put additional ones from a new view from the sidebar.
This update improves the consistency of the overall Sheets experience as it mirrors the workflows for creating conditional formatting rules, protected and named ranges.
Thanks to this solution you can, for example, keep an eye on your team's work on various projects, checking the progress at any time.
This way you can quickly become aware of and monitor whether everything is proceeding in a expeditious manner: whether some activity has been at a standstill for too long or whether there is some critical issue that needs to be handled quickly. All this in full autonomy avoiding information handovers with other tools, which can lead to forgetfulness, loss of time or errors.