Use Smart chips in Docs and thank me later

Hi! When was the last time you used a Google Doc? I hope your answer is recently, otherwise, what am I trying to accomplish with today's article? Google has updated Docs with Smart chips and these not only improve the collaboration within Google documents but also make it easier to access all the features within a Google Doc faster.

Scenario

You have a meeting coming up and this meeting is scheduled in your Google Calendar. You want to use Google Docs to take minutes for the meeting.

Taking minutes for the meeting

If you don't use Google Calendar for scheduling, take this little light (and this one, too) of mine and let it shine. There are several tools, apps and techniques for taking minutes effectively, but I like to target the average person, so free 'ole Google Docs it is.

Open and set up the Google Doc

A few minutes prior to the meeting, we create a new Google Doc by typing doc.new in the browser. A new google document opens and we can set up the document for our meeting notes. Previously, you would have to set up the document manually and include relevant headings, dates, times and attendees, etc. Something like this:

You think I am going to do this for free forever? (Probably)

Using Smart chips

However, after the most recent updates to Docs in Google Workspace, Google is leveraging its elite ecosystem to make our work easier and more enjoyable. Therefore, instead of setting up the document manually as we did above, we now use Smart chips. You will notice that when you open the new Google Doc, you see "Type @ to insert". "@" is the activator for Smart chips which allows you to use any features in the Google Doc.

Type "@" and enter any feature you want to use

For our meeting notes, we type "@" and type "meeting" to see the options Google offers in a dropdown. Google offers a Building blocks feature for Meeting notes which appears in the dropdown. We select Meeting notes and Google automatically pulls up all the upcoming meetings from Google Calendar. Once you click the meeting you want, Google sets up the document for us and we can take notes and add action items. We can share the document with the other meeting attendees for them to make live edits during the meeting.

The beauty about using Smart chips to attach files, folders, and collaborators to documents is that when you update the files or folders, Google will update them automatically in your current document. Magic!

Conclusion

Take some time to explore Smart chips in Docs by clicking "@". It is so much easier to format documents using Smart chips! I use them a lot for adding headings to documents so that the outline of my documents is created automatically.

Have a great week!