Google Sheets now lets you insert and view rich contact information using smart chips

Google Docs received an update last month that allowed you to mention anyone from your Google Contact list in order to insert them directly into the context of the document. This would then let you interact directly with them by hovering over their name and clicking their email address, phone number, and more on the short-form contact card that appeared there.

As an extension of that update, Google is now rolling out the same feature for Sheets! Over the next week and a half, you should start to see the feature pop up for you and your organization if you’re on any Workspace tier. This goes for both Rapid Release and Scheduled Release domains alike.

These are being coined “People Chips”, and are a specific type of Google’s “Smart chips”, which have recently been implemented in Google Drive, Gmail, and more. These People Chips can be inserted into any cell in the Sheet simply by typing an “@” followed by the name of a contact from your account.

Immediately, a dialogue box will appear and be populated with relevant contact names, and selecting one will make it into an interactive chip, which is essentially text with an oval backplate design. Google hopes to make it easier for you to see vital information about your colleagues or contacts, including their job title, location, and contact info so that you can book meetings, start chats, send emails, and more without leaving the work you’re doing in Sheets.

You can also insert People Chips into your document by activating a cell that already includes an email address, selecting “Insert” from the top navigation, and choosing “People chip”. Lastly, don’t forget that you can right-click an email address in a cell, and choose “Convert to people chip”. All of these methods will produce the same result. Smart chips can also be created in Docs using “@today”, “@tomorrow”, “@yesterday”, and “@date”, as well as a specific date, such as “@Jan”, or “@1/1/2022”, but I’d love to see these extra options available to Sheets before long.