Google celebrates the adoption of Smart Canvas features, announces more to come

Building off of their announcement back in May of last year which introduced Smart Canvas – a new product experience that delivers the next evolution of collaboration for Google Workspace – Google posted today on The Keyword a summary of all the Smart Canvas features released to date.

Additionally, Google boasted of the welcomed adoption of these features by revealing that they are being used in documents more often than well-established features, such as commenting. Below are all the Smart Canvas features so far:

1. Auto-generated summaries in Google Docs: High-level overview of your document’s contents without having to read the entire page upfront.
2. Pageless format in Google Docs: Allows any text, images, tables and more to “re-flow” automatically based on the size of the screen.
3. Expansion of the “@” menu: We were able to previously @-mention colleages in Docs and Sheets, but this expansion allows for the use of the “@” menu to insert additional things like images, tables, and templates.
4. Meeting notes template: Automatically imports information from a calendar meeting invite into a Google Doc, which you can use to take notes during said meeting.
5. Previewing of Google Maps links directly in Google Docs: This utilizes a smart chip for which you will see a thumbnail. Once you click on it, it will expand on the right sidebar of the Doc.

Google also took this opportunity to announce that with the expansion of the “@” menu, a new feature will be available in the coming weeks that will allow collaboration with others on an email within Docs. This will entail exporting your finished email as a draft. We have yet to see how this feature will work exactly, but we can’t wait to try it. We’ll be keeping an eye out and will report back as new features become available in Workspace.