Many Google Workspace products like Gmail, Sheets, and Docs are some of the best in their segment. They are easy to use, feature rich, and effortlessly sync across devices and operating systems. The smart canvas feature is one of the newest Workspace utilities with immense potential. Now, Google is extending more smart chip functions to Sheets, which are a part of the smart canvas.

If you aren’t familiar, smart canvas makes Google Workspace products quite a bit more useful, bringing support for customizable building blocks, document variables, emoji reactions for document comments, and third-party plugin integrations. You can also tag people, places, web links, and other documents directly in your files, but only some of these capabilities are available across all three Workspace utilities.

These smart chips in Google Sheets have been updated with support for YouTube links. If you paste a YouTube video link in any cell of the sheet, simply hover over the cell and click the Chip button to convert your link into a smart chip. The video title will replace the URL, making the video easier to identify for your collaborators on the Sheet. This can give additional context to the Sheet viewers, and you need not add the YouTube links in the document comments section. It was available on Docs, and is now on Sheets too.

In our testing, we only saw an option to replace the pasted YouTube link with the video title, a telltale sign of a gradual rollout. However, Google mentions that hovering on the cell with the YouTube chip reveals additional helpful information like the video description, duration, and preview directly in Sheets.

Additionally, Google now allows adding multiple people in the same cell on Sheets. Previously, users were limited to one smart chip tagging a person, per cell. Multiple chips per cell could be useful for when you’re assigning work.

These new features make the smart canvas more intuitive and seamless on Google Sheets, but it can be termed an incremental update. If you're looking forward to these changes, they will reach all Google Sheets users by May 25, 2023.