Smart Chips are a newish feature to Google Docs. With smart chips, you can embed Google products like docs, slides, sheets, and drawings right into your doc. I have also had success chipping videos that live in my drive or from the share links on Youtube! In addition to embedding these materials in your docs, you also have the ability to add dates, calendar events or even create a calendar invite right on the fly.
Let’s say that I am working with other teachers or preparing a group project for students. I can create a document that has all of the content that we need and embed it right into the document. In the past, I could accomplish this with hyperlinks but with smart chips, it gives a nicer visual feel and my collaborators can see the type of content I have linked rather than just clicking on a word I have hyperlinked. When you mouse over the smart chip, it gives a preview of the content you have chipped, let’s you know who owns the content, and reminds you to alter your share settings on the original content if you have not done so already. Take a look at an example of a document I built using smart chips.
To add a smart chip to a document, type the @ sign and begin to type the title of the material you want to pull in from your Drive. The content the dialog menu box pulls is slightly limited, so if you know exactly what you want, you can always go to your Drive first and grab the share link from it. Once you hit the @ sign in your doc, you can simply paste the share URL in. Docs will then prompt you to hit tab to turn the URL link into a smart chip.
To learn how to add smart chips to your own documents, watch this short video.
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