so here we are with Google canvas and it is Google Documents but there's a layer that
Google workspace are building inside of this called canvas and I wanted to show you how to
get started with it if you're somebody that uses Google docs on a regular basis if you're using
the workspace accounts this can help you to optimize your experience not only for yourself
but for teams too so as you can see we're inside of a Google Document now what I'm going to first
do is go over to file and I'm going to scroll down to page setup now this is a recent Edition
that Google have added to make Pages a little bit more expansive and feel a little bit more like a
database more than it is a page in front of you so you can click this new Option called pageless and
you can see that the format dramatically changes you can even choose a background color that goes
with it and if you want to you can set this one as a default option now so if this is default it
means your pages will look like that consistently let's go ahead and click okay and you can see
instantly that there's a dramatic change to the look of this page it doesn't feel like a page
it is more like a canvas in front of you now you can close the document outline view that's on the
left but that will Auto populate as you create it and you can also add things to your summary here
so already we've changed the look and feel of the document so let's get started with actually
activating some of the different blocks that you can add to a document inside of Google so the best
way to activate that is by pressing the at command now straight away You're met with a few options
and I want to take you through stuff individually so first of all if you're looking to interact with
someone in your team or someone externally you can actually invite them to a certain segment of the
page so for example if I wanted to add my editor Steve to be able to see this element of a page
then I can add that person there now as you can see on the right hand side something pops up the
ability to mention people and notify them so I can actually share this instantaneously with him or I
can dismiss it here and be able to share it later now the cool thing is if I hover over the person
that you're using their smart chips ability to be able to get a bit more detail and also be able
to email them send them a message through their spaces ability and also start the video call or
create an event and you can even add this person to your contacts too this is all in an effort
to build a better sort of more cohesive Google workspace and start interacting with others so if
I press that at command we're going to scroll down to files because I believe this is the second key
piece of information that's quite helpful files help us to connect different experiences in our
Google Drive and they've made this a lot easier in documents so if I go and expand this and I
want to bring this meeting notes in for an editor review you can see that the document now lives as
a linked experience inside of this canvas so here what it can do is I can actually click into this
and it open up the document as a separate page so it's very helpful for being able to see stuff at
open a preview as well so that you don't have to fully go into that document without committing and
you could also expand it as a full-size one or just get rid of it as you can see here now the
great thing is too you can also add as many files as you like and you can add additional ones that
live outside of just Google Documents too now skipping down to Media you can now add things
like images drawings charts and emoji from this menu you could previously add them before but
it just means that you can quickly type an image and search the menu so if I typed in image then
I can find some of the files that I might have inside of this layout I can also type in pages
so for example if I press at command and typed in Plymouth you can see that I can add a location
here from Google Maps which is perfect now if I want to be able to add something like lists and
things like that I can do this through here which is perfect for creating checklists and things like
that but the biggest Edition they've added in terms of multimedia is the ability to add dates
dates are not only helpful for booking meetings but also associating a deadline to a certain task
that you're adding so this is a great for be able to build up and create certain deadlines
that you want to add and I'm going to show you a demonstration of how this can be helpful now if
I go to at command and I go down to building blocks and go to something like I don't know
launch content tracker you can see that because of the pageless view I get a full span of what I
can add here but what I can do is I can be able to bring the publish date into here and say tomorrow
and have that there so that's where the dates are helpful and it can even add information I could
say like Exeter to be able to have information that people can quickly grab and find there I
could say meeting notes and I can toggle some of these more recent abilities now you can actually
add options here and I'll show you how to create a drop down so if you're inside of anywhere inside
of this canvas you can press at and type in drop down and you can see that you can create some
of the presets or your own one if you want to but here's a good one a Project based one that
has some pre-populated experiences that you can quickly use which is perfect and that's somewhere
where over here I could type in meeting notes and be able to connect up this item here now if
it was around a specific event that I had so if I was typing in meeting notes and this is something
that I've had as part of an event I don't know like there's some SB second brain Summit then
can and connect an existing event and if I want to I can click into that event and find it inside of
my Google account I think I deleted that one so that's probably why it doesn't exist but Google
seems to think it still exists inside of this demonstration but you can start to see how these
components can be quite helpful for managing and building up a the different more immersive Google
canvas experience and I'm going to show you a few more additional ones so let's have a look down
here we also have the ability to add headings and as I mentioned the ability to add calendar events
and that demonstration you can also add some different items like tasks tasks can actually
be assigned here and they will live inside of the Google Tasks which is something that you can now
connect up with documents inside of your account you can actually assign them to specific people so
this one here lives inside of the meeting notes editor review document that we have separately
and I can go tick it off and it will tick it off inside side of that actual document too which is
a huge Time Saver so they're really improving the way that tasks can be done you can see here
that you can add all of the regular stuff that you'd expect like bookmarks table of contents
Etc stuff that are sort of just Advanced formatting options now they've had the
ability we've showed you how to add some building blocks but there's also other ones like project
road maps let's go ahead and add an additional one review tracker so you can start to see that
they're very simple tables but a great way to get started it could even actually do something
in building blocks now like email draft which connects to your Gmail and helps you and your
team to collaborate on an email in real time and it helps you for example if you were looking to
build an email together inside of a dock like okay what do we send to the client in terms
of an actual name and details and everyone can start contributing to the CC and BCC and subjects
Etc and helping to format it in real time so they've really Advanced the way that you can do
this and you can access everything really up here in the inserting segment of the file management
you can see here that you can also add some of the details like smart chips like the people files and
calendar events and places which help you to advance things for you and your team so Google
are continuing to evolve this and to create a more tighter experience across the board and what I'd
recommend doing is playing around with how it best worked for you and your team and obviously
the more you use other Google experiences the better and more sort of concise this is going
to work we've started to see more recently with Google keep and things like that they're
connecting up the existing documents with some of the sort of documents that are here so you can see
here that I started taking notes separately for myself maybe on Google keep you can start to see
that's connecting up the document that I have in front of me so really interesting additions
from canvas hopefully explained everything and obviously this is going to evolve over time so
if you would like to subscribe and find out more about Google workspace and specifically
about docs we'll do some more videos on that very soon thank you very much for stopping by please do
subscribe and I'll look forward to seeing you in a future video thank you very much folks cheerio