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Hello AppSheet Community,
As you may have seen already, we just launched AppSheet smart chips for Google Docs!
What are AppSheet smart chips?
Smart chips in Google Docs are already recognized as a powerful way to provide users rich, in-context views of linked assets and drive real-time decision making by bringing relevant data from places like Sheets, Slides, and Calendar directly into Docs. Meanwhile, AppSheet creators have been streamlining business processes and placing solutions directly into the hands of their users.
The release of AppSheet smart chips combine the power of smart chips’ in-context experience with the bespoke solutions built in AppSheet so that detail and deck views from any app can run directly from Google docs via a smart chip.
AppSheet’s integration with smart chips lets users view and take action on the data in real time, including triggering automations–all without having to leave Docs.
Why is this valuable?
Consider a travel plan, trip report or budget request as an example. With AppSheet smart chips:
- An AppSheet creator could insert a smart chip of all travel requests for a department in a Google Doc, thus enabling a streamlined approval flow and automation without requiring the approver to navigate through the approval app,
- App users could also insert views of their pending or approved trip requests into a travel plan doc for stakeholders to easily review/take action.
- Multiple chip-based views showing real-time information from several different apps could be inserted in a single document, transforming the Doc into a dashboard or hub for all trip related information and actions.
Essentially, any user can insert detail or deck views from apps that they have access to into Docs, and collaborators can see and take action on AppSheet data directly from the document.
Installing the “AppSheet for Google Docs” Add-On
To get started, install the AppSheet for Google Docs Add-On.
Inserting an AppSheet smart chip into your Google Doc
Once installed, you can immediately begin adding AppSheet smart chips to render application views in your Google Docs. Simply navigate to the user-facing view of a deployed app you’d like to include, copy the view URL, then paste it into your Google Doc.
Here’s step-by-step instructions for how to add AppSheet smart chips into your Google Docs.
- Open an AppSheet app you wish to render in your Google Doc. You can add as a smart chip any AppSheet app you have access to, whether as a user or a creator. Note that once inserted as a smart chip, the app will still respect any policies or permissions configured in AppSheet. This means that you’ll need to share the app with any users who should have access to the data presented in the smart chip. For this example, we’ll use the Simple Inventory template app.
- After opening the app in the AppSheet editor, you’ll want to open the app in a new tab to obtain a full screen view of the app.
Hint: Click the Open in tab option in the top corner of the editor.
This will allow you to extract the URL of the view you wish to insert into a doc. - After opening the app in full screen mode, navigate to the Inventory Log view In your browser and copy the full URL of the app view you wish to add to your Doc.
The URL will generally be of the form:
https://www.appsheet.com/start/…#appName=[YourAppName]&view=[YourViewName]]
Note: The full URL will typically contain other HTTP parameters including group, page, sort, table etc. The minimum parameters for smart chips to work are appName and view. - Once copied, paste the URL into your Google Doc in the position that you wish the view to appear.
- Then click [Tab] to replace the URL text with the smart chip.
Once inserted into your Doc, you’ll be able to hover or click on the chip to see the inserted AppSheet view. Once the chip renders, you’ll be able to interact with the view just as you would in the actual AppSheet application. - Note: Recall again that users of the chip in the Google Doc must already have access to the view in the application.
- Feel free to experiment with other views in your app!
Remember that only deck and detail views will render in a smart chip.
For example the ‘Levels’ view of the Simple Inventory app renders as:
Availability
Available to Google Workspace customers with AppSheet licenses and AppSheet licenses.
Further Resources
Google Help: Use AppSheet smart chips in Google Docs
Google Workspace Marketplace: AppSheet for Google Docs
Let us know your use cases!
If you have any specific use cases in mind for using smart chips, feel free to share it and other feedback in this thread!
@cschalk_ws Today I wanted to use this feature. Usecase: I'm writing a report in Google Docs and wanted to insert all the items that are related to this report. So I wanted to insert a smart chip from a filtered deck view. But I get this Error message:
"Something went wrong when executing the add-on."
Detail Views are working correctly. But not Deck Views.
I've sent also a support ticket.
@cschalk_ws Instead of showing IDs, could the smart chip show the label of the related items?
Here is the App:
Here is how the smart chip looks like:
As mentioned in today's release notes, we've expanded the functionality in the AppSheet for Google Docs Add-On to allow for @ commands allowing to capture user input (form view) or show app details (deck view)! See the documentation: Use AppSheet smart chips in Google Docs for more details.
Here is a quick inline demo:
Not sure how many users use this in real business scenarios.
@Rifad wrote:
You're correct; it would indeed be more advantageous if the approach was reversed. Being able to preview documents, websites, and PDFs within the AppSheet Desktop UI app itself, rather than from the document, would be more practical.
I suggest this is more practical approach. User can tag or use google doc inside appsheet rather than appsheet inside google doc. @nico
Example: Check out ClickUp's slash commands for integrating Google Drive into ClickUp. It's unfortunate that third-party apps can accomplish this, yet AppSheet, a Google subsidiary, doesn't prioritize such useful features.
https://help.clickup.com/hc/en-us/articles/6308960837911-Use-Slash-Commands
@Koichi_Tsuji wrote:
Basic notion for AppSheet (at that time when it was born before Google Time), AppSheet aimed at centralizing all the related work flow into single place (AppSheet app) to improve the productivities and complex workflow.
You should consider giving ClickUp a try for this use case. They've done an excellent job with customizations and their UI. While not identical to AppSheet, ClickUp offers many improvements, particularly in project management and collaboration.
AppSheet seems limited to basic and niche use cases nowadays, with an outdated UI reminiscent of the 2000s. ClickUp's UI is also highly commendable for the tasks you mentioned. I'd recommend AppSheet primarily for simple data entry, database management, and PDF generation. However, when it comes to database management and automation, AppSheet excels, though it lacks the capabilities for centralized collaboration found in ClickUp. @Koichi_Tsuji
@Rifad wrote:
As shown, while Google is progressing 10x slowly with incomplete features and some less appealing UI designs, competitors have already done them with better innovation for business applications. This sluggishness from AppSheet (GOOGLE) spells doom for AppSheet.
This is a cool feature. But as said, I will find it difficult to make use of it for any process.
Using the app just seems more simple and fast.
My suggestions :
A- Improve UI
___
B - Enable this feature in Sheets
___
C - Enable more views
As said before this feature should be great most likely in reporting. I don't think being able to edit from a doc would be that useful. But seeing summarized data in a well built UI would certainly be.
Instead, the edit feature of smartchip would be useful in the context of a ChatApp
@nico wrote:
Deck views should work, you may have hit an intermediate error that requires re-opening the smart chip.
Hi @nico I was in contact with the Support team, but di not get an answer since 1 week. That's why I copy my text, because I see that you are involved.
It seems that filtered deck views based on a slice are not working.
Re-opening the smart chip does not help.
Hi AppSheet Team,
Thank you very much for investigating. The Google Doc that I’ve shared with <PII removed by staff> and <PII removed by staff> is now working partially. But it takes quite long (about 17 sec) to open the Smart Chip when you hover over it. This is not handy. It seems as if the smart chip syncs the whole app, instead of just the one view that’s linked with the smart chip.
If you think that a whole sync is necessary, then the Google Doc should cache the sync. Because I’ve disabled “Sync on start”. So after the smart chip was opened once and has synced the app, the second time you open the doc and hover over the smart chip, it should not need to sync the app again. Just like it already works when you hover over it a second time while the doc is still open (not closing the doc and open it again).
Or maybe you can do it like that: While creating the smart chip it could sync the app and cache it in the doc.
I say it’s working partially, because sometimes the second smart chip in the shared google doc gives this error. This is the same error that I had from the beginning.
Also the third smart chip of the shared doc is still not working at all. It always gives this error. It never worked.
I’ve now added a fourth smart chip that gives the error: Url too long. Maximum of 65519 characters. In fact the link has 65538 characters. But I need this link because it’s a filtered view.
