Google Workspace content is directly tied to your Gmail account, making it very easy to work collaboratively with colleagues and access your files from anywhere. A recent flurry of new Smart Canvas features have greatly simplified template creation, document reuse, and linking YouTube videos. Google is now adding a polling feature to Smart Canvas, and it should be particularly useful in shared Google Docs.

Following in the footsteps of Telegram, WhatsApp recently introduced a new polling feature. Understandably, polls make collective decision-making in groups much easier. Google recently announced a similar implementation is now available to Google Docs users, through Smart Canvas. Users can add polls to their document body using Smart Chips.

It is immediately apparent the polling feature doesn’t have the visual refinement we see on platforms like WhatsApp, but perhaps that’s excusable because this is Google’s maiden attempt. Looking past the dated visual design, Google lets you express your opinion by clicking the emoji beside the corresponding option, adding to the count of people voting for that option.

Google envisions people using this feature to compare ideas, seek opinions from the team you’re collaborating with, and ranking ideas by popularity. With polling integrated in Docs, teams won’t need to poll collaborators using workaround methods like emoji reactions to a message in Slack. The feature is already rolling out, but Google has limited access to certain customers: Business Standard, Business Plus, Enterprise Standard, Enterprise Plus, Education Plus, and Nonprofit-tier Workspace.