How to Get Grid View in Google Meet

Google Meet, the video conferencing software of choice for many people who host online work meetings or classes. Especially now, when working from home or attending online classes is not an option but rather a necessity, apps like Google Meet have been huge lifesavers.

But no matter how many perks an app has, if it misses out on something important, the whole experience is diminished. Google Meet initially only supported camera stream of up to four participants in a meeting, and that’s why the grid view chrome extension became so popular. Thankfully, Google has now added Google Meet Tile view feature wherein you can see up to 16 participants at a time without using an extension.

That said, the Google Meet grid view extension mentioned below lets you see everyone in the meeting. If you have a meeting of 16+ participants, you may still want to use the grid view extension to see all (up to 250) participants in a meeting.

Using ‘Google Meet Grid View’ Chrome Extension

This extension keeps it simple and does exactly what the name says. It provides a Grid View in Google Meet video calls. No matter how many people are there, it gives each video equal space on the scene by dividing the screen. It’s gotten immensely popular in the past few days.

Open the Google Meet Grid View extension in the chrome web store. Click on the ‘Add to Chrome’ button to install the extension to your browser.

A confirmation dialogue box will appear on your screen. Click on ‘Add Extension’ to confirm.

Now go to Google Meet, and you’ll be able to use the extension in a video meeting to the grid view of all participants. If you had an ongoing call while you added the extension, refresh the page and rejoin the meeting.

In the meeting, you will find an additional button with a ‘Grid icon’ at the top-right corner of the screen.

Go to the icon and hover on it, and it will show you the additional options you can use to configure how you want to use the Grid View.

Select the checkbox for ‘Only Show Participants with video’ to prevent the attendees who don’t have the video on from taking up space on the screen.

The second option is to ‘Highlight Speakers’. It is a really useful feature, especially in meetings with a lot of people where it can become hard to pinpoint who just spoke. When this option is on, a yellow box highlights the video of the person currently speaking.

You can also include yourself in the grid by turning the third option on.

Then, click on the icon to turn it on after you have configured the settings. The icon won’t have a diagonal line through it when it is on. And your meeting would be switched to the grid view.