Google Docs provides a lot of flexibility in terms of user preferences.
Some of the preferences are very useful when enabled. Others can be plain annoying.
However, utility is in the eye of the beholder. One person’s annoyance may be another’s productivity booster.
The following is a list the current options in the General tab (under Tools > Preferences), along with our preferences. Of course, your mileage may vary.
With the help of four Google components, two of which are included with G Suite and G Suite Essentials, you as a marketer can create a free marketing dashboard.
Once you’ve created a dashboard, you can easily share it with anyone within your organization. All they will need is their G Suite login to access the dashboard.
You can optionally share the dashboard outside of your organization with someone who has a G Suite or Google account.
The needed Google components are:
Google launched G Suite Essentials in May of 2020.
Essentials can be viewed as a slimmed down version of Google’s G Suite. It includes Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, Meet, Sites, Forms and Keep. It does not host your email and it is not your users’ calendar system. Essentials does not include Google Drawings, My Maps or Jamboard.
There are a number of reasons an organization may want to have multiple domains associated with their G Suite account.
First, we’ll look at some of the reasons for having multiple domains. We will then provide instructions for how to associate additional domains with your G Suite account.
Updated: ✔️ July 11, 2020
Google Meet and Zoom are two of the most popular online meeting applications on the market.
Zoom has always been available to everyone. Google Meet used to only be available to G Suite subscribers. On April 29, 2020 Javier Soltero, Vice President & GM of G Suite, posted that Google would be rolling out a Meet version that is free for everyone.
The AI-driven meeting scheduling vendor x.ai reported in a March 18, 2020 blog post that Google Meet is being used in 24.83% of all video conference meetings scheduled using their app.
Zoom is being used in 69.13% of meetings. That means all other online meeting platforms among x.ai’s customers account for only 6.04%.
Keep in mind that Zoom meetings can be hosted by anyone, regardless of what office suite or email client they’re using. Google Meet is specific to G Suite.
Updated: May 22, 2020
Long before current events changed where and how many of us work, Matt Matt Mullenweg, cofounder of WordPress had developed a 100% distributed workforce at his company Automattic.
Automattic is “distributed first.” The idea of a geographically disperse workforce was a foundational one. Nearly 800 employees work in 67 different countries.
In the following video, Matt provides a number of tips for building what he calls “a distributed capability.” These include:
Updated: July 23, 2020
Google Meet, which is available to all users of G Suite and consumer Gmail users, is an easy to use online meeting application. As do all meeting apps, Meet supports camera, audio and screen sharing.
As far as audio hardware goes, there are a number of options. Some work better than others, depending on the environment the meeting host or attendee is in.
Keep in mind that just one attendee who introduces too much ambient noise can degrade the meeting experience for all attendees.
There are a number of cases in which you may want to remove duplicates from a list of records using Google Sheets.
For example, you may want to remove duplicate records before importing a list of leads into a CRM system such as Salesforce—or into a marketing automation system like ActiveCampaign.
Despite all of Google’s human and artificial intelligence capabilities, Sheets does not have a very sophisticated deduplication logic… yet.
The Chrome browser and G Suite can work together in several ways.
These connections will help you create and find documents more easily. They will save you mouse clicks.
The following tips also work for consumer Gmail accounts.
Google released Pixelbook Go on October 27, 2019.
Go is marketed as a consumer laptop. But since this is a business-oriented site, we’ll take a corporate angle on this new Google offering.
If you’re not familiar with Chromebook’s Chrome OS, it’s a lightweight operating system that can be considered “browser first”—mainly a gateway to the cloud.
You missed an important online meeting. Was it because you did not create a Google Calendar Reminder?
It’s more likely because you did not enable one or more Event Notifications.
Let’s look at the difference between Reminders and Event Notifications.
Because Google is a search company at its core, there is a collateral search benefit to users of Gmail for Business (G Suite) and consumer Gmail users.
That benefit is a set Gmail search operators that you can use to find specific emails anywhere within a Gmail account.
Here are some of the ways you can use these search operators to save time.
Most people are aware of consumer Gmail. If you don’t personally use Gmail, you likely receive email from friends and family with gmail.com addresses.
What many people don’t realize is that Gmail is also available to organizations.
Gmail is just one of the components of G Suite. Other components include Calendar, Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides and Sites.
We all get annoying emails in consumer Gmail and business Gmail that aren’t necessarily spam.
Let’s look at some of these types of incoming emails and why you might want to block them instead of reporting them as spam. Then we’ll look at how to block and unblock emails.
The emails in question are sometimes personalized. They often come directly from an individual email account (as opposed to from an email server).
Both consumer Gmail and business Gmail users often have a need to create Gmail templates.
Fortunately, Google Labs developed an easy (and free) way to create Gmail templates. This app is called Canned Responses. As its name implies, the intent of the app was for responding to inbound emails. However, the majority use case may well be for new outbound emails.
Access to Canned Responses is available to G Suite users by default, but user access can be disabled by a G Suite administrator in the admin console.
Updated: May 9, 2020
In April 2019, Google announced Voice [for businesses]. This is different from Google Voice, which is a free, individual user offering for Gmail users.
The Voice announcement was for a complete, cloud-based business telephone system, with features such as auto attendant, call transfer and one button calling among users. This “Cloud Telephony for G Suite” may be disruptive to the entire business cloud telephony industry.
Why? Because Google now has a service that competes directly with popular business VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) providers like Vonage, RingCentral, 8×8 and Ooma.
Over time, some businesses end up with a plethora of different logins to assorted Google and non-Google online properties.
This is particularly true in the digital marketing realm, where there can be dozens of online accounts that a staff marketer or a contract marketer needs to access.
Google Drive is well known as a consumer product. 1.5+ billion Gmail users each have access to 15 GB of free cloud storage on Google Drive (consumers can always buy more storage).
What many people don’t know is that Google Drive is also a business product. It is a part of G Suite, the business version of Gmail.
Updated: July 28, 2020
Google Sheets, available as part of both consumer Gmail and organization-wide G Suite, allows users to easily create trend charts based on any source that can be connected to a Google Sheet.
The GOOGLEFINANCE function for Bitcoin was not working for a time, but seems to be working again now. You can “set and forget” the function—cells will auto-populate or auto-update at regular intervals.
Many people have multiple Gmail logins.
An example is someone who has a personal Gmail account and one or more business Gmail (G Suite) accounts.
In fact, independent contractors such as marketers can have many business Gmail accounts—one for each of their customers.
The good news is that an individual can login to Gmail as different users within the same browser.
When someone uses a free service such as Gmail, Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, they are not a customer of the service provider.
For free services such as these, the customers of the service provider are the advertisers.
The product offered by the service provider to advertisers is a combination of the service itself and the users of the service. In other words, free users are a part of a product offering for advertisers.
One of the key advantages that Google Docs has over the competition is that a document (or spreadsheet or presentation, etc.) can be shared for editing or commenting with any G Suite or consumer Gmail user outside of one’s own organization.
But what if a G Suite user needs to share a document with someone outside their organization who does not have a Gmail account?
The core applications of office productivity suites such as G Suite are: email, documents, spreadsheets and presentations. These are the basic software tools most people use at work.
In addition to these core applications, there are a number of G Suite extras that are included in the monthly per user price. Not everyone is aware of these bonus applications.
Updated: December 26, 2019
Salesforce Files Connect for Google Drive allows specified users to add Google Drive files to the Files section or a Lightning Page component of any record.
The Salesforce Files tab will show Google Drive as a Connected Source. A custom tab called Google Drive can be created. This tab can have list views like any other tab.
Setting up Files Connect for Google Drive requires administrative access to both Salesforce and the Google Cloud Platform console (the same admin login as G Suite).
It’s best that the same username is used for logging into both. This may mean temporarily making a G Suite admin a Salesforce System Administrator or visa versa.
While the following may seem like a lot of steps, the ability to set up secure server-to-server integration in about 30 minutes represents a tiny sliver of time compared to setting up other types of system integrations.
If your organization is not yet using G Suite, you can try this setup yourself with a free trial of G Suite.