Many people have a need for a free Google Account. However, they don’t want or need a Gmail address. This includes longtime users of a personal email service from Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL, Comcast and others.
Just a few of the reasons you may want to create a Google Account (without Gmail) are:
With the ongoing move from cable TV to streaming, many people are trying to decide which device to connect to their TV—Apple TV or Chromecast with Google TV (think of Chromecast as the hardware and Google TV as the software).
In a business environment, it’s important for employees and visitors to be able to wirelessly display a presentation on on a big screen in a meeting room.
When using Google Meet in business, an office background will give you a more professional look than, say, a background of a beach or a forest.
In October of 2020, Google introduced the ability to replace your background in Google Meet. While Meet includes a number of stock backgrounds, you can upload one or more backgrounds of your choosing.
If your organization uses Google Workspace, you may have discovered that when you upload a video to Google Drive, it’s not simply a stored file—the video can be played inline.
What’s more, Google Drive uses the YouTube engine to play uploaded videos. When playing a Google Drive video, the interface has the appearance of a slimmed down version of the YouTube player.
In many businesses, the marketing department signs up for a variety of Google services. These services include:
Companies that are not using Google Workspace need to set up access to these Google services via an individual (consumer) Google account. This is usually a Gmail account, but it is also possible to sign up for an individual Google account using a business email address.
The consumer (a.k.a. individual) version of Google Meet is free to anyone with a gmail.com email address. The consumer version generally has the same host and attendee experience as the business version of Google Meet, which is included in Google Workspace.
However, there are some important differences between the free, consumer version of Google Meet and the business versions of Meet.
In September, 2016 Google rebranded Google Apps [for Work, for Education] to G Suite. In October, 2020 Google rebranded G Suite to Google Workspace.
In our opinion, Google Workspace is a much stronger brand name than G Suite. “Google” is better than “G.” “Workspace” is better than “Suite”, especially in today’s world.
What we observed in Google Trends about the first rebranding is that it took years for G Suite to leapfrog Google Apps as a search term.
Google Sheets can be used as a free RSS (and Atom) reader.
The Sheets IMPORTFEED function allows you to create a self-updating repository of blog & news article content that you can easily share with your social media followers.
In this post, we’ll explain how this works. We will also provide you with a link to a sample Google Sheet that you can copy and adapt to the RSS feeds that most interest you, your customers and your social media followers.
We’ll show you how to create Google Sheets formulas for one-click social sharing of blog posts and articles on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.
Google Voice for business is a cloud-based business telephone system that has features such as auto attendant, call transfer, voicemail and one-button calling among users.
This “cloud telephony for Google Workspace” offering may be disruptive to the entire business telephony industry.
Why? Because Google has a service that competes directly with popular business VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) providers like Vonage, RingCentral, 8×8 and Ooma. These vendors all offer an alternative to traditional landline service.
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 Google Workspace and Google Workspace 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 Google Workspace login to access the dashboard.
You can optionally share the dashboard outside of your organization with someone who has a Google Workspace or Google account.
The needed Google components are:
Google launched Google Workspace Essentials in May of 2020.
Essentials can be viewed as a slimmed down version of Google’s Google Workspace. 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 Google Workspace 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 Google Workspace 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 Google Workspace subscribers. On April 29, 2020 Javier Soltero, Vice President & GM of Google Workspace, 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 Google Workspace.
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: September 23, 2020
Google Meet, which is available to all users of Google Workspace 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 Google Workspace 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 (Google Workspace) 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 Google Workspace. 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 Google Workspace users by default, but user access can be disabled by a Google Workspace administrator in the admin console.