This is the main category of this blog site. The G Suite category contains the majority of the blog site’s posts.
Gmail, Google Slides, Google Docs, Google Sheets, Google Meet and other components of G Suite are covered.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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 Google Workspace, the business version of Gmail.
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 Google Workspace or consumer Gmail user outside of one’s own organization.
But what if a Google Workspace 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 Google Workspace 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 Google Workspace extras that are included in the monthly per user price. Not everyone is aware of these bonus applications.
Many small businesses do not have the in-house resources needed to fully implement and properly manage Google Workspace. These companies often seek help from a Google Workspace Partner.
There are a lot of companies that advertise Google Workspace services, but not are all official Google partners.
In 2017, Google launched its Cloud Partner directory, which is a searchable listing of all companies that have been accepted into the Google Cloud Partner Program.
There are a variety of add-ons and built-in functions for seamlessly and automatically pulling business data into Google Sheets from external sources.
Once business data is in Sheets, it can be manipulated an analyzed in a number of ways.
Here are six functions and add-ons for importing information into Google Sheets. All six are free of charge.
Updated: March 14, 2019
If you’re using Google Workspace or considering Google Workspace for your organization, there may be questions about Google Workspace security in your mind.
After all company email and business documents (if you are leveraging Google Drive for cloud backup of local files) are stored in Google’s data centers.
Google Workspace, as you’d expect, has multiple levels of built-in security.
Google has introduced native Gmail Offline for business (Google Workspace) and consumer users of Gmail.
This means that Gmail users can now read, reply to and compose emails while not connected to the internet. What’s more, no Chrome extension is needed.
It also means that people who current use a local email client in conjunction with Google Workspace, mainly for offline access, may find that the local client is no longer needed.
There are many aspects to Google Workspace that can add energy to a business. Most of them are not available with standard web host email. Some are available with consumer Gmail.
Through continuous improvement, Google regularly adds new productivity features and functionality to Google Workspace.
Unless noted, all of the functionality below is included with Google Workspace at no extra cost. Google packs a lot of business value into Google Workspace beyond email, documents, spreadsheets and presentations. Here are 25 ways your business can use Google Workspace to increase productivity.
Gmail and Google Workspace use the same global data storage as Google’s search engine.
Google currently has 15 data global data centers. The first data center was built on the Oregon side of the Columbia River in 2006.
Google stores subscriber data (email, documents, spreadsheets, etc.) in small pieces. Each of those pieces is copied several times and stored in multiple geographic locations.
Updated: April 25, 2019
Google has made significant inroads into the small business market with Google Workspace. For business owners and employees who have been using consumer Gmail, moving to Google Workspace is an easy transition.
However, Google has faced several barriers to widespread Google Workspace enterprise adoption. Here are some of those blockers and what Google has been doing to address them.
Below are several California wine country maps that we created in Google My Maps. Included wine country maps are: Napa Valley; Sonoma Valley; Alexander Valley; Lodi; and Paso Robles.
Google My Maps is available to both users of consumer Gmail accounts and to Google Workspace users.
Google My Maps allows for mass importing winery locations from a spreadsheet. My Maps also allows for manually adding each winery.
Since Google introduced Chromebook in 2011, the adoption of Chromebooks by businesses has been more of an interesting idea than a widespread reality.
We first wrote about the business potential for Chromebooks soon after they hit the market.
Our contention was that with so many applications moving to the cloud, that many employees would no longer need a heavyweight local operating system such as Windows or macOS. Technologies such as Citrix could be used to access Windows applications from the Chrome browser.
Whether your company is a small local B2C business or a large B2C company, it’s worth paying attention to your Google My Business (GMB) listing.
According to Google, “listings on Google My Business can only be created for businesses that either have a physical location that customers can visit, or that travel to visit customers where they are.”
This means that most businesses can (and probably should) have a GMB listing. A Google My Business listing is a free source that can direct more visitors to a business’s website, almost no matter what type or size of business.
For salespeople who regularly send out long form proposals that contain pricing tables, there has always been a conundrum.
That is, a pricing table within in a document can’t be dynamically updated as easily as a spreadsheet table. The word processing capabilities within a spreadsheet are limited.
Often, a proposal’s pricing table is revised several times before the final version of a proposal is sent to the prospect or customer. This can require manual effort. Either the new bottom line in the document table needs to be hand calculated when line items are changed — or the spreadsheet table must be re-copied/pasted a into the document.