All of us know about Google – the search engine company. Most of us might even know about gmail, the email service from Google. But did you know that Google offers you an entire suite of office software and more? Office software similar to Microsoft Word, Excel, and Powerpoint. And here is the best part, it can help your business and it’s all free!
I’ll give you a quick run of some of the different software available from Google:
Google Docs: This is Google’s suite of Office software
Documents: This is the Microsoft Word equivalent.
Spreadsheets: This is the Excel equivalent
Presentation: As the name suggests, it is Powerpoint’s mutant brother.
Forms: Here is a new one to the game. Have you ever seen forms on the internet – forms like Contact Us, or Ask a Quote, Surveys etc. Here is Google’s way of making that easy to do for you. You just go through a wizard and fill in the questions you want in your form. Google will create a pretty form for you and give you a link, which you can send to anyone to fill the form. All that information is collected and presented to you later.
Gmail: This is one of the most well known non-search services of Google. For those who don’t know. This is an email service similar to hotmail and yahoo mail. Except! its on steroids – the kind that makes it simple to use, clutter free, fast and offer pretty much unlimited space.
Google Tasks: This is your to do list.
Google Contacts: This is your address book.
Google Calendar: This is your agenda.
You may think, “big deal, so it’s free? I already have my phone/diary/ agenda/computer that can do that!”. Here is the awesome part about these services from Google. They are all cloud based. This means, they are all stored in Google’s ultra secure, ultra protected and backed up infrastructure. And this is how that helps you:
Your computer may crash. You may lose your phone. Your agenda might be eaten by your pet. In all those cases, you will likely lose all the information you had. But when its on Google’s servers, all of that can happen, but your information will still be safe.
I recently had a bad shock related to losing data. I had gone on a trip with some friends. We had a great time, took thousands of photos. I had stored it all in an external hard disk. When I came back home, the disk died in about 2 weeks. I lost almost all of the photos!! If only I had backed it to Google’s Picasa Web Albums or something similar sooner, would I not have had this happen to me! Lesson learned, now I do this.
Being on the cloud means, your information is always available to you. Forgot your diary at home? Forgot to take your laptop with you on that trip? No worries, as long as you can access the internet, you can log in to Google’s website and all your information will be there.
One of the benefits about many of the above Google software is that it allows collaboration. You can share documents, spreadsheets, calendars etc. with others. They can contribute to it, or just see it. This is very useful, when you have a secretary who manages your schedule, or when you have employees who fill time, or when you want to coordinate meetings with some partners, or you want your partners’/employees’ opinions on some document.
Here is one of my favourite things about Google services. It stays synced across all your devices! Once you set it up, any contact you add to your phone, or any meeting you add to your calendar on your phone is automatically saved and available on the web. Even if you lose your phone, all your contacts and the notes you put about them are still available in your Google contacts/gmail account. When you get a new phone, you don’t have to manually fill in all your contact information again. Just sync with your google account, and all of it gets to your phone. Most modern phones can do this (BlackBerry, Android, iPhone, Windows Mobile etc.)
We can talk a lot more about these services, and how they help your business. But that will take many more pages. So I will leave that to you to explore. However if you are interested to know about how something works, email me or go to www.dreamsand money.com and submit the contact form with your feedback. I would also love to hear any interesting, helpful experiences you have had with technology, and how it has made your life/business better. Feel free to email me, and I will be happy to share your experience with thousands of other readers through this column. Cheers.
Aishwar is a Software Developer working in Toronto. You can contact Aishwar at aishwar@floatingpoint.ca or visit his technology site at floatingpoint.ca.
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