Archive for Google Docs
Free Google Mail, Calendar & Docs Training
Posted by: | CommentsLast week, we talked about the extensive, free training resources available for learning Microsoft Office. We highlighted the new Ribbon Hero interactive, game-style training.
This week, we’ll focus on Google mail, calendar and docs and where to go to find training for these popular programs.
I signed up for gmail about three years ago and have my mail coming into my Outlook where I prefer to manage it. I’ve also used Google’s flexibility to have it pull email in from some of my POP accounts. It’s great to have the ability to see my mail accounts either while traveling or from the familiarity of Outlook.
Google mail, calendar and contacts are all accessible from your gmail screen. The Google calendar is especially popular and powerful – mainly with people who own smart phones because it’s easy to load to their phones and it can be synced with Outlook, Windows Live, Plaxo and I think with the Mac platform as well (not a Mac person).
After Gmail came Google Docs. A free and very stripped down version of Microsoft Office (in my opinion). Google’s also made it easy to collaborate and share documents rather than email them around. Microsoft similarly has a way to both upload and share documents. You can read my article about it here.
Back to our focus on finding some free training for Google mail and docs. The University of Minnesota evidently uses Gmail campus-wide because they’ve published extensive help resources accessible to anyone.
Their Google learning site contains on-line lessons, instructional videos, downloadable study/instructional guides and a searchable repository that seem very complete.
If you’ve ever been puzzled or curious about all the things you can do with Google Mail, Calendar or Apps, the basics as well as some advanced material is covered. Additionally, Google has an extensive support site as well.
Google Mail and Docs have become quite popular with small businesses, students and people who don’t want to pay for mail and office applications. There is the issue of backup and accessibility of our email, calendar events and documents. There are ways to access mail off-line (not sure about documents). The privacy/security issue seems to pop up as well. If you’re a person who stores credit card numbers, insurance policy numbers, etc. on your local machine, how will you feel about it being in the cloud? Maybe not so secure? Something to think about. Google is free, useful and accessible, but for me, I enjoy the Microsoft familiarity. They are also coming out with cloud apps and the ability to work and compute virtually. We’ll talk more about that with another column.
Microsoft Small Business Live – Open, Share & Save Documents From Your Computer
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Microsoft has been refining and upgrading their ‘Live’ series of offerings the last few months. This article will focus on recently revamped ‘Microsoft Office Live – Small Business’. Just visit the Office Live site and you’ll be introduced to a cornucopia of options. You can set up a website, set up an e-commerce store, purchase a domain name and then set up various e-mail accounts using the new domain name. There is a contact manager, an e-mail marketing feature and newsletter creation and mailing (paid subscription for these).
We will focus on a free and very useful function I found while exploring this site—the ‘Share Documents’ feature. Looks like Microsoft is competing with Google here as they are offering a place to store, share and collaborate on Microsoft Office documents. From the above menu of items, click on the ‘Share Documents’ and you’ll be taken to your Workspace site where you can upload documents for sharing, collaboration or storage. Check this out for full details on everything you can do with your workspace.
I liked the fact that I can upload multiple documents at once by clicking one file, holding the shift and selecting consecutive files. It does not upload folders, however. Once I’ve gotten my documents uploaded, I can create different workspaces to share with different groups (or just a single person). It’s easy to move my documents to new workspaces and flag documents for sharing. As you’re setting up to share, you decide if the recipient will be an owner, editor or viewer. I really like the choice I have to send my invitation to someone and they don’t have to sign in or create an account to view the documents. Don’t you just hate getting something from someone and in order to see it, you have to get your own account!
I like this interface much better than Google Docs. It seems to be more intuitive and just makes more sense, at least to me. Over on the right side of the document screen, you can check out the activity in your space. You can see who has made changes or uploaded any more documents – very handy. Click on the ‘Comment’ box and leave a note for a co-worker.
Microsoft has a collaboration feature they call ‘Shared View’. You can read more about this application, which you can download and use without using the Live Small Business site. Click on the ‘Share’ button and select the option to share your screen with someone. You’ll have to have the app installed on your computer—you’ll be prompted for what to do. After it’s installed, you can initiate a sharing session with anyone right from Word, Excel or PowerPoint – nice.
I’m saving the best for last! The coolest feature and a huge timesaver is that you can save a document directly to your on-line live workspace right from your local Microsoft Office application. This means when you’re working on a document in Word, Excel or PowerPoint, click the save button and you’ll have the option to save either to your local drive or your small business live workspace in the clouds. You do have to install this add-in to be able to do this. It works with Office 2003 & 2007. It’s really great – can’t do that with Google Docs!
I first set up a Windows Live Account before I set up the Small Business portion and I was pleased to discover that I can access either of these areas by going to http://home.live.com/ and signing in. I did notice once I get into the Small Business section and I’m in the documents section, I don’t find a way to navigate myself back to my top level, or home page. This is annoying. I wish they would have some menu items at the top to get me where I want to be!
Next week, we’ll look at the ‘Outlook Connector’ and what that can do.
Google’s Presentation is “Suite”
Posted by: | CommentsGoogle completes its free suite of office products this week with the launch of Presentation –a product that competes with Microsoft’s popular PowerPoint software.
With this addition, Google Docs now offers, for free, a complete suite of office productivity products. All the software is web-based, nothing is downloaded to the user’s computer. As long as the user is on-line, Google products work fine.
I had to try it out. I created a new presentation, played around with the different themes, inserted different types of slides (title, bullet list, two column, etc.). A few shortcomings were that it didn’t have an option to insert a chart slide or a spreadsheet. It’s definitely a simpler product — not as many bells, whistles and options as PowerPoint, but that could be a plus for the novice user.
Presentation also allows the uploading and revision of .ppt files, so I uploaded a graphic-rich presentation and noticed quite a few slides that didn’t make the translation very well. If you have a mostly-text file, it should upload with few problems.
The feature especially touted by Google is the collaboration ability of having storage of documents on-line. If you are collaborating on a document with several people, it does alleviate the confusion of multiple versions of the same document out there. The document owner uploads the file and specifies who can access and make revisions. Google has a blog entry that announces Presentation along with a informative (and cute) video. See it here: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/.
