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Five Tips to Become More Productive with Google Apps

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Nice office at a home. Source: http://wedaredtodream.com/members/?page_id=1691The improving quality and speed of Internet applications has been helping people to increase their productivity and reduce time lost. I personally make heavy use of Google Apps, and I find that it helps me save a lot of time on many everyday tasks.

Here are five tips on how to use Google Apps to help you become more productive:

  1. Keep all of your ideas and thoughts together and accessible anywhere by creating a Google Document.
    A Google Document is great for keeping track of ideas, thoughts, and rough drafts. It helps me save a lot of time as I don’t have to worry about copying files from one place to the next with a USB, and I have a single place where I can write down and see all of my recent thoughts and ideas.
  2. Follow all of your favorite blogs and sites using Google Reader.
    Google Reader is an incredible time saver for me. I have no idea how I would keep up with all of the blogs and information out there without the ability to categorize and aggregate all of my favorite feeds in one place. It is much more productive than keeping 100 bookmarks and visiting them one after the other!
  3. Store and track tabular data by using Google Spreadsheet.
    Google Spreadsheet is another very useful Google App. It is very easy to share spreadsheet data with others, and these spreadsheets can be updated by multiple people at the same time. This is very handy when it comes to collaborating with others on the same data.
  4. Manage your email more effectively with Gmail.
    When it comes to email, I don’t think anything beats Gmail. Traditional web email just seems so ancient and slow as molasses by comparison. The ability to store tens of thousands of emails is pretty great, too.
  5. Get feedback from your users with Google Forms.
    Finally, the ability to embed forms directly into your website by using Google Forms, and having the results go directly into a Google Spreadsheet saves you the trouble of having to hand-code a form yourself, or collecting submissions via email and then compiling the data by hand!     You can see an example of a Google Form in action by visiting my six-month giveaway. Be sure to check it out.

So, do you also have any tools that help you improve your productivity and save on time? I’d love to hear about them.

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Comments

  1. I definitely have used all of these with the exception of Google forms, but it definitely seems like a great tool that I will use in the future. I really like the ease of use of the forms in your giveaway and their look. Thanks for the info my friend.

    • Thanks! Yep, Google Forms really made it a lot easier. Now if only there was an easy way to customize the HTML code to embed links in the questions. I did not find one the first time around.

  3. I love Google Reader and Gmail works great too. I’ve tried Google Docs a number of times but I guess I’m just not used to how it formats and stores things and how it tracks lists, bullets, and spacing, because I get frustrated more often than not by formatting issues.

    Still, I’ll probably give it another chance when I have more time as I’m sure it’s an issue of patience and just getting use to the ‘Google’ way.

    • Editing in the browser is still a little strange for some tasks, but I do like the ease of use when it comes to simple lists, scratchpads, and things like that. For the more in-depth stuff I use Open Office.

      • I love google voice. I have used skype as well. I can’t really tell the difference in quality. And google voice is free. Plus you can just give one one number to everyone without worrying about changing you number behind the scenes. The voice transcripts… if you ever needed a voip, give it a try.

  5. Nice round up. I am also a big fan of Google products. I use Office Quite a bit, never really considered giving Google docs/spreadsheet a shot…I may just have to, especially once I found out you created your giveaway with it. Your giveaway was literally the most impressive I’ve ever sen!

    • Thanks, MFO! The Google Form is going to help save a lot of time, as I already have all the data in a spreadsheet. I just need to double-check the entries, but the work of compiling everything together is already done for me.

  6. What! No plug for Microsoft’s “me too” Live Office or Skydrive! I use gmail, google docs and google voice all the time. I’ll have to take a look at google reader.

    • 😉

      Reader is amazing. I haven’t yet had a need for Google Voice, but it seems like another success based on feedback from you and Suba.

  7. Good Post Kevin,

    I’ve been using aps for sometime. One of my favorites is Google Docs (Spreadsheets) for paying my bills. Once per week, I login to my computer (any computer for that matter – which is one of the nice things about Google Aps, Cloud Living) and run down the list. There are some really useful spreadsheets inside Google Docs.

    I also rely on reader a lot, for catching the blogs, info, etc I want to keep up with.

    • Yep, I would definitely be lost without reader. I still have my finances in an old excel sheet dating back to 2005! I haven’t seen the advantage to money managing software, so I still haven’t switched!

      • You know it’s funny you mention that, because I’ve tried them all (the software programs) But, I find them to almost be like a 2nd job. something that really helps is doing bills at a set time every week. Just run down the spreadsheet, check, pay, etc. It works and is fast!

  8. Great roundup of tips Kevin, I don’t make enough use of the apps in general (except gmail) and really need to get my stuff together and a little more organised.

    • You are such a posting machine, Forest, you might be really efficient with keeping ideas in your head, and thus have no need for Google Docs 😉

      • I think my brain is the reason I do need to use some other forms of storage… It’s overactive that is for sure. I loathe trying to sleep at nights because I can’t switch the damn thing off. I have been using methods of writing stuff down to move priority and worry of losing thoughts away to help with sleep but just on paper, I should move it to the cloud environment so I have access anywhere :).

  9. I have to try google forms, sounds really cool! I’ve used google docs, but then I forget what I’ve stored there and return to my trusty usb. 🙂 (this one’s going in my round up!)

    • Thanks, Barb! What I really like about it is that you no longer have to worry about synchronizing files. The drawback is that you no longer have ownership over the files, but you could always back your documents up every now and then.

  10. Google Reader is great!
    I also really like Google Docs. I use it with some of my buddies to plan our “mancations”. (Men’s vacations). We go to Myrtle Beach every spring and we use Google Docs. to track our expenses, payments, book villas, golf courses and the like. Very handy since we all live in different cities.

  13. i haven’t used google voice yet… sounds good though!

    gmail is awesome.. I lured my BF away from hotmail to gmail. remember archaic hotmail??!

    I like google calender too. You can upload other people calenders onto yours.

    • Haha, yeah, I remember hotmail. I remember how horrible it was, too, before Gmail became popular.

      People complain about Google becoming a monopoly, but is it really a monopoly when people are abandoning crappy products in droves? It’s not like Google cracked a whip and forced them to switch. 😉

  14. I make heavy use of Google Spreadsheet. Especially once I figured out how to make the Canadian stock quote work with it! Now I have all my scenarios tracking with live stock quote updates. It does track behind Excel, but the ability to access anywhere is just too important for me.

    • That’s quite cool that you have it connected to live stock quote updating. How did you do that?

      It’s really great how information technology has been making so many things easier these days. It wasn’t so long ago when you still had to walk into the bank to do your banking (ok, at the very least, you had to pick up the phone!)

  15. I love google reader. What did people do without it?

    I would prefer using outlook vs gmail though. gmail doesn’t have the best offline capability and I always find myself wanting to reference email attachments in places where I have no connectivity.

    I’ve used google docs when I wanted to post a bunch of things on craigslist all on one posting. Worked great. You just put your link in your posting ad.

    • Google Reader is definitely a big time saver for me.

      I’ve used a Gmail backup tool (I should probably do a short post on it sometime) to archive all of my emails, but it wouldn’t be the perfect tool for actually browsing them offline. I suppose what you can do though is use Thunderbird or Outlook to connect to Gmail via IMAP or Pop3 — that way you will have easy offline access to all of your emails!

Trackbacks

  5. […] of my favorite posts of the week had to be from Kevin over at Invest It Wisely, 5 Tips To Become More Productive With Google Aps is brief and simple and that is the magic of using Google Aps. (Simplify) Using Google Docs to keep […]

  7. […] Five Tips to Become More Productive With Google Apps at Invest It Wisely.  Most of us use some Google apps, buy my hunch is that we are missing out on some great ones.  Kevin succinctly explains these apps in a way that even I can understand. […]