If you use Google Chrome for work (and to basically do everything else), check out this round up of the best Chrome addons and extensions for Google Workspace (G Suite) users.
Here are a few more of the best Chrome extensions that we’ve enjoyed using:
Have you tried any of these addons and extensions yet? Comment below if you think these videos are helpful or if you have any questions about anything technology.
To learn more about our Cloud Support Service, or schedule an IT Systems Check, contact itGenius - the Google Workspace Experts
Transcription:
G’day, guys. It’s Pete Moriarty here. I’m going to be taking you through my top five Chrome extensions that everyone should be using if you are a small business owner. These are going to make your day much more productive, going to help you out with some little tips and tricks. And if you’re interested, we actually have a longer form version of this video, a whole one hour webinar on all of my favorite extensions and I think I went through about 20 on that, that is inside our members area. So if you’re interested in that, please go ahead and check out our website down below. There’ll be a link there to concierge where you can get access to all of our recorded webinars. Although, let’s jump into the five that we’ve got for you today. If you’re interested in Chrome plugins and Chrome add-ons, you get them all from the Chrome web store and this is Google’s marketplace for all of the Chrome ad-ons.
You’ll see here that this is just a website, pretty straightforward, chrome.google.com/webstore, and then you can browse through different lists of the most popular ones and you can search for them and find them. I’m going to share some of the ones that are my favorites and from here on out, what you want to be doing from there is actually just installing them yourself. You can search for them in a web store, and I’m also going to drop the links to each one of these below. Now, some of these are changing right now and that’s because Google have actually changed how they are doing apps and extensions. The Google extensions that appear inside your actual menu bar inside of Google Chrome are staying for good. There is nothing changing about those. However, Chrome apps, which actually lived on the desktop and popped out in a separate window to your Google Chrome are now being depreciated.
There’s new forms of web technology, which mean that Google are no longer using Chrome apps, which are the separate standalone apps. These are now actually all being either extensions or web apps. And so if you’re wondering where some of the old ones have gone, there aren’t that many that are really going to be missed because everything’s kind of been rolled up into the new extensions menu. So let’s go through some of my favorites. I’m going to open up my list here. So the first add-on I want to take you through is the biggest lifesaver add-on for me and this is an absolute, absolute mandatory one for anyone who’s working in the Chrome world, and this is called Clipboard History, and what this add-on will do is actually save you if you ever cut and pasted something and then let go of it or forgotten about it and you want to go back a couple of steps on your cut and paste history.
This is effectively a history for your cut and paste and it lives in your menu bar and let me tell you, I use this probably 30 to 50 times a day. It is absolutely awesome. So I can open up here, it’s this little green icon here and with one click, see all of my clipboard history. So all of that history basically sits here automatically being saved every single time I copy something to my clipboard. So if I go and maybe copy over some text here, the Chrome web store, hit control C for copy, you can see it’s shown up there. So every single time that I copy something, it’s going to show up in my history and Clipboard web history saves it all. Now, not only does it do that, it’s got a couple of pro features as well, which I’ve not actually used because they’ve only just released them, but you can click one button and actually have it saved to a cloud account, which will then synchronize between different machines.
So that’s useful if you’ve got multiple computers and you want to have your clipboard history move across the different computers. I think Mac’s do that nowadays, where you can have your history go from your phone over to your computer and that’s kind of useful, but where I find this really useful is where maybe I’ve got something saved in my clipboard history on my laptop, and I want to have it available on my desktop and I’m using Chromebooks obviously. So I want to have them available to me. So that one’s called Clipboard History. Let me open that up for you so you can see the right one. Because there’s a couple of these and I want to make sure that you get the right one here. Here we go.
Clipboard History Pro. That’s the one. Cool. So it’s at clipboardextension.com. Super, super duper useful. Now some of the other features of Clipboard History Pro, you’ll see here that once I’ve got something in my actual clipboard, I can star it to favorite it and that’s basically just never going to allow it to erase. It does have a history function and it will bit by bit delete the older entries. It will only save up to a certain number that you specify, but if you want to have something saved, then you just click it as a favorite. You can also click the send to mobile option here. So it was previously the cloud sync option, now it’s sent to mobile and what that one does is that you’re doing it to have the pro plan.
I don’t currently have that one, but that will then synchronize it between your different machines. So super simple implementation, super, super useful tool. If this one was awesome, then go ahead and write awesome down there. Next up. Let’s talk about one of the most important ones in your Chrome world, and that is your security. We talk a lot about this plugin because it’s absolutely essential for all business users to have a password manager and our password manager of choice is LastPass. LastPass lets you share all of your passwords, so your secure passwords between your team and without actually exposing the password, it will allow them to log into a website and get access to that site. So it might be a … you probably wouldn’t use it for WordPress, but any site or service that doesn’t have the functionality of allowing you to actually share a login by creating multiple users, LastPass will allow you to save those passwords in a secure vault and then in that secure vault share out access to those websites without revealing the actual password.
Now, the other cool thing that LastPass does, is it will actually allow you to have a different password set for every different website that you use. So for most of us, many of us will repeat and reuse passwords and they’ll end up on multiple websites and all it takes is for one of those websites to be hacked and then your password is all of a sudden exposed to the internet, and then what happens is someone grabs that password and they try it with your email address on all the different services, social media, your Google G Suite account, all the different services that you have online and one by one, they may find their way into one of your accounts. So using a tool like LastPass, which will generate a random password for every website that you use will mean that things are actually kept nice and secure.
So let’s go ahead and have a look at what LastPass looks like. LastPass is just available on lastpass.com and you can install the Chrome extension, which is going to sit here. So you can see it’s a little red icon, sits up in my browser and basically it lets me have one master password for every one of my passwords here inside of the password manager. So I’ve got a vault here which actually stores all of my passwords and from the vault there, all of my passwords are going to be saved and encrypted, but I’ve also got the option here to auto-fill websites and all those kinds of things, makes that pretty straightforward and then we’ve got … here it is, the password randomizer. Now I like to go to 20 characters for my passwords. It’s just a little bit more secure, but basically all day long you can generate new passwords for new websites and they’re the ones that you’re going to use as you go through to each one of your sites.
Okay, cool. That is LastPass. With any one of your passwords, you can go ahead and click the share button and actually share that out to somebody else if you want to share a password and share secure access to one of your websites. LastPass also have a great Teams feature, costs a little bit of money, but you can get access to that through itGenius. And what the Teams feature will allow you to do is set up secure folders so that once you place a password into a folder, certain levels of staff will be able to get access to that. So you can have a whole group of staff access a password, you can give different permissions, like maybe someone might want to have the ability to update passwords but not necessarily kick you out as the admin, you can have different levels of hierarchy.
And that works a little bit similar to Google Drive and the share drives feature where you can have different levels of access based on different level of enterprise-y permissions. So that’s the LastPass Teams edition. If you’re interested in that, be sure to get in touch because we have discounts available for our concierge members. So we’ve done two out of three. Let’s get into number three here. My third one is called Text Expander. This is another absolutely essential one. I use this every single day. Now what Text Expander does is it gives you shortcuts for texts. It’s a little like automation kind of scripty app, and what it lets you do is get really, really smart when you’re typing and using, let’s say, repeated phrases.
Now, if you’ve ever had something that you need to type frequently and you may find yourself cutting and pasting those into Google Keep or cutting and pasting them maybe from your clipboard history or cutting and pasting them, I don’t know, maybe using canned responses inside of something like Gmail or if you’re using Zendesk or Hiver, you might have some canned responses set up, well, clipboard … not clipboard. Let’s try that again. Text Expander will allow you to set little trigger phrases and trigger keyboard shortcuts and then automatically paste snippets of text. What I love about that is it makes it really quick to get your work done if you’re using repeated [inaudible] of text that you actually need to paste and present. So let’s open up and show you how to find the plugin in the Chrome web store, just to make sure that you get the right one. Let’s open it up here. It’s called Text Expander.
So this is the one that I like. It’s called Auto Text Expander 2 for Google Chrome. It doesn’t have an amazing rating there, but this one I’ve been using for years and years and works absolutely fine. It’s also free, which we love. It’s very hard to beat free. So let’s open up my extensions here and open up my text expander, if I can actually find it. Here we go. Auto Text Expander. Cool. All right. So I’ve got my text expander here and you can see here that I’ve got a number of different shortcuts and each one of those shortcuts just has a little bit of text here. And with that, I can automatically have that text expand into a note, which is pretty darn groovy.
So let’s go ahead and open up, I might do this using Google Keep is probably the easiest thing to illustrate for you guys. All right. Let’s open up a new note here and I’ll see if I can make that a little bit bigger, probably going to help us. Excellent. All right. So I’m typing away, here is my note and let’s just actually go to the text. I’m typing away my text note here, and let’s say, for example, I need to put my signature in there and I’m using an app that doesn’t have a signature function, when we use Zendesk or we previously used Zendesk for most of our ticketing, we’ve since switched over to Hiver for that, what we would do is we would need to actually paste our signature at the bottom of each one of those emails.
So I’ve got a little shortcut set up, which is actually shift one, two. So it’s really easy to press on the keyboard and shift one, two, will actually insert a signature. So you’ll see the exclamation mark and then very briefly the @ sign, I need to do it a bit faster. So exclamation mark, @ sign, and then it automatically pre-fills with my details there. So that’s just happening because Auto Text Expander says that when I do an exclamation mark and then an @ sign, it’s going to automatically drop in my signature. All right. Let’s have a look at another one. I’ve got one, and that is, I think I’ve forgotten the keyboard shortcut for it now … Oh, there we go. It’s C @, okay, easy. So it’s C and then an @ sign and then automatically it drops in my calendar link there.
So that’s another one that I’ve got set up. It’s so baked into my mind when I actually use it, I forgot what the keyboard shortcut was. So Auto Text Expander is going to make it really easy if you’ve got those little snippets of texts that you need to paste from time to time, makes it super easy to do it, [inaudible 00:12:01], just with a swift keyboard conversation. One of the other ones that’s actually built in, which is pretty groovy, I think is BRB. Does that one still work? No, maybe not. I think D and then @ sometimes was date … no, it’s going to make a liar out of me. D then the number eight. Okay, cool. So if I go D8, there we go. It actually puts the full date in there for you, which is pretty groovy. So you can get clever with some operators in there. It all start to actually bring in other bits and pieces of functional data and you can connect it to different [inaudible 00:12:34], all kinds of different bits and pieces that you can do. But honestly, I just use the simplest ones, like my signature and it is super useful. So that’s Auto Text Expander, and that’s going to help you with your clipboard.
Part 2
Our next one is a productivity tool. I’ve been using this for a long time, and I absolutely love this tool. It’s called Kill the News Feed, and what this does is pretty much exactly what it says it does, it kills your Facebook news feed. Now, as a business owner, I’ve got plenty of important work to do, but from time to time, I do need to jump onto Facebook, whether it’s replying to posts in this group, or going live, or responding to someone who’s tagged me in a post, or people tag me in their friend statuses all the time when someone needs help with their Google account.
What I find is that when I open up my Facebook in a browser, it’s very, very easy to get stuck in that hole of the Facebook news feed, and scrolling, and scrolling, and scrolling. You get the dopamine hits, and then all of a sudden it’s been three hours and you’re lying on the couch wondering where your day went.
So Kill the News Feed completely removes the news feed feature from Facebook, but it still lets you get all of your other work done. What I mean by that is, you can still go into groups, you can respond to messages, you can see your notifications, you can send messages, but you just don’t have the newsfeed feature.
So this is what it looks like when I go to my Facebook. I’ll open up my Facebook here, and I just don’t have the news feed feature. I can see all the other bits and pieces. I can see the comments there, which is pretty cool, but I don’t have a news feed to actually scroll through. Now, it would help if I shared my screen, so let me share that again.
You can see here, when I log into my Facebook, all of my notifications are there, all the other bits and pieces and features are there, but I just don’t have a news feed, and so all of my distraction factory Facebooking is gone and it’s all just one pure place … I really can’t call it a place of productivity, but it is at least somewhere that we can get work done without getting completely sucked in.
The final one actually used to be a Chrome extension and was a Chrome app, and has now actually been removed. So it’s now actually only available on the mobile and on the web. Well, it’s available on Google Chrome as an Android extension, as an Android app, if you’re on a Chromebook, but it doesn’t actually run inside of Google Chrome. But I want to give you this one as a little freebie anyway, because this one is really important.
Now, it’s called Authy, and what it’s used for is two-factor authentication. This is a great little app for generating your six digit codes for the different tools and services that you log into. Now, if you had G Suite implemented by us, or if you’ve done any of the basic security steps inside of G Suite, you would know that switching on two-factor authentication is the easiest way of locking down your account from someone else getting access.
If someone knows your username and password, but you have two-factor authentication switched on, when someone goes to access your account, even if they know your password, they have to actually use your mobile phone to get access to that account. So if you’ve got it locked down to your mobile phone, it’s going to send you a six digit code or a push notification. That’s really useful, right? But what about all the other websites that you use that also want you to use authenticator apps?
Now, there’s a great app called the Google Authenticator, and that lets you generate those six digit codes, but Authy goes a step further and it lets you actually synchronize those codes between different devices. So you could set up Authy on your iPad, and you could set up Authy on your phone, as well.
Now, what that saves you from is, if you ever lose your phone, which I’ve done many times, if you’ve only got the Google Authenticator app on one device, you have to go and do a recovery on every one of those websites. So you need backup passwords, or you need to identify yourself, or you need to reach out to us if you’ve locked yourself out of your Google account, and that can be a little bit of a pain. What Authy does is it synchronizes across your different machines, and across your different machines, you can then access your authorization codes without having to be reliant on that one device.
The other cool thing that I like about Authy is, if you’re using a Chromebook, then it will actually run on the desktop. As I said, formerly, it ran as a Chrome extension. Now it’s a local app. So if you’re on a Chrome device, it will actually run as a desktop application. So you can see here, inside my Authy, it’s got all of my codes, and each one of those codes, it’s actually hidden with a black screen right now because I’m screen sharing, and so it just automatically hides it, just in case anyone’s trying to get access to it.
But what this will do is it will give me access to all of those codes, right from the desktop, and if I’m on my mobile device, I’ll actually have the same thing as well. So I’ve got all of the codes just being generated there, pretty much in real time. Let’s see if I can get it to focus. There we go. It’s going to take its time. So I’ve got all my codes being generated there.
Now, if you’re on a Windows or a Mac machine, then you can actually download the Authy app, and there’s a desktop app for there as well. You might be thinking, “Well, Pete, doesn’t that defeat the purpose. If you’ve actually got all of your codes on the device that’s supposed to be a two-factor authentication device, right, it’s supposed to be on a second device, well, doesn’t that defeat the purpose?”
The answer to that is, well, yes, it does a little bit, to be completely honest. However, it’s very, very likely that you will know where your machine is and you will be with your machine. You will very likely have it in your physical presence, and that’s one of the key factors of security, is physical presence, right? Unless someone has your machine and knows your computer password, so you need to make sure you have a good computer password, then they’re not going to be able to get access to that account.
If someone in a foreign country gets access to your Google username and password, or your banking username and password, or another application that is locked down with two-factor authentication, then they’re not going to be able to get access unless they literally had your device. That’s the point of two-factor authentication, is a second factor of authentication, and one of those can be your presence.
Now, if you decide, of course, you may just lock it down to one phone here and then a second phone, maybe sitting in a drawer at home, then that’s going to make things a little bit easier for you and a little bit more secure if you wanted to go down that route. But the most important thing over all of this is making sure that you’ve got a solid password on your local computer, that you have a passcode switched on on your phone, that’s absolutely mandatory, and if you’re using a tool like LastPass, making sure that you’ve got a great master password for LastPass.
So if this was useful, guys, let me know. If you’ve got a problem that you need solved inside of Chrome, then let me know in the comments, an extension that maybe you would like to have, or something that you’ve got on your wishlist for extensions. Maybe you’re interested in sharing one of the ones that you like yourself, and you want to share that with the community, go ahead and paste that in the comments below. I’d love to know, what are your favorite extensions and if there’s any that we may highlight in an up and coming video.
So if you liked this, we’ve got heaps more in our members’ area. So if you’re interested in becoming a concierge member, please head along to itgenius.com and check out ways that we can help you. Now, if you’re not yet a member of our G Suite community, head along to our Facebook group. It’s a free and open group for business owners utilizing G Suite, and that group is where we share live videos, you get early access to videos like this, and we share heaps of tips and tricks with business owners already in the Google ecosystem.
Until next time, guys, I will see you later, and if you need any help, our concierge team are on hand. Drop us a message down to IT Genius below, and we will be sure to help out. Take care, guys. Cheers.
To learn more about our Cloud Support Service, or schedule an IT Systems Check, contact itGenius - the Google Workspace Experts
