G Suite has rolled out another set of updates for business owners to enjoy! Watch on and see how these new features are here to help you manage your business all the more easier!
0:19 Grammar correction in Gmail
0:50 Slicers and Scorecards in Google Sheet
2:10 PDF Form Filling from Mobile
3:04 Drive Shortcuts
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Transcription:
G’day there, Pete Moriarty here. Every couple of months, we cover all the G Suite news. This is the latest and greatest in everything G Suite for business owners. Take a look, we’ve got some good stuff coming up this week.
First up on the list, Google have brought grammar checking into Gmail. If you’re already using a third-party app like Grammarly, or something like that, you already have access to this. And Chrome, obviously, already does a spell check for you inside of anywhere in Google Chrome in any fields. But Google have now added this into Gmail as well, and they’re also checking grammar. So look out for a little squiggly blue line, and that means that Google is checking your grammar and making recommendations that you might want to update that sentence that you are typing. I’m not sure what languages this is in, but it definitely works in English, and that’s been rolled out to all users.
Next up is one for Google Sheets. Google have announced slicers and scorecards, as well as a number of themes for your Google Sheets. Slicers and scorecards are very cool. Slicers basically let you filter your data live in a Google Sheet. So you can put a little datepicker-type widget inside your sheet, and then you can use that to create a filter. What that does is, if you’re sharing your sheet with multiple people, and you want to allow them to manipulate the data a little more easily, that happens right inside the sheet.
Scorecards are little widgets if you’re using a Google Sheet like a dashboard. So as your data updates live, it’s going to automatically adjust different kinds of widgets to visually represent that data.
Those are great, and the themes for Google Sheets are great as well, make it nice and easy for you to click to different themes for things like your graphs and charts, and other bits and pieces.
But if you’re really pushing the more powerful side of Google Sheets, and you’re using them as a dashboard, I would implore you to check out Google Data Studio. This is something that we can help you with in the Google ecosystem. It’s a free product, but it’s effectively advanced dashboarding, custom-made APIs and integrations you can pull into there. Of course, it connects with your Google Sheets as well to visualize any of your data. So chat to our team if you’re interested in that.
Next up on the list is a big one for Google Drive. This has been asked about for many, many years. You can now autofill, well not autofill, but you can fill and work with PDFs right inside the Google Drive app. I don’t know if works on the web yet. Definitely works on the mobile, and it’s been rolled out to both Android and iOS. But you can now use Google’s tools to actually edit your PDFs, fill them in if you’ve got a PDF form, and then save them straight them back into Google Drive. You can even save as a copy as well, if you want to. Makes it nice and easy. What that does is it makes something really easy that’s been a pain to do in the Google world. Modifying a PDF, even in a Chromebook, is a little bit cumbersome, because you’ve got to download the document, work on it, and then re-upload it again. When you’re working on mobile, there just wasn’t really a great option to be able to work with those. So it now works right inside of the Google Drive app, and I’m super, super happy about that.
Another one for Google Drive, and this one is in beta still, and so you’ve got to sign up for the early access program, but Google are now allowing you to create shortcuts inside of Google Drive. Now what that is, is a shortcut to a file, where effectively a file can live in more than one place.
Iinterestingly, a quick history lesson, Google used to let us do something similar in Google Drive a long, long time ago. That was mapping one file to multiple folders inside of Google Drive. I’m going to fry your noodle a little bit, folders actually act a bit like tags. So you can have one file and apply it to multiple folders. If you think about folders like tags, it’s easy to think about how that works when you’re inside Google Drive. These shortcuts that Google’s talking about are effectively the same thing.
The example is, if you have maybe a price list for your business that is in the finance team drive, but you want to share that price list with the sales team, well, right now you have to use link sharing or you have to make a copy of the document. Both of those end up getting a little bit cumbersome and a little bit messy. If you’re on the sales team and you want to just go to all your files in the sales team drive, well, that’s going to be a bit messy as well. So super useful to have this blinking. They’re called shortcuts inside of Drive, and you do have to sign up for the beta to get access to that. But I’m expecting it’ll be eventually rolled out to everybody in Google Drive, and that is a super-useful feature. I’m looking forward to that one.
Final update for Google Drive is Google has rolled out the priority page for all editions of G Suite. So if your on Business or Enterprise right now and you’ve logged into Google Drive, you would be used to seeing a priority page which lets you link important documents in one place. Google’s trying to make it kind of the landing page for Google Drive when you go to access your documents. They’re going to use AI to serve up popular documents or ones that you may use on a regular basis. They also allow you to create collections. I think they’re called workspaces. Those let you actually put together groups of files. So if you have one group of files for finance, if you have one group of files for sales, whatever, you can put them into those little groups of files there. But this previously wasn’t available for Basic G Suite users. Google have now made it available for everyone. So if you were on a Basic plan, which we recommend bumping up to Business or Enterprise for many reasons, but if you’re on a Basic plan, you now get access to this as well.
That’s a wrap for the news. Thank you so much for tuning in again. If you’re interested in getting access to our take on the news, in-depth training videos and our webinars, which happen monthly, on training, everything G Suite and helping you and your team be more productive and get more out of this amazing business program, well, you might be interested in our concierge service. Head along to www.itgenius.com. Check out everything about our IT support service, and our team will be very happy to do an audit on your G Suite account, check out what’s going on in there and give you some recommendations on how we might be able to help you get more out of the platform. Until next time, see you later. Cheers.
