Since we have the big Google event here on August 17th (the details are here and here) I thought I would take the opportunity to make sure all of us knows a bit more about Google and what they have to offer.

There are many services offered by Google, but this short article will just touch on a few that will be helpful on the desk.

First, a quick word about signing in. This is generally true about many different sign ins, such as Yahoo, and, as in this article, Google, and that is this: you don’t have to use anything other than your username to sign in to Google. So, when you go to any Google page you can dispense with @gmail.com. This matters if you are a slow typer or are working with a slow typer. You can see here that I have merely used scirefmplic rather than the full scirefmplic@gmail.com.

This illustrates another important point: when you are signed in to anything Google (gmail, Google docs, etc.) you are signed in to everything Google, until you specifically sign out. Staying signed in is handy for when you want to switch between gmail and another Google service such as Pictures or Drive. This also means that you should always sign out of your Google here at work when you’re done or when you go off desk, especially since many of us access our Google accounts on shared computers.

So, on to the various Google services!

Whenever you are on any Google page you will find this little bank of boxes in the upper right hand corner:

If you click there, you will have this pop up, showing you many of the Google services available:

And, if you scroll down a bit, click on “more” then scroll down again to “even more from Google” then you will see this:

From Google assistant you can scroll down to see a full list of many, many Google products. They offer many and will continue to develop more apparently.

If you scroll down to “work smarter” you will see these four offerings:

Docs is Google’s answer to Microsoft Word. It works very similarly, and the benefit is any document made on Docs is automatically saved in the cloud–you can save it to the desktop, or a usb, or other methods with which you already may be familiar, but you don’t have to use any of those methods–Google does it for you, by saving it in your Google Drive.

Google Drive is the one I mostly want to focus on here, because if more patrons used Drive then we wouldn’t have to collect all the lost usb sticks we collect. Google Drive is essentially a big usb stick in the cloud. It can’t be lost, you can access it anywhere, it’s big (15 Gigs for free, with a paid option to upgrade to more space as desired) and it’s password protected.

I will do a more detailed article on how best to use Drive, but suffice it to say, Drive, and other cloud-based products like it, will eventually make tangible storage devices obsolete. You need to know about Drive.

There is also a Google analog to Excel (Sheets) and PowerPoint (Slides), and they are much like Docs–not quite as powerful as the Microsoft analog, but usually good enough to get done anything you want to get done.