Small independent businesses need to find effective, affordable solutions where they can. Thankfully, we live in the age of freeware and freemium, and ubiquitous online tools provided gratis by IT giants in the name of world domination!
And no IT giant is more giant nor more dominant than Google. For those who are willing to swallow the search and data giant’s dubious monopolizing of, well… Google Everything, you’ll find business tools that are as powerful as any other free office toolkit in existence.
Using a cloud-based office such as Google Drive is particularly useful for small businesses where you’re constantly on the move trying to make new connections. Or if you don’t have fixed premises. More and more people are working this way, because it’s a pleasant way to live and an efficient way to operate.
But at the same time, Google Drive is so intuitive and usable for home business owners that many fail to recognize the full, hidden potential of the office suite. So let’s take a closer look at what’s hidden beneath the surface.
Google Docs Hints and Tips
Sadly, Microsoft Office feels like a bit of a dinosaur next to the dynamic connectivity of Google Docs and its associated apps.
You don’t need to worry about lack of basic features. If the font list seems a bit sparse when you first start using Google Docs, you can search for and import the precise fonts you need from Google’s font directory.
With Google Docs, you can instantly edit images and pdfs just by right-clicking on them in your drive and selecting Open With > Google Docs. Hey presto, you have an editable Google Doc, which you can of course save, in turn, as a pdf to distribute as you please.
But where Google Drive’s alternative to Word really comes into its own is its use of Google’s most famous functions. Translate is really a flagship of this. It takes just moments to click Tools > Translate and pick the language you want to go to. As you may have experienced from Google’s other translation services, some languages translate more accurately than others.
But to communicate and share information with an international team in a hurry, it’s a great option. And if your texts are eventually destined for public eyes, you can always let Google Docs do the horsework of translation, and then find somebody with a knowledge of the language to tweak the details.
Google’s labs come in handy with another time-consuming office task: dictation. Docs has a pretty powerful natural language processor that can figure out what you’re saying, so you don’t have to type out long documents or take up your assistant’s time by calling them in for dictation. Instead, just head to Tools > Voice Typing to use your computer microphone instead of your keyboard!
This tool is also useful if you need to transcribe recordings from a meeting or a seminar. You can try playing your recording into your device’s microphone. If the recording is too noisy, then try listening to it through headphones and repeating what you hear into Google Doc’s voice typing system. It’s a lot quicker than typing it out by hand.
How to Be a Google Sheets Power User
Meanwhile, if Excel is where you spend more of your time (or it’s the app you dread to open), you’ll find an altogether more global alternative with Google Sheets. It certainly makes more sense when your figures or data are used by multiple members of a remote team.
And security need not be an issue. Google’s spreadsheet application allows you to choose variable access permissions for different members of your team. You can lock access or use to entire spreadsheets, or to certain areas within a spreadsheet. You can even add a warning so that a pop-up message appears when somebody tries to edit data that they should think twice about altering.
And if your organization is buried in spreadsheets, Google Sheets has a special way of navigating around those reams of figures: QR codes. It’s not the simplest thing to do, but if you use spreadsheets often then you probably have enough IT knowledge (and enough need!) to set it up. You can use one of those familiar square barcodes to mark territory within your spreadsheets, either as a point to which you want to return, or as something to which you have ‘ownership.’
General Google Drive Bonuses
As mentioned above, Google’s office suite uses the power of Google’s existing services to provide something beyond which the company’s rivals are able. This includes unrivaled search power within your documents, for example searching pdfs and images by text.
Another ‘perk’ is that Google of course owns YouTube; so any video you upload to your Drive, you can watch back in a YouTube-style player. This is super-useful when working on version-after-version of an important international video project, or even if you just want to send somebody a private video message.
And being browser-based means that plenty of third-party developers have created add-ons and extensions to plug those few functionality gaps that Drive has. If you cite a lot of research, EasyBib will make referencing flow like a dream. If your workflow involves importing stock photos into your Powerpoint presentations, make it easy on yourself by using Google Slides instead, and powering up with the Unsplash plug-in.
Naturally, shifting your business to a whole new office suite takes time and planning. But the time and effort you spend doing so should be more than recovered in the benefits you gain.
