Google Apps and Work
Google Apps. - I’ve been speculating about google apps for some time now. I’ve gone back and forth between google apps and just my normal work applications. However, when the good ol’ company decided to change its gears and switch some positions around, I now have found a long lost friend in these applications. UTA, Utah Transit Authority or something like that has come to our company and pretty much said “Get out soon”. Our company pays rent to another company I guess for the buildings that we use. So, UTA is planning on putting a Trax station in place of where our wonderful building is. Forceful re-location is what some would like to call it. So we are moving. Where? Heck, no one at the company not even the C.E.O. knows. All they know is that we are moving “North” not “South” so, because of the push, the Board of Directors for our company has asked the current C.E.O. to step down and to monitor and assist in the moving of the company to the new location… The C.O.O. has moved into the C.E.O. position and has required a little bit more detail out of everyone. All of that said, I was told to make up a weekly agenda by the C.E.O. of the company. Every Friday send it over to me in an email please. Without hesitation, I started writing things down on a note pad of course. By the second day of that, I my hand was already hurting. I knew there had to be a better solution for me and my wonderful new agenda which had fallen from the sky. I turned to Google. I knew Google had “Google Calendar” and I was determined to find something to work for me so I wouldn’t have to write things down, as well as after writing them down, type them up. So, I started with “Google Calendar”, went to it using my already acquired and well appreciated “Gmail” account and started typing in entries. Lo and Behold, I don’t think I will ever use anything else for agenda planning anymore. Not only could it put dates, times, detailed descriptions, alerts, etc. but I could add “filtered” calendars. Say I wanted to make one for Work hours (which I did) and also one for something like Personal “things to do” or whatever, I could execute this without any issues. Another feature of Google Calendar that I enjoy is its “Add a public Calendar” meaning, any calendar another company, friend, etc has, I can grab those and put them into my calendar as well. I picked up “Movie Release Dates”, “Weather w/Forecast”, “Mozilla Developement Team’s Calendar”, and a few others. This was a plus, I could plan out a nice date with my fiancé and throw in work updates at the same time. You can also import your Outlook calendar information right into the calendar. Also there is perfect color coding and instant “Show/Hide Filters” that you can filter your calendar to show whatever the heck you want. Also I do believe there is a “mobile phone” option to get things sent via your provider to your mobile phone (haven’t tried that yet). The best thing about Google Calendar in my opinion though, would have to be, its mobility. I can access Google Calendar from any web browser I want. I don’t have to “Login to my computer, wait for boot applications to load, click the icon, let it load up, select where to go, etc”. And that’s why I love it. Any computer (with internet), any operating system, any day, any time, I get to use Google Calendar. I love Google Calendar and I will continue to use it. Next on my list of wonderful things is Google Docs. Google Docs is great. I have touched it lightly and can already understand the power behind it and love how simple it is to use. Businessmen, stock trades, real estate agents, IT professionals, marine biologists, pharmacy technicians, etc. you name them they can find a use for this bad-a$$ application. Google “Word” equivalent and Google “Spreadsheet” not only have the common features of the Microsoft, and Open Office, but it has the awesome power of the Google.com search implemented right into the program. With the spreadsheet, you can use the common functions like “=SUM(A1,A2)” and others, but the functions that I’m learning to love are the wonderful “=GoogleLookup(entity, attribute)” function. Here you can insert just about anything you freakin want into this bad boy and it will use the power of Google and Unleash your results. Just as an example, one of my company’s customers is “Kroger”. Lets see. So say I wanted to make a list of C.E.O.’s to send a Christmas Present to for the Holidays or something stupid like that. All I would have to do is simply type in the cell “=GoogleLookup(”Kroger”, “C.E.O.”) ” and BAM, just like that, it loads in the results using Google . “David B. Dillon” is the CEO of Kroger. So going on with that I do believe there’s like an auto complete feature you can use to auto fill the rest of the form with the C.E.O. lookup formula. The “=GoogleFinance(symbol, attribute)” is also quite nice, using this I can pull Financial information of a company using the stock symbol. So technically I could put together a spreadsheet that pulls “=GoogleLookup(”Kroger”, “ticker”) and it would give me the symbol and from there create a spreadsheet that then shows financial information like:
- price: market price of the stock - delayed by up to 20 minutes.
- priceopen: the opening price of the stock for the current day.
- high: the highest price the stock traded for the current day.
- low: the lowest price the stock traded for the current day.
- volume: number of shares traded of this stock for the current day.
- marketcap: the market cap of the stock.
- tradetime: the last time the stock traded.
and many more. Overall I could see myself moving to a more “mobile” operating system with the use of these applications and the technologies already used in the internet. (Ajax Windows, etc). I haven’t really looked much further into the other Google Applications available online, as I do, I will definitely keep you updated on them and how awesome they really are.
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