An introduction to Google Apps

hey everybody I'm Steve Strowbridge i'm with florida computer care we've got another youtube video for you what are we gonna talk about today well today we are gonna talk about Google Apps what our Google Apps well I'm assuming you know who Google is probably the largest search engine company in the world not only does Google have a page where you can find things but Google has a ton of services for us to use so what are they well it's basically a suite of applications that we can use and the great thing about these applications is they will run on just about anything you can run Google Apps on Windows you can run them on a Mac you can run them on Android you can run them on an AI device you can run them on just about anything that runs on electricity they allow for seamless synchronization and integration of all these services so you can integrate things like email calendars contacts files folders pictures they can all be synchronized across multiple devices it's a 100% free it's easy to use and most importantly it's extremely collaborative because Google Apps allow you to share information with other Google users so let's talk about some of the most basic and simple of the Google services and that would be Gmail Gmail is how Google does email so if you've used the email before you know what email is what's great about Gmail it's very fast it's very friendly highly secure and very low on spam when something shows up in junk it's usually junk another nice thing about Gmail is it's recognized by just about every device just about every system just about every software that can be used to read and write email will automatically detect Gmail will automatically configure it for you all you have to do is plug in your email address and password and poof it just starts working Gmail comes with integrated contacts that synchronize along with your email so your address book will automatically complete when you start typing in a name and those contacts will also feed into all the other various applications like your navigation your calendars etc and your standard Gmail which is the free consumer version ends in at gmail.com you can also get a corporate version of Gmail where you can put your own domain name on top of that but Gmail is the most basic of all the Google Apps services but we don't stop there there is more are you ready let's see what else Google has for us well Google also has a calendar feature and this is a calendar like any other calendar you have all your standard features you can change your view between day view week view month views it gives you reminders you can view multiple calendars that can all be viewed in different colors and an overlay you can overlay things like holidays and birthdays those can all show up on top as well but the best part about this is because the Google Apps platform is collaborative you can share your calendar both publicly and privately you can even publish a calendar to a website that other people can just pull up a page and see what's on that calendar here's another cool feature but maybe not why you think what is Google+ well Google+ is kind of like Google's version of Facebook it is a social media platform if you're saying to yourself I've never heard of Google+ before you're not alone and that's okay because the fact that it's a social media platform isn't the coolest thing about this the benefits of using Google+ are twofold number one if you do create a profile and you put your information in there you are gonna make yourself more searchable through Google searches because anything you plug into the Google system will allow you to be found that much easier the other benefit of using the Google+ application is that if you install the app on your phone there's an added benefit where you can have automatic backup of all your phone's photographs so by installing the Google+ app signing in with your account turning on a feature all your photographs will be backed up to your gmail account and you can view them from any other device and it's just a nice safety net in case you lose your phone and you're worried about losing all your pictures so Google Plus is if nothing else a cool way to backup your pictures here is one of my favorite features is the Google Maps app which provides Google Navigation I use this as my GPS so basically anybody who I put in as a contact not only can I send an email to that person not only can I put them on my calendar but I can also look them up click on their name and Matt get the driving directions to get to their location so it is a very smart fast and efficient GPS system that ties into your contacts but it will also work as any other GPS where if you don't have the contact saved you can search for an address you can view you know what are the local businesses and restaurants nearby me it'll know where you are and tell you what's around you and you can even get traffic information to when you are driving on your GPS so Google Maps and Google Navigation another great free app that ties in to everything that is synchronized with all of your various Google services and applications here's another cool one here - Google Voice what does Google Voice do well Google Voice gives you a private phone number that you can publish and have people call what will happen to that phone number well that phone number can ring up to five other mobile phones are traditional phones it can call just about any other kind of phone except another Google Voice number so you get one public number that you can publish and then you can call up to five different private numbers and you can get real creative with how you do that you can have these things called different people at different times of the day you can have all five of them ring at once so it's pretty cool the other benefit of using Google Voice is you can have privacy and anonymity to your home phones office phones and cell phones because you can make calls through the Google Voice app and only have people see your Google Voice number in the caller ID and so it is a very nice way to use one public phone persona but have a lot of different ways to receive calls including text messages as well so people can text you on your Google Voice number you can view your voicemail you can listen to your voicemail audibly you can get a text-to-speech what we call visual voicemail and you can also view your text messages and you can do this on the web or you can do this on the Google Voice app that runs on both Android and iPhones hangouts another great feature from Google Voice hangouts is going to probably slowly replace Google Voice but what is hangouts what does hangouts do for us well at very least hangouts is kind of like an instant messaging client so if you've ever used a AOL Instant Messenger yahoo instant messenger you can do those basic things but you can do a lot more you could install the hangouts app on your phone and you can actually have that replace your normal SMS app and have a little bit nicer looking things depending on what your phone's messengering looks like there's a lot of other benefits you can get with hangouts too because it has a lot of features similar to Skype if you've ever used Skype you can call anybody else who's got a hangouts account which is basically the gmail address you can call them as a voice call so you can call from computer to computer from computer to phone tablet to phone tablet to computer you can call with voice calls you can call with video calls you can even include a group of people in this call so you can have conference calling all with hangouts you can use hangouts to call landlines from your computer and you can even use the hangouts app to replace the Google Voice app on your mobile device and have it handle both your SMS messages as well as your voice messages so again the more you use these Google services and the more you use these Google apps the integration makes things so convenient so seamless so easy Google Drive one of my favorite features you've probably heard of Dropbox you might even use Dropbox at very least Google Drive does everything that dropped box does it allows you to put files and folders on your computer have those things synchronized to the cloud which means they go online and then these things can then show up on any other device so you can put files on your desktop put files on your laptop be in two different locations be looking at the same files because they will synchronize you can even pull those files up on your mobile device like your phone or your tablet but where this continues to get better is that because it is part of the Google Apps suite it's part of this universe it is tightly integrated with all of the other apps so if you're on Gmail on the web or if you're using the Gmail app on your mobile device you can very quickly and easily attach any document that is inside your Google Drive and send that as an attachment to anybody else even if they don't use Google Drive even if they don't have a gmail account so it makes it real quick and easy to get to your content and send that content out to somebody else and the best feature of all in my opinion about Google Drive or the Google Docs platform which is basically a web-based version of Microsoft Office where you can work on PowerPoint presentations you can work on Microsoft Word documents you can work on Excel spreadsheets of course they're not the Microsoft versions of these applications they're the Google versions of these but they look very similar they function quite comparably and they will work in a browser they will work on your phone and they don't cost you any money so it's a great great feature on top of that they're also collaborative meaning you can share these documents and use them with other people and you can do that in real time so Google Drive combined Google Docs offers a lot of powerful features for sharing files and collaborating on files what else can Google do for us what is the core of the Google universe well it's seamless and it synchronizes meaning that every device that you plug in your Google account to you can have 12 computers five phones and eight tablets and as long as they're all configured with your Google account you're gonna see the same information on all these devices and it doesn't matter if they are mixed and matched between Windows and Mac and Android and iOS and blackberries or whatever else you can imagine everything will synchronize to every single device regardless of who makes it it's a wonderful thing on top of that you can collaborate and share files share information and work in real time with anybody else who uses Google and this is true for both the free gmail accounts and the corporate Google Apps as well you can cross-pollinate you can share information collaborate it's a wonderful wonderful wonderful technology so now that I've kind of told you what these features do what these features are let's go ahead and take a look at these features and I'm gonna do a demonstration all right look like on our computer and our mobile devices and so when you're using Google Apps on your Windows machine or your Mac it is preferred that you run it using Google Chrome as your browser so Google Chrome is a free download you can get from google.com if you point your browser to google.com and you don't I already have chrome installed you'll see a little pop-up that says click here to install Chrome chrome is the browser made by Google and it's optimized for all these apps to run very smoothly so let's look at the most basic of all apps which is Gmail right Gmail is how you send and receive all of your emails now the great thing about Gmail so right now I'm in my spam folder and Gmail is really good about flagging real spam as spam very few legitimate spam messages actually make it to your inbox and very few things that make it to spam are put there by mistake so the spam filtering on here is really good and so I'm just kind of showing you this number one to show you that the spam on here is awesome but also I'm not going to show you real messages in my inbox because you know there's probably some personal or private stuff in there what does this look like on our mobile devices well I'm actually using the Gmail app on my iPad and Gmail app is actually the preferred way to do this could I use the regular Mail app on my iPad or my iPhone answer is yes what am I missing out by not doing the Gmail app or what is the Gmail app giving me that the normal mail doesn't it is the ability to send an email with an attachment of something that's stored in my Google Drive the normal iPad and iPhone mail app will not allow you to attach things from Google Drive but you can see here whatever's in here shows up here if I delete this this will go away that should synchronize the delete in my Gmail here in just a second although I might have to refresh the list if I pull down and refresh it boom it's gone so email is email I think everybody knows what email looks like I think everybody knows how it would email how it works so what is the other more cool feature well your calendar right so your calendar which you can manage through the web now here's the thing about Google Apps Google Apps will automatically plug in and work on just about any type of device on just about any type of operating system and will view and just about any type of mail calendar applications the exception is Microsoft Outlook Microsoft Outlook will not automatically synchronize to calendars will not automatically synchronize contacts from Google and I think it's primarily because they would basically say to themselves if we did this we are preventing people from buying our version of this which is Microsoft Exchange so they intentionally don't do it in the Outlook product they want you to use Outlook with their email system it's called Microsoft Exchange but if you use any other mail client like a generic one like Thunderbird if you use the mail app that comes with Windows 8 or Windows 10 that will plug into Gmail that will synchronize everything but this calendar here I'm managing through the browser and it looks and acts just like you would manage a calendar in Outlook or in your mail app when whatever computer or device you use so you can go to add a view right now I've got my written reminder to create the Google presentation that you're looking at now I can go to a week view I can go to a month view now in this case here I can just look at this calendar going to my normal calendar app on my Mac so here I am looking at my calendar here I can say today is the 22nd and I can see that this is telling me on the 22nd I need to create my Google Calendar app so your calendars that you can manage on your computers on your desktops and on your laptops will sync to your mobile devices which is you know that's what we want so that's a cool feature what is an awesome feature about Google Apps one of my favorite features is the Google Drive what is Google Drive well Google Drive is pretty much Dropbox right if you're familiar of Dropbox Dropbox as a service where you can put files and folders and documents and pictures and whatever in a folder that folder will automatically upload itself to the internet it will synchronize itself and then you can get the same stuff anywhere you go so it's basically an internet-based file server very easy way to store in synchronize files across more than one computer across more than one device apps gives us Google Drive Google Drive does all of those features but it's very tightly integrated with mail and everything else so in this case here I have created a folder called demo Docs and in this demo Docs here I've actually created some Google Docs and Google Docs are pretty cool because Google Docs are documents that look and act and function just like a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet just like a Microsoft Word document but they're actually entirely web-based so in this case here I've got a Google document and this is just a generic document and it says this is a Google document this is coming up in my browser and it pretty much looks like Microsoft Word I can go here to my iPad I can go to my demo Docs I can pull up the same document on my mobile device and I will be able to see that document and so it's just a cool way to store files and to be able to pull up those two files you know let's say you've got an office computer and you've got a laptop and you've got a tablet and you've got a phone you can keep all your documents synchronized in the same place so here I have the same document I can actually modify this document on my iPad and the cool thing about this is that these documents are actually collaborative where I can make these changes right now I am making changes on spelled that wrong on my iPad so you can see as I'm making those changes on my iPad they're actually showing up in the document on the left so this is a very cool way to share documents with other people who have Gmail accounts so if you want to have a shared document that people can all be working on if you want to have a shared spreadsheet that you're using like a database you can do all that kind of stuff you can just click on the share button over here and you can share this document with anybody else who has a gmail address so that's a that's a document and by the way it automatically saves I don't have to click a Save button the minute I'm done making a change it has completely saved itself so I can go ahead and close this so if I go back to my Google Drive and I want to look at this sample spreadsheet here I just made a real simple sample spreadsheet now this for all intensive purposes looks just like a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet I will tell you this I am NOT an Excel power user but I know many people who are so if you are an Excel power user and you're doing things like macros and pivot tables and you're linking sheets to tables and other sheets this probably isn't going to be the tool for you but if you need just a real simple spreadsheet that you can use this kind of like a database or a checklist or just simple ways to store things it will actually work and again you can modify this either on your computer so in this case here let's say in June my expenses weren't 14,000 they were actually fifteen thousand fifteen one two three I'm gonna change that and that's going to automatically update here on my iPad and and now I can go over here to my iPad in June and I can click on my iPad and I can say all right well I want to change my expenses here so now I can actually change this number here and let's say my expenses were only $8,000 that month so I can type in 8 1 2 3 and hit check and that's done and so now you can see here that I'm actually making changes on both my mobile device and on my computer at the same time and these things are synchronizing in pretty much real-time so the cool thing about Google Docs is that not only can you share any normal document you can share a normal spreadsheet a normal word document you can share PDF files you can share pictures all your normal stuff but there are these things that are called Google Docs that are live documents that you can run in a browser and you can run on your mobile device and it doesn't cost you any money you don't have to buy a Microsoft Office to use these Docs so that is very cool stuff another cool feature about Google is Google Voice and so basically what Google Voice does is it gives you a phone number and so basically I've taken my business phone number and my business phone number is a Google Voice number this will now ring a cell phone a landline you can program this number to ring up to five different physical phones that can be mobile phones they can be landlines the only thing it can't ring is another Google Voice number but you can ring five different numbers and you can get real creative with times of day and all kinds of stuff but basically when you have Google Voice people call that number it'll ring your cell phone you can configure your cell phone to use Google Voice as its voice mail all of your voice mail will get stored in Google Voice and your text messages as well so you can view your voicemail in your text messages in a browser you can click play and listen to them and you can even see them on your smart device as well so you basically have a way to replay voicemail you have text-to-speech or what you call visual voicemail you can visualize your text messages you can respond to a text message from your browser lots of cool features they've actually now upgraded Google Voice to integrate with an app that's called hangouts hangouts is another great app for for the Google Apps suite so hangouts as an app you can run in a browser you can add this as an app to your computer you can add it on your phone and with Google Hangouts you can use this to send and receive text messages what we call SMS messages it's also kind of like a Skype program and an instant messaging program so you can you can instant message people you can text people you can have voice calls you can have video calls so hangouts does all the stuff that that Skype would do and your text messaging programs and again it all synchronizes to the cloud it ties in to everything else you do you can view it from your browser you can view it from your device all right well that's it I hope you enjoyed looking at these Google apps and seeing what they can do for you I hope they've given you some ideas you probably have used similar services to this you might be using some of these Google features but maybe not all of them or maybe you haven't used them to the level that you possibly could be so hopefully this has shed some light on some possibilities and some things you can do I hope you did enjoy this if you have any questions about this you can shoot me an email I'm Steve NFL Peter CARICOM if you have any questions you can visit Florida computer care on the web which is FL computer CARICOM when you're at the website you'll find links to our YouTube channel we're also on Facebook and Twitter if you like this video give it a like click on the thumbs up button on the YouTube channel there leave a comment with your feedback if you've got something like to say and if you think anybody else might find this information useful go ahead and share it with them as well thank you for

Channel: Florida Computer Care

Views: 40,669

Keywords: Florida Computer Care, Technology, Computers, Google Apps, Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Drive, Google Docs, Google Hangouts

Id: EOZGPNitae4

Length: 22min 28sec (1348 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 22 2016