Among the apps named Docs, Slides, and Sheets - Docs is very useful for letter drafting, document writing, and designing so I find nothing special about it as it offers those wordprocessing features which are offered in any other apps available in the market.
What I find most special and very efficient about Docs and other apps is that their collaboration feature. Many a time we need to collaborate the Docs with other users. Here I would suggest doing it online in real-time with these Google office apps. These alleviate the traditional collaboration pains such as multiple versions of the same file with multiple users. Later to merge and have a final copy of the document is a huge pain and an inefficient way of collaboration too.
So I'll not go deep into the individual features of Docs and Slides in this blog. Rather I would only emphasize and repeatedly suggest harnessing these applications' power of enabling a team to take their collaborative works around documentation, presentation, and data management to the next level.
Sheets
This is my most favorite app in the Google office suite or in the offerings of Google Workspace. I would like to highlight a few super useful features of Sheets which you should try once as follows.
1. Templates
There are various interesting Spreadsheet templates are available if you access Sheets from the Sheets app https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets. These templates help us to create Spreadsheets for our specific purposes very quickly otherwise it would take a good amount of time to format the sheet to meet our requirements. For instance, I have selected one Sheets template as follows to demonstrate this useful feature.
A few templates are listed on the home screen of the app itself. For more, expand the Template gallery as shown below.
Once you find the desired template select the template and it will create a new file with the pre-defined formatting and structure automatically. As you can see below I have selected the Team roster template which contains two sheets, columns, formatting, etc. for the target objective. Rest I have to just tweak a bit to fit the same for my specific work.
2. Version History
With this powerful feature, I can navigate back to the previous snapshots of data entry done by the users. This is helpful to either restore the previous versions/snapshots for anything wrong in the current version or to audit the data entry in the Sheets. This is available in the File menu as shown in the following image.
Note - you should save (create a copy) the current version before restoring any previous version of the file if the data containing in the file is valuable for you.
3. Publish a Spreadsheet on the Web
In some specific cases, you may need to publish the table of data on the web or your website, then this option will be useful as the published content can be updated from the backend itself. All the updates in the sheet will be reflected on the published site automatically. Thus your site or the particular web presence will never go obsolete due to old data. This option can be found in the File menu and looks like the following image.
Rest all the features are more or less the same in any Spreadsheet application. If you can use any spreadsheet application then you can use those here as well.
Please note that this publishing feature is also available with the other office apps, you can explore them for other purposes.
I have built many interesting apps using Google Spreadsheet and a couple of other applications and platforms. Please comment below if you are interested in knowing them as well. Maybe some of them will also fit your solutions as well or give you some great ideas to make your life around Google office better.
Google Forms
Last but not least - Try Google forms which make your surveys easy and data collection from the users or from any group of people smarter. You can use Google forms to develop and deliver your quizzes as well. Explore it!
It is important to know that all the above-mentioned apps along with some other apps are under Google Workspace offering and delivered using Google Drive as centralized storage for all the apps.
Thank you.
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