Chapter 1

G Suite: The 50¢ Tour

IN THIS CHAPTER

Getting to know G Suite

What comes inside the G Suite box

Your urgent G Suite questions, asked and answered

A brief introduction to online collaboration

A quick look at the G Suite mobile apps

Way, way back in 2006 (an era so far in the distant past that people somehow had to manage back then with no iPhones or Android devices), the wonderful eggheads at Google came up with an idea: What if, they mused amongst themselves, businesses could avoid dealing with the headache-inducing and sanity-destroying complexity of managing high-tech services such as email, messaging, scheduling, and file storage? What if, they continued, Google managed those services and all businesses had to worry about was, well, business? "Wouldn't that be great?" they asked themselves.

The answer to that last question must have been a resounding "Yes!" because in that year Google Apps was born. This collection of online apps for email, messaging, calendars, and, a year or so later, documents and spreadsheets was an instant hit and has been sprouting new apps ever since. Now known to the world as G Suite, Google's business-focused collection of online apps just keeps getting better and more popular. In this chapter, you discover what G Suite is all about, explore what G Suite offers, and have your most pressing G Suite questions answered. Won't that be great?

What Is G Suite?

In the world of business jargon, a silo is a person or department that can't or won't share information with other people or departments in the company. Not all that long ago, all employees were silos in a way. Why? Because they beavered away at their computers using installed software such as Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel, with all of their documents stored safely on their hard drives. Sure, every now and then they shared a document on the network or via email, but for the most part they worked in not-so-splendid isolation from their peers.

But as management gurus and overpaid consultants have been telling anyone who'll listen for at least a couple of decades now, silos are bad. On an individual level, silos make everyone less efficient and less productive; on a departmental level, silos create duplication of effort and endless turf wars; on a company level, silos inhibit growth and innovation.

Yes, silos are nasty things, but how do you get rid of them? An alarmingly large number of management reports and business books have been written to answer that question. It's a complex and difficult topic, but here are three solutions that are almost certainly common to all those reports and books:

• Make it easy for individuals to access their software and documents no matter where they are or what type of device they're using.
• Make it easy for people on the same team or in the same department to collaborate with each other.
• Make it easy for people on different teams or in different departments to share information with each other.

And that, at long last, is where G Suite comes in. Google's G Suite is a set of applications that's designed to tear down silos. How? By implementing the preceding list of solutions in the following ways:

• G Suite apps aren't installed on your computer. Instead, they live online (in the cloud, to use the vernacular), so you can access them from any location that has Internet access, using any type of device - desktop PC, laptop, Touch PC, tablet, smartphone, you name it - that you have handy.
• G Suite apps are built with collaboration in mind. For example, two or more people can work on the same document at the same time. No, I'm not just making that up - it's a real feature. G Suite also enables you to easily email, meet, and chat with members of your team or department, so everyone stays in the loop.
• G Suite documents aren't stored on your computer. Instead, all G Suite data and documents reside in the cloud, so it's a snap to share them with anyone in your company.

Silos, schmi-los!

What You Get with G Suite

My dictionary defines a suite as "a connected series of rooms to be used together." You're probably thinking hotel suite, but that definition is actually a succinct and useful definition of the Suite part of the G Suite name. You can, in fact, define G Suite as "a connected series of Google apps to be used together." That is, the G Suite apps are all awesome when used by themselves, but they're designed in a way that connects them together to make your work life easier, more efficient, and more productive.

Okay, so what are these apps that I've been going on and on about? Table 1-1 provides the list, with pointers to where you can find more info later in this book.

TABLE 1-1 The G Suite Apps

App

What You Can Do with It

Where to Find More Info

Gmail

Send and receive email messages. (See Figure 1-1.) You can also share files as attachments, organize messages, control email conversations, and more.

Chapter 2

Chapter 18

Calendar

Maintain an online schedule of appointments and other events. (See Figure 1-2.) You can also see reminders of upcoming events, schedule repeating events, share calendars, and more.

Chapter 3

Chapter 12

Contacts

Create and maintain an online address book. (See Figure 1-3.) For each contact, you can store info such as the person's name, email address, and phone number. You can also import contacts, group related contacts, and more.

Chapter 4

Docs

Create, edit, and collaborate on word processing documents. You can change the layout, add bulleted and numbered lists, work with headers and footers, format text, paragraphs, and pages, and more.

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 11

Sheets

Create, edit, and collaborate on spreadsheets. You can build formulas, sort and filter data, analyze data, and more.

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 11

Slides

Create, edit, and collaborate on presentations. You can change the theme, show your presentation, create slides that include text, images, shapes, and more.

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Meet

Set up and join online meetings. You can invite people to a meeting, share resources, record and live-stream a meeting, and more.

Chapter 13

Chat

Exchange real-time messages with members of your team, department, or organization.

Chapter 14

Groups

Join and create groups for posting messages, sharing files, and more.

Chapter 15

Forms

Create forms, quizzes, and surveys to gather information and opinions from members of your team, department, or organization.

Chapter 16

Keep

Create, edit, and share notes.

Chapter 16

Drive

Store, manage, and share files online.

Chapter 11

Using Apps Online - Really? Here Are the FAQs

When folks switch to G Suite, if they're used to working with programs installed on their PCs, then the idea of using apps that somehow work online is the stuff of science fiction. It doesn't help that the G Suite apps look just like their PC-installed counterparts. (Check out Figures 1-1, 1-2, and 1-3 to see what I mean). How is any of this possible, and does it actually work? Those are great questions, and I'll try to answer them by walking you through a long list of frequently asked questions (FAQs) from people just like you who are new to G Suite:

• Won't everyone on the Internet see my stuff? Nope. Your company's G Suite administrator will have provided you with a G Suite account. This means the only way to see your stuff is to sign in using your G Suite email address and account password. The only way other people can see your stuff is if you choose to show it to them by using G Suite's extensive collaboration-and-sharing features. (See the chapters in Part 3.)
• Okay, but can't tech-savvy snoops somehow "tap in" to my data as it goes back and forth between my computer and wherever this "cloud" is located? Dang, but that's a good question! The bad news is that, yes, it's technically possible for someone to "eavesdrop" on your data, a practice called packet-sniffing. The good news is that your data is scrambled (encrypted, in...