In the Loupe
In the Loupe
Breaking Down the Best - Google Suite (Drive, Docs, Sheets, Forms, & Slides)
Today we are taking a deep dive into the Google Workspace Suite of tools. These free tools are cloud based and able to be accessed in minutes after the creation of a Gmail account.
These tools are widely considered to be industry standard tools, as they make collaboration and asynchronous editing possible. Learn how the Punchmark team has been using these as well as how you can level up your own company's collaboration skills with them!
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Welcome to In the Loop email or an AOL email. I'm going to scream. It is time for you to get on the G Suite bandwagon. I've been on it for years. All of Punchmark is run off of the G Suite, which I'll get into, but it's primarily part of Google Drive, gmail, google Sheets, google Docs, google Slides and Google Forms. I'd recommend you just take a look or sit back and I'll explain the value of each of them and why I use them and why I prefer that over, for example, the Microsoft suite. All right, let's enjoy.
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Speaker 1:And now back to the show. Okay, everybody. So, like I mentioned in the intro, this is going to be about the G Suite. That's what I'm referring to it, as that is Google's suite of products and they all work really well together. What I'm primarily referring to is Gmail. It is the industry standard and very, very much understood to be the industry standard. It's free and all of these tools are free. You pretty much access it with a Gmail. Google Drive, which is sort of like a Dropbox, but it connects and contains all of the files for the other ones. Google Docs, which is sort of like Microsoft Word, except it's cloud-based. Google Sheets, which is just like Excel. This is the only one which I will accept people using Microsoft Excel for certain instances. If you're like really deep into making pivot tables and data and stuff like that. Google Forms, which is the industry standard. I honestly recommend using Google Forms over any other form. Unless you have a CMS like HubSpot, then maybe it makes sense to pipe it into your CMS, but I would recommend Google Forms for any other reason. And Google Slides, which is just like a slideshow Microsoft PowerPoint, essentially. So let's get into each of them.
Speaker 1:I want to start at Gmail. Gmail is the industry standard and what I recommend off of that is that you immediately get a lot more. I don't want to say respect, but you're understood to be legitimate if you email with a Gmail. The reason why is the spam catching and the ability to prevent bots from using Gmails is a lot higher than, for example, these more defunct ones like AOLcom. So the reason why you know it's a Gmail is your email is going to end in gmailcom or you can actually overwrite that and have it be based off of your domain and this is like a business version so you can use. For example, all of Punchmark's stuff is at punchmarkcom and a lot of our businesses have that. I believe it costs a little bit of money and you have to own the domain. However, I recommend you just make a Gmail. If you don't yet have a Gmail, I'd recommend that you make one, because it takes two seconds and it's free and it will get you access to the other parts of it. So the other parts about it that I really like is it has really high deliverability.
Speaker 1:Again, google is the industry standard for man a lot of things, and with that comes they have a really high ability to sniff out bots and spam. Their spam catchers are the highest in the industry. You can have add-ons that will catch even more spam, but what that means is you're less likely to get phished. And what I've been doing for years is sometimes I go into my spam, you know, once a month, once every couple months, just to see if anything got caught by spam that you know maybe I'd need, and I have never pretty much ever found some spam that was supposed to be a real deliverable. So with that I find that it really gives you the sense of legitimacy and I genuinely believe that their service and their ability to connect emails and forward stuff to each other is so much higher than again like a Hotmail.
Speaker 1:Not that I don't think that it works for you and I understand the fact that you might be attached to your Hotmail, but I do believe that Gmail is the standard and I have like five Gmails. I use one only for signing up for free accounts. That one I only use because you know you get put into their marketing system, the different marketing systems, and I don't want that. Going to my work email I have a work email. I have a professional one for my life outside of work. I have one that I only use for testing things, for Punchmark, so that one I only use when it comes to testing email sequences to get pushed there. So I would recommend that you at least look into getting a Gmail. If you own a domain, you have a website for your jewelry store, that you consider setting up all of your emails through there. Okay, that's enough on Gmail. I highly recommend it.
Speaker 1:Let's talk about Drive, google Drive. So Google Drive is one of those things I actually got into when I was in college. We organize all of our work through Google Drive. The reason why I recommend Google Drive is that, again, it's cloud-based, which means that everything can be edited all at once, with all of the different edits being synced, so you can actually have multiple people in the Google Drive or on the same documents and they'll be syncing in real time. And what that is really great about is, for example, if you're using Dropbox and you have all these Microsoft documents, people can be editing and then someone might have another version and then they merge and then one gets overwritten and suddenly all that work was lost, which happens a lot.
Speaker 1:I highly recommend, if you're doing something collaborative, you consider working with a Google Drive. It's super easy to figure out. It kind of the utility of it doesn't reveal itself until you start working with two other people and then suddenly it's like, wow, this is really useful. And what's really nice about it, too, is that you can also work and collaborate outside of your organization. So we use to give you an idea, we use Google Drive as a organizational tool for when we work on the vendor vault, which we've talked about before in the past on In the Loop. It is our publication for Punchmark.
Speaker 1:When you work on a publication, oh my gosh, you are constantly working on different sheets and documents all at the same time. Everybody needs to know what's going on. Edits are coming in all the time and if you were working on a document and putting it up, well, suddenly I had one time someone was working on an entire intro for this magazine I was working on in college and they spent like an entire day on it. One person hit Command S and saved on top of that sheet while they had closed it down and it wiped an entire day's work on it and let me say it was not great for our team cohesion. People were very upset. But with a Google document or with a drive, that would be totally taken care of. Again, it's free and a great part of it is.
Speaker 1:Sometimes in the past I've worked on these big, expansive projects with outside contractors. For example, I've talked about Stephanie Momont Rhodes and she was a editor, a copy editor for us, and what I like about that is that I can just give her access to a, I guess, a smaller folder and she can add all of the copy into that folder without ever getting access to any of the other assets or anything like that, so she can only see what I've allowed her to see, which is the copy. And that way it keeps the scope a lot more controlled. And not that I'm ever worried about that, but it can be helpful, especially if you're working on sensitive things. At Punchmark, as I've started to climb in the leadership roles a lot of the times, the easiest way to onboard someone is you just add them by email to the appropriate level of, I guess, permissions to the Google Drive. And when I got promoted to director, well, suddenly you have access to the director section of the Google Drive as opposed to having to send them. You know an entire zip folder with a ton of different documents and suddenly it's kind of sensitive, because what if they took it and they forwarded it over to someone? Well, in Google Drive they're just in there and they can't really share anything externally otherwise. So that's Google Drive.
Speaker 1:I really like it. It's kind of like the connective ligaments between everything. It's where everything sits. I personally don't like Dropbox. It's too stagnant and clunky for me. But I can see how people like it, dropbox. The benefit to it is that you don't have to. I think it's cheaper when it comes to the cost of the. It's cheaper when it comes to the cost of the data that's in there. In Drive, you can quickly rack up expensive charges if you're putting like terabytes of information files in there, like if you're working in really large photographs that you know you might have a photograph that is 100 gigabytes large. You know if it was shot in raw or 50 gigabytes, and it might be a suite of them or an entire photo shoot, in which case that is going to take up a lot of cloud information and suddenly you're getting charged. You know a little bit of money, but if you're not working in raw, well, you don't really have to worry about that.
Speaker 1:Ok, let's talk about Google Documents. This one. I probably use Google Documents every hour of every single day. I work at Punchmark. I'm constantly in Documents Things I love about it.
Speaker 1:It's exactly like Word. Microsoft Word is the forebringer. However, google Docs is cloud-based. Microsoft Word is usually tethered to your account and Microsoft Word costs money. So there you go. Word is backwards compatible, so you can actually import docs into Word and it'll work exactly the same. However, it's kind of hard to switch it back. It kind of freezes it in time, if you will, and it allows for multiple people to dynamically edit the same document. Why is that good? Well, have you ever worked on a really long document and then suddenly you're working and you overwrite on top of people? Well, this makes it so that someone can be working on the intro and someone could be working on the outro, and it doesn't even matter. You can see their cursor jumping around. It's very collaborative and I personally, I use Google Docs every single time I write a blog post. I start in Google Docs. It has a great spell checker in it. I know that sounds so dumb, but I think it's the best out there. It's way more effective than writing in Slack, and I think Docs is.
Speaker 1:If I write any copy. I just share the document with people and I have a new system that goes along with it. One of the things I do with my docs is I sometimes set the docs to be, I guess, comment only mode. So instead of people being able to edit what I wrote, they can only leave comments, and the comment system requires a little getting used to, but I sometimes do that. For example, I wrote the year in review for Punchmark. The document was like 5,000 words long and it was really took a lot of time, and then I shared it with everybody at the company. But instead of letting anyone edit it directly, I asked that they all commented their edits, and that way I knew, you know, hey, this is a grammatical edit, no problem, I'll just approve it. But if people try to reformat it, well, I had to approve that. Yes, it's a little bit controlling, but it makes it so that I don't have to ensure we're all on the same page. Sometimes I can just be like no, that's just not the way that we're going to format things. All right, everybody, we're going to take a quick break and hear a word from our sponsor.
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Speaker 1:And now back to the show. And we're back. I know the flow and if you come in and try to, you know, switch things up drastically. Well, let's talk about it first. It's a little bit more control. I think that Docs is amazing. It also allows you to embed images really well and I find it super awesome for that, and you can actually import Google Docs into things like Confluence, which we use to write our knowledge base, and you can attach them to readme documents and things like that. I'm just a huge fan of Google Docs. If you can't tell, I find it extremely helpful. It is industry standard, way better than Microsoft documents or whatever, so I am a big fan.
Speaker 1:All right, let's talk about Sheets. And as excited as I am for Microsoft, for Google Docs, I'm even more excited for Google Sheets. I think that Google Sheets are incredible. Sheets are the Excel version, so you know lots of cells and tables, tables, and the one thing I will say about it is it is good for about 75 to 85% of everything you want to do with a sheet.
Speaker 1:There are some people who don't, who wouldn't want to use Google Sheets, and for those people I understand you can't really do these advanced formulas and mergings and pivot tables quite as much, and I actually asked my vendor liaison, kimberly, why she prefers to use Microsoft Excel and the reason why she's explained it is that there's a lot of formatting and VLOOKUPs and pivot tables that she can use to find the issues with data files a lot easier. Personally, that kind of goes a little bit over my head. I don't understand. I use it for organizing projects and project outlines a lot because I find that putting things into a spreadsheet makes things so much easier for me to visualize. I'm just a very visual person and I've started to learn that if I, you know, formulate my spreadsheets a certain way, suddenly I feel like I'm in the driver's seat. If you're doing stuff with data, well I understand if it's not for you and I'll give you a pass. But that kind of combines Google Sheets combines really well with the next one, which is Google Forms.
Speaker 1:So forms are a way to solicit information from people and the value of that is that you can survey. So we do stuff internally with these. So, for example, I set up about four years ago. I set up a system for us to submit KPIs, which are key performance indicators, and there's seven different teams at Punchmark, or eight really, but seven different teams and each team is responsible to submit their KPIs every Tuesday morning and we do that through a Google form those form. Each team has their own Google form and each form is tailored to have the KPIs that that team has. Those forms dump their information, the results, you might say, into the same sheet so you can format these forms in these sheets to either be independent or to go into different tabs of the same sheet. So that is pretty cool because that way it's completely hands free and the longer you use the same system, the stronger and better the data gets, which is pretty neat.
Speaker 1:I started I built the KPI system when you know, back in, I think, 2020 or 2021. And I kind of like built it. I was sort of like figuring things out and now it turns out it was the right way to do it because you're very easily able in Sheets to create visualizations out of the data submissions. So I have, you know, our entire company's, I guess, kpis and data all formulated onto a dashboard which I use to present to the C-suite at Punchmark and it's all pretty much automated at this point. It does take a little bit of upkeep. Every couple of months and also at the end of every year I have to, I usually spend about two, three days where I completely have to build the next year's kind of submission forming. I'm sure I could find a way to automate that, but I don't really know how to do it.
Speaker 1:But the forms are great. One reason why you might not choose to use a Google Form is if, again, if you have HubSpot or I think Salesforce is another one. We don't use Salesforce, but if you have HubSpot, it might be best to have a form that pipes right into HubSpot and attaches it in one spot. There is value and advantages to having things submitted into one spot. However, for me, I find that forms are so malleable that I don't mind just spinning up a couple of new ones, all right, and then the last is going to be Google Slides, and these are just PowerPoints. So Microsoft PowerPoint is the paid version and Google Slides is the free version.
Speaker 1:And Slides. That is how we create all of our slide decks at Punchmark. It is so easy to use. I have a Punchmark boilerplate template that we all built, you know, a while ago, and all I have to do is duplicate out of that and I'm ready to go in. You know 10 seconds, and that's a pretty advantageous thing. I find that the quicker and faster you are able to get started, the more harmonious and, I guess, fluent, you feel so slides. It's very simple. I always just recommend that you set up a good template that is branded appropriately. I sometimes just use a all black template, just straight. All black, white text with a punch mark logo on the bottom left. I use that for really stripped down internal presentations. But however you want to do, it is definitely totally up to you. So all of that to explain.
Speaker 1:Maybe we can talk about how this could be used in a project. So I've talked about our KPI systems and how we use it in Vendor Vault, but maybe I'll just attach a couple more. At Punchmark we have the informal rule of no internal emails, so everything internal meaning team member to team member, needs to be communicated through Slack. That's how we use it. However, I do find that Gmail is the best way for us to work with all of our partners and for me to CC everybody effectively. So we communicate externally with everybody through Gmail and then, when it comes to collaborating internally or externally, we do it through Drive. Drive is the overarching umbrella that everything sits under, and this is free as well. You can set up folders inside of Drive that are project-based, so inside of a folder you can have another entire hierarchy of subfolders, and that's pretty cool, and you can have more and more subfolders available to you and those folders can always be permission protected. So if you're working on something sensitive and it's important that you keep certain things private or above a certain level of clearance, well, that's pretty easy to do. All you have to do is just make it so that it's invite access only and then control who gets invited.
Speaker 1:Google Docs are pretty cool because we use that to write out our documents and write the base copy for anything. You can also set things up so that they're formatted in the most raw, stripped down, unformatted version of copy, which makes it easy to mold in different things, whether that's the punchmark blog editor, I've been writing tons of punchmark blogs for a different project I've been on and with those, every single one of those blogs starts in Google Docs. Google Sheets is great because it allows you to stay organized. When I went to launch this campaign I recently was working on with Ross, the entire step-by-step process was outlined in Google Sheets and we knew what we were going to do. On one tab was the checkpoints. On the next tab it was the organization of the content. On the next tab. We had just a spreadsheet that was like kind of storyboarding and ideas and like, also just like internal checklists, because you know, sometimes you need a spot to just throw things. And those sheets we keep in a Google Drive he's kind of getting my points on this one.
Speaker 1:And forms work really great with sheets. Forms can pipe right into sheets on the same tab or you can export all your information into a different one. What I've used Google Forms for when it came to in the loop was actually for our entries to our giveaways. You complete a Google form and then that information sometimes goes into a spreadsheet and then I'm able to take that information, export it and then randomly draw from that information and then finally slides that's more presentation of information. And then finally slides that's more presentation of information. And what's cool about that is that you don't need to have it on a thumb drive or anything like that. You can always just share it directly with that person and then revoke access if you ever want to. And that's how we make everybody submit their presentations at our client workshop in Charlotte, north Carolina is. A lot of times we prefer people share us their Google Slides. I think it's one of those steps. That is a major undertaking for any company.
Speaker 1:However, cloud-based information, especially when it comes to collaboration, is what you need these days and I would highly recommend, if you haven't tried it, maybe consider it. Punchmark is on it, we love it. Anytime someone comes in, they're like, oh, how come you don't use Google Docs, so how come you don't use the Microsoft Suite? And I'm just like, oh, come on, let me tell you, and I feel very strongly about it. I'd recommend you try it out. If you have any questions, maybe shoot me an email, michael at punchmarkcom, and that is a Gmail. Thanks, everybody. I think that's where we'll leave it. I appreciate you listening to me ramble about how much I love G Suite. And yeah, this episode was brought to you by Punchmark and produced and hosted by me, michael Burpo. This episode was edited by Paul Suarez with music by Ross Cockrum. Don't forget to rate the podcast on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. It's the best way to help us grow Bye.
