A Love Affair with Google Docs

I drank the Google Docs Kool-Aid.

For years I put off trying Google Docs. I’d heard good things about it, how it could make life/work easier, blah blah blah, but didn’t think I had a valid reason to take the time to learn another new program/tool. It wasn’t until an instructor came to me and expressed interest in using it in her class that I actually looked at Google Docs seriously.

What did I discover? I love it! It’s simple, and what I like to call “stupid easy” – ridiculously easy. I thought it would be complicated to use, but it definitely is not.

As an example of how simple it is to use, one day my boss told me he heard you can make surveys with Google Docs and the results go straight into a spreadsheet. That’s pretty cool, I thought. So I opened up my Google account and less than 3 minutes later I had a silly 3-question “Form” sent out to colleagues. I didn’t use help guides or tutorials; it was intuitive.

If you haven’t used Google Docs yet, check out the oldy but goody “Google Docs in Plain English” video (use the link or watch it below).

Practical Examples

To add practicality to this otherwise simple memoir, here are some of the best ways I’ve used Google Docs:

  • Avoid attachments. I made a list of workshops we’ve offered this year and sent the link to over a dozen people to get input on workshops their staff/faculty might want this summer.
  • Survey to gauge interest and make decisions. When we were starting this blog I set up a survey and sent it to my colleagues to decide what we should call the blog (voted on 15 possible names, whittled down from a much larger brainstorming list), who would be willing to write for it, and what topics they’d cover.
  • Schedule blog posts and other events. Continued from above, not only did the results of that survey name this blog, but they also helped me put together a schedule of who would be responsible for writing a blog post each week an on which topic.
  • Work-in-progress document. We upgraded to a newer version of an LMS and put together a list of changes and known issues. Since the document would change as new issues/changes were discovered, a static attachment to an email would not suffice. We also needed multiple people to be able to edit it without passing an email back and forth.
  • Co-author an eBook. Several of us in my office recently used it to write an eBook. That’s right, we wrote the eBook simultaneously which was super efficient. We could all work on our different parts and review each others’ work quickly and easily. (Be on the lookout for a future blog post about this process!)

So, I’d encourage you to give Google Docs a try. You might also be surprised at how easy it is and how much time and energy it can save you and your colleagues. The possibilities (well, variations anyway) are limitless!

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