Google Apps – Mr. Bradford Online

Using Google Calendar to Find a Time to Meet

By admin | July 25, 2019 | Comments 0 Comment

I recently gave a presentation at the Arcadia Innovation Summit on how school administrators can use G Suite to communicate better and increase their productivity. Below is one of the ideas that I shared for increasing communication before a meeting. Enjoy!

One of the most difficult parts about scheduling a meeting is finding the time to meet. Normally there are several emails sent back and forth before a time is agreed upon. In the video below you will learn how to use Google Calendar to quickly find a time to meet. This is a huge time saver!

The Workspace Document

By admin | November 12, 2015 | Comments 0 Comment

I realized earlier this year that I have a lot of files in my Google Drive named untitled. When I thought about why I have so many untitled documents I realized it’s because most of them were temporary files that I created in order to quickly type something or quickly create a table. I never named these documents because they were throw away documents that I only needed for a temporary moment.

While having numerous untitled documents is not a bad thing, I recently have been using a Workspace Google Doc and a Workspace Google Sheet to help me organize my thoughts. There is nothing fancy about my workspace documents. I literally just click create a new document and made a blank document. When I need a quick space to type out an email, create a schedule, or crunch some numbers I open up my workspace, erase what was previously there, and start working.

In addition to limiting the number of documents in my Drive, this workflow has been super helpful in organizing my work. Instead of searching several different untitled documents trying to find what I’m looking for, I instead open up my workspace doc revision history and start looking at previous versions of my document until I find what I need.

I won’t lie, it was hard to break my habit of creating a new document every time I needed one. To help break this habit I created bookmark links on my bookmarks bar to both documents. These links serve as a quick way to access the documents. Having the links in front of me has also helped with reminding me that the documents exists and that I should be using them.

If you are like me and you have a ton of documents in your Google Drive titled untitled I suggest giving the workspace document a shot. The only thing you have to lose is another random document or sheet in your Google Drive!

=Concatenate

By admin | July 9, 2014 | Comments 1 comment

Anyone who works with spreadsheets will tell you that there are times when you need to combine the data from two cells into one. Recently I ran into this issue when creating my class rosters. I had a cell for first name and one for last name. What I needed was one cell that contained both first and last name. At this point I had a choice. I could either rewrite them all or use a function to auto populate the fields.

I really didn’t want to spend hours typing in names so I used a function. Earlier in the day my schools Director of Technology taught me about the CONCATENATE function.

The CONCATENATE function takes data from different cells in a spread sheet and combines the data into one cell.

For example I was able to use this function to combine the data in my first name and last name cells into one cell. Below is a breakdown of how the function works…..and yes it works in both Excel and Google Sheets.

So the next time that you need to combine two pieces of data into one I would highly recommend using the CONCATENATE function. It’s a huge time saver!