If you’re anything like us at Matter Solutions, you appreciate tools and platforms that are simple but ultimately, work well.
Thankfully for all of us, Google does offer some valuable and useful tools that are free (mostly) and enable you to run most the aspects of your business or even life.
The everyday tools
The everyday Google tools are fairly obvious and unquestionably useful.
- Search Engine: You probably used it to reach this article and anytime you want to find out anything.
- Maps: One of the most useful tools available to the public. It provides the user with directions, travel times, street views and range of other features.
- Chrome: To put simply, chrome is a web browser like internet explorer. It is fast, simple, secure and customisable.
G Suite
Google suite is a collection of tools centered around business and more than anything; productivity.
- Gmail: Gmail is Google's email and is exceptionally reliable. It is excellent for businesses because of its ease of use and can be set-up quickly.
- Calendar: calendars best feature is its time-saving ability, easily integrating your Gmail, google drive, sites, contacts, and hangouts.
- Hangouts: a very useful video chat tool that is good for business meetings. Hangouts is also simple to set-up and like all of the Google products, integrates well with other Google products, calendar especially.
- Docs: docs is a watered down version of Microsoft Word. Whilst it doesn’t offer the extensive features that the traditional Microsoft word offers, because of its ease of access for the writer, and the ability to make a document accessible to everyone in your office.
- Sheets: like docs, sheets is a watered down version of Microsoft Excel. Sheets still allows users to do more advanced functions like data analysis and is easily shared among the office. Maybe the biggest is the ability for multiple users to be editing a sheets document at once, which can potentially save huge amounts of time for businesses.
- Slides: slides is fantastic for a group of people collaborating on a group presentation. You can see the uses for this product in business especially, is a quick presentation is on the cards, slides will allow multiple people to edit the presentation, saving valuable time that can be spent on preparing what you are going to say.
- Keep: If Docs and Sheets are Chris and Liam Hemsworth, and Slides is the third Hemsworth brother than Google keep is a second cousin. Made for taking notes, keep is actually very useful because of its integration with other Google Suite platforms.
- Drive: drive is comparable to Apple's iCloud. It is less personalised, however, and focuses more on business features, like quick access to docs, sheets and slides and unlimited storage capabilities.
- Cloud search: this tool essentially allows you to search for anything across the Google platforms you are using. This could be Gmail, docs, sheets, slides etc.
The lesser known
Google has an extensive range of products, so there are bound to be a few that fall by the wayside.
- Google Duo: Duo is a one-to-one video calling service. It adjusts to the quality of the video according to the network/internet quality of the two callers to optimise performance.
- Google Flights: Flights is a flight booking service. One of the valuable features of the service is the ability to track prices, so you can get alerts when prices drop and receive valuable travel tips also.
- Google News: news is very simple, gathering a collection of different news stories from different news outlets.
- Waze: a navigation and traffic app, Waze is simply fantastic for users, allowing them to plan their driving trip, but also informing the user on when traffic will be at its peak and adjust driving routes accordingly. The app can even tell users when the best time to leave is to avoid traffic and delays.
- Google Trips: Trips allows the user to plan out their day and organise trips. Ideal for travelers, it provides suggestions of where you should stop off on your trip for the day and highlights nearby attractions.
Overall Google has a number of very valuable products for users, with a full list of the products available here.
The takeaway from this list is that productivity and simplicity seem to be at the forefront of Google's thought process when designing the tools for users and especially businesses owner. Matter Solutions shares these views of productivity and simplicity, something we pride ourselves on whether it be our SEO or use of Google products.
