I'm also at a company that's a 100% Google Apps and so have been forced to make a good go at it.
- Gmail is great for near-term communications, having chat in the same place makes it a nice communications hub for immediate and near-term communications. I like it better than Outlook and it seems much snappier in day-to-day use.
But I find it almost unusable when looking for emails from a while ago. It's so bad that I connect to my mailbox with Thunderbird and use Thunderbird's search to find anything. The problem is with the threaded conversations, I'll get search results, with the result buried somewhere in 1 of a 100 different emails in the conversation and as far as I know there's no easy way to sort through that pile.
- Calendar is actually pretty good. For my use as good as Outlook. It integrates nicely with Gmail and gets the job done. It's also pretty snappy in day-to-day.
- Document is okay for very simple things. Collaboration is a killer feature. But it's missing many of the things that makes Word superior. It's bad enough that people in my company who interact with anybody outside of the company are on the list for a personal MS-Office license...pretty much just for Word. The review functions (comments, change tracking etc.) in Word is absolutely needed if you work on any kind of contract/proposal paperwork. I find that I quickly exceed the formatting abilities of of the web app without getting into anything too fancy.
- Sheets is also okay for very simple things. However, my accounting department sends me a pretty simple traditional spreadsheet showing timetracking for my staff and it's totally unviewable in the web app. I'd rather just use the web app then firing up Excel, but I simply can't.
- I don't think I've ever bothered with the presentation app or anything else in the suite, but that's all I really need to use. TBH, it's actually a pretty nice suite that gets me about 70% where I need to be. However, all our internal tracking tools (Atlassian tools) really want documents instead of links to shared on-line docs so you end up importing/exporting everything as word docs anyways.
but I have to say I think that this (2nd, 3rd?) rewrite of sheets looks really good. I'm going to try it out the next time I need to deal with staff time.
If you can't find it in GMail, then how on Earth do you find things by Googling them?
Ten minutes spent learning how operators works will save you hours of time. Google was right when they said 'archive everything' and that folders were a terrible idea.
For #1, Hit the "Expand all" button (it's the one to the left of the print button at the top of the entire conversation. Then use Ctrl-F to search within.
I'll be honest, I had not thought to look next to the print icon for an expand all button and unless you told me what that was I would have had no idea what it was for.
> I'll get search results, with the result buried somewhere in 1 of a 100 different emails in the conversation and as far as I know there's no easy way to sort through that pile.
Expand the conversation and use the built-in browser search.
- Gmail is great for near-term communications, having chat in the same place makes it a nice communications hub for immediate and near-term communications. I like it better than Outlook and it seems much snappier in day-to-day use.
But I find it almost unusable when looking for emails from a while ago. It's so bad that I connect to my mailbox with Thunderbird and use Thunderbird's search to find anything. The problem is with the threaded conversations, I'll get search results, with the result buried somewhere in 1 of a 100 different emails in the conversation and as far as I know there's no easy way to sort through that pile.
- Calendar is actually pretty good. For my use as good as Outlook. It integrates nicely with Gmail and gets the job done. It's also pretty snappy in day-to-day.
- Document is okay for very simple things. Collaboration is a killer feature. But it's missing many of the things that makes Word superior. It's bad enough that people in my company who interact with anybody outside of the company are on the list for a personal MS-Office license...pretty much just for Word. The review functions (comments, change tracking etc.) in Word is absolutely needed if you work on any kind of contract/proposal paperwork. I find that I quickly exceed the formatting abilities of of the web app without getting into anything too fancy.
- Sheets is also okay for very simple things. However, my accounting department sends me a pretty simple traditional spreadsheet showing timetracking for my staff and it's totally unviewable in the web app. I'd rather just use the web app then firing up Excel, but I simply can't.
- I don't think I've ever bothered with the presentation app or anything else in the suite, but that's all I really need to use. TBH, it's actually a pretty nice suite that gets me about 70% where I need to be. However, all our internal tracking tools (Atlassian tools) really want documents instead of links to shared on-line docs so you end up importing/exporting everything as word docs anyways.
but I have to say I think that this (2nd, 3rd?) rewrite of sheets looks really good. I'm going to try it out the next time I need to deal with staff time.