An informative article written by CustomMade guest blogger Doug Turner of Turner Custom Furniture. Doug is a very talented woodworker as-well- as a savvy businessman. Doug likes to share his business and marketing tips with other craftspeople in order to help them run efficient, successful businesses.
Google Docs is an expanding suite of applications, which allows the creation of:
- Documents
- Spreadsheets
- Tables
- Forms
- Presentations
- Drawings
None of these applications is extremely complex – for instance, the drawing program is not Sketchup. It’s sort of like Microsoft Paint, but again, it is web based, meaning you can sketch in real time while someone watches and sketches on the same drawing at the same time, which is very useful.
For the most part, I use the document and spreadsheet applications to create:
- Day, week and month plans to share with employees, business partners and subcontractors.
- Cut lists
- Rough accounting spreadsheets, meaning a quick view of who is getting paid what and when for each job, sales tax liabilities, subcontractor payments etc. I don’t recommend it for full fledged accounting, but it’s nice to be able to have a quick view of job income, sort of like a web based dry erase board.
- Employee manuals
- Vendor contact information spreadsheets
- Contracts
- Presentations
- Fabrication standards
- Project drawings and notes
- If you don’t have one, create a Google account, here: https://accounts.google.com/NewAccount
- Navigate to the Google docs home page, here: https://docs.google.com/
- Start playing. Google Docs will save automatically, and you can always delete docs you don’t want.
Comments
I ran a series of "give-aways" on my blog. I embedded a Google Docs form which saved the submissions in an Excel style spreadsheet. Google even sent me an email everytime someone submitted an entry. And as you say, it is free.
Google "docs" is a great tool and its free. Recently I am starting to doubt the privacy policy of googles. Free is a term google and others love to use.Google use every single key stroke to make money off of you (direct advetisments)companies pay google top dollar for this. From a markeeting stand point and in a free market world we should market our info and even get paid for using google !!
FYI, Office 365 is cloud-based. It includes all of the usual suspects in the Office Suite, including Exchange Online-based email, calendars and contacts. It's not free but the $6 a month for individual plan is cheap compared to the up-front costs for the desktop Office. And no advertising dollars to support it, sort of the PBS vs commercial TV model.
I found this article to be very informative. I have never really got into Google Docs much, but I feel that I should give it a try after reading this. Thank you :)
Log in or create an account to post a comment.
Sign up Log in