Google has changed the way businesses do work. If you are considering switching to using Google Apps and Chromebooks at your office, then this book will be your crash course! It covers how Chromebook work, getting started with Google Analytics, and the most popular Google Apps (Docs, Sheets, and Slides) This book is not endorsed by Alphabet, Inc. and should be considered unofficial.

Chances are you grew up a Word and Office user. Maybe you were a rebel and committed your herd to OpenOffice, or, dare I say, WordPerfect—but for the majority of people, our lives were loyal to Microsoft. In 2005, a small little startup named Upstartle developed something unheard of at the time: a web-based word processor called Writely. It pioneered the idea of writing on the “cloud” and changed the way people thought about word processing. Google noticed the little upstart, and in 2006, they acquired the company. The software was abandoned and turned into what everyone knows today as Google Docs. It disrupted the industry—namely, Microsoft’s industry. Today, Google has a whole suite of productivity apps; from documents to spreadsheets, you can do just about anything from the cloud. Microsoft and Apple have each made big attempts to create cloud-based environments of their own for office productivity, but Google pioneered the idea and its collaborative, online environment make it hard to beat. It’s become so feature-rich that many businesses are finding it to be the preferred way to conduct business. If you are thinking about making the switch to Google, or have already made the switch but want to make sure you are using it correctly, then this guide will walk you through it. It will show you all the basic features to make sure you can get up and running as quickly as possible. It covers Google Drive, Google Docs, Google Slides, Google Sheets, and Google Forms. Let’s get started!

Email as a communication tool has been used since the 1960s. Commercial use of email is still relatively young. Today, email is dominated by one company: Google. Estimates show that over 50% of all people with email use Gmail! If you picked up this book, you probably have one or are considering getting one. For its email service, Gmail is easy enough to use—compose email, send email, done! But there’s more to Gmail than sending and receiving email. How do you get not-Spam emails to stop showing up as Spam, for example? What on Earth are labels? And how do you get email forwarded to another inbox? If you want to be a power user, then read on!

For 40-some-odd years, the world of spreadsheets has been ruled by one king: Microsoft Excel. Sure, there were far away challengers that tried to overtake the beast—I’m looking at you, Lotus 1-2-3—but none have come close to dethroning the powerful tool…until Google Sheets. So what is Google Sheets? It’s a cloud-based spreadsheet. Think Excel, but online. “But Excel is online,” you say. Yes! But Google was there first, and really has the advantage over Excel in this arena. It’s quicker and easier to use for collaboration. Google Sheets is also free; Excel has monthly/yearly subscriptions. If you’d like to get the most out of the software, then let’s get started! Note: This book is the Google Sheets portion of the larger work: The Ridiculously Simple Guide to Google Apps (G Suite). This book is not endorsed by Alphabet, Inc.

Microsoft Office used to rule them all. It didn’t matter what computer or operating system you had—if you needed to type something, you used Office. Times have changed! Today there are many Office Suites out there. If you have a Mac, then the best one for you just might be iWork. If you really want to get the most out of it, then this guide will help. It will show you the ropes—including how to do all those things you are used to doing in Office - and help you with some of the features you may not even know about. Ready to get started? Let’s go!

It used to be a few times a year Apple would take the stage and announce something that everyone’s head exploded over! The iPhone! The iPad! The Apple Watch! The iPod! That still happens today, but Apple also is well aware of the reality: most people don’t upgrade to new hardware every year. How does a company make money when that happens? In a word: services. In the past few years (especially in 2019) Apple announced several services—things people would opt into to pay for monthly. It was a way to continue making money even when people were not buying hardware. For it to work, Apple knew it had to be good. They couldn’t just offer a subpar service and expect people to pay because it said Apple. It had to be good. And it is! This book will walk you through those services and show you how to get the most out of them.

Take project management to the next level Working as a team can be challenging, but working remotely as a team can add a layer of complexity to the work; it can be difficult to monitor who is working on (or responsible for) different aspects of a project and where they are in terms of deliverables. Trello, which is a part of the enterprise software development company Atlassian, is a Kanban-style project management tool that can run natively on your computer or on the web. Trello lets you work collaboratively wherever you are and whatever you are working on. There are free and paid versions of the software, so it works for any budget and any company regardless of size. It also integrates with the software you already have. This book is not endorsed by Atlassian Corporation Plc. and should be considered unofficial.