This is Day 17 in the 31 Days to Become a More Efficient Virtual Assistant Series
Previous post: 7 Tips to Become an Advanced Google Drive User
For virtual assistants, being able to collaborate effectively with members of your team is crucial. While there are other tools available, one tool I recommend to all my clients as well as fellow virtual assistants is Google Drive. This is a suite of free web services from Google that allow you to create various types of online documents you can easily share and work on in real time with members of your team. You can also upload and store documents on your Google Drive and access them anywhere you have Internet connectivity.
Google Drive can also save you a lot of time. As we all know time is money. You can quickly and easily create documents and share them with your clients. They can then work on it with you in real time. You are both able to track changes and communicate while working together, all in real time! Let’s take a more in depth look at the three major services that make up Google Drive.
Documents
One of the benefits of using Google Drive is the ability to work easily with multiple document formats.
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You can view document revisions as well as all previous versions.
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Documents can be emailed to other team members as attachments. Have a specific area you’d like to call attention to? You can easily do so by highlighting the area and then “insert comment”.
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Once the documents is good to go, you can easily download and save your document in any of four popular formats including Microsoft Word, RTF, PDF or HTML.
Spreadsheets
In addition to being able to work with documents, you can also create and edit spreadsheets.
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You can upload and save .CSV formatted spreadsheets as Google spreadsheets.
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You can chat in real time with people editing your spreadsheet. You can also add comments into specific cells to call attention to certain things (or as a reminder to something specific).
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You can create charts with your data. This is something that can enhance your client’s spreadsheets when creating presentations.
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Google spreadsheets works exactly like Excel spreadsheets meaning you can perform formula calculations and use sophisticated formatting commands to make your spreadsheets look great.
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Individual sheets can be embedded on your blog or website.
Drive
The main feature of Google Drive is a cloud storage account where you can upload and save photos, videos, documents and other files. Along with being able to create and edit documents and spreadsheets, you can also create professional presentations and edit photos and graphics. A Gmail account is require to access Google Drive. You get about 30GB of free storage to start with the option to buy additional storage space based on your needs.
With Google Drive you can access your files from any computer, tablet or smartphone anywhere and anytime. You can create folders and organize your files based on your requirements and keep all your files available and ready to go. You can get some organization tips on yesterday’s post: Seven Tips to Become an Advanced Google Drive User
