Google apps and drive and docs etc

[Tim Sture]

Trying to get my head round all this but struggling to make sense and the Google introduction pages are pretty crap (for me anyway) in that not really making it clear enough. It just all seems to be written in a different language and I get this swimming through treacle feeling

 

Got any idiots guides you can point to for me to read up?

 

Plan is to make files available via this to at least one or two other people as well as myself in the coming months - so want to duplicate stuff easily and have it sync automatically without it being in three places on my hard disk!

[Violet Elizabeth]

Yes, it is confusing !

 

Google Drive - like another hard disk but "in the cloud". When installed on your PC/Mac it will show up just like another drive. You can also access via a web interface. And share with other people. Apps on phones too. You can put anything you like in here, so MS Office type files.

 

Google Docs - A set of MS Office like tools that allow you to create documents directly in your Google Drive. And also the name of the MS Word like wordprocessor, with Sheets and Slides as Excel and Powerpoint. The advantage of this is that if you share with someone they don't need Word/Excel etc.

 

Google Apps (for business, for education etc) - a set of Google Tool that includes Drive, Docs, as well as Hangouts, shared Calendar and "@yourbusinessname" gmail accounts. You probably don't need this.

 

Also Chrome Apps, which are "apps" in the Chrome Browser for Docs/Sheets/Slides.

 

So with Drive you get Docs. And this is probably all you need.

[Simon.Rogers1]

Once shared and relevant permissions given the cool thing about Google Docs is that everyone who is sharing can work on the document at the same time (within reason).

 

Memsec (Sam) and I used to run these when keeping entry lists up to date and when one of us entered or updated the sheet the other would see the screen refresh.