 Welcome to TechSoup Connect. I'm Sandra Amur, and I'm your TechSoup Connect host for the Ontario chapter. TechSoup Connect is a program of TechSoup, which is a global network of tech for good need-ups. And TechSoup is a nonprofit that helps other nonprofits get, implement, and use technology effectively. As I mentioned, I'm Sandra Amur. I'm a digital workplace expert. I've been helping businesses of all sizes implement efficient digital workplaces and including nonprofits. I have over 20 years experience in IT and project management, implementing a variety of systems with most of my career being with HR systems, but moving into a whole bunch of other systems and project management type of work. I'm the national past president now of the One Parent Families Association. So I understand what it means to work in a nonprofit. And again, I'm your host today for Ontario chapter. And I'd like to take this opportunity to quickly go over some of our community values. We welcome everyone here, and we're all about building a community to here, and we're here to support each other. Our goal is to build stronger nonprofits. And technology is one of those really important tools in helping nonprofits work more efficiently and become stronger so that you can then help all of your communities thrive as well. Love to have you participate. Everybody has something to learn and contribute. So as I go through, if you have something interesting to say or to share, please feel free to use the chat or in the broader term of things. If you have any ideas for future events or now that we're kind of COVID, if you have any ideas for in-person get-togethers in the Toronto area or I guess Ontario, but I'm based in near Toronto. If you have any ideas for events, for in-person events, please let me know. I did become a tech host when just as the pandemic was starting, so I haven't had the opportunity to do any in-person events. So it would be nice to meet some people face to face. I tend to find that we do these online events, and I'm able to say a quick hello, but I don't really get to connect with anyone because we're trying to deliver some great content to you guys so that you can learn and grow. But if you have anything in mind for in-person events, please feel free to let me know or virtual because I'll still be doing virtual events. And obviously we treat each other with kindness and respect. A little bit about TechSoup Connect. It can help connect you with donated and discounted products from software hardware, all sorts of things. And as an example, these are some of the types of things that you can get through TechSoup at discounted or free prices. You can also, and we're here to talk about some changes in Google Workspace today, you can sign up through Google for nonprofits for free to use Google Workspace as well. This is an example of how much you could save going through TechSoup as an example of a nonprofit with 10 staff. So you can see that you can get some really good deals by registering with TechSoup. TechSoup also has a forum where you can get help and answers to questions about all sorts of tech related items. So if you have any questions or you just want to browse and see if you can learn something new, check out forums.techsoup.org. And again, as I mentioned, I'd love any help or ideas for events. And if you know somebody who might want to present or have something interesting to share that all other nonprofits can learn from, please feel free to let me know. So today we're talking about what's new in Google Workspace. And coming up in February is the funding drivers that raise you more. This is a joint event with our Vancouver chapter. So be sure to check that one out as well. And also for any of you that might have been registered for our previous event on data visualization that had to be canceled at the last minute, that will be rescheduled. I think we're looking at a mid November date and I just have to wrap that up. So keep an eye out on your calendars for that. It should be coming soon. Okay. And you had asked, do they offer services for government employees? So I'm not sure specifically what you mean. I don't know if they have government service, like not for government employees specifically. I know they might offer services for something like libraries. But I think the criteria that you need to be a nonprofit so as a government employee on your own, no, I don't think so. But if you reach out to their support, they should be able to answer that for you. All right. So let's get started here. We're going to talk about what's new in Google Workspace today or over the past year. I've already gone over who I am. So I won't do that. This is a slide that I like to include in my presentations a little bit about how I look at building an efficient digital workplace and how it takes these three separate components of people plus processes plus technology and how you need to look at the whole thing to make sure that you're working efficiently. But I won't go into too much detail on that. So today we're going to talk about some of the changes in Google Workspace. And as a nonprofit you already know and I mentioned you can get Google for nonprofits for free. If you are new to Google Workspace, these are little slides and I'll send this out with the presentation afterwards. But a few key features of Google Workspace that I'm going to get right into the changes because I've done this presentation once before and I got really close to using up the full hour. So I'm going to barrel through here. So if you have questions, feel free to either come on off mute and ask a question and stop me or ping something in the chat and I'll try to look back and answer questions as I go if I'm able. So we'll start with some changes that have happened for Gmail. And just to give you a frame of reference, I've gone back about a year. I think I went back to about January, February of this year for all the changes that have happened recently up until about the end of August. I think is when I prepped this deck. So there have been a few other changes that have likely happened since then. But that's what this presentation will cover for now. So to start in Gmail, there was a new integrated view for Gmail. So if you go into your email, you'll see, you may have already seen this, a new option to see which apps you can see in Gmail. I have a better view here. So you can see here on the left, this was the old sort of view where everything was a drop down. Whereas the new view here, you can actually put these, you have the option to see the apps here just to the left of these menu items. So right now I have the mail selected. So you can see the mail options. But if you were to hover over chat or spaces, you would see a quick view of some different options available there. And this has just been a nicer view, a nicer way to get to things and to keep all of your communication channels in one place. Another change that's coming or already came when I did this presentation, I didn't have this available in my instance yet. Some of you may have already seen this, but they did launch some email marketing tools for Gmail, which are really interesting. So this first one here is the ability to select a layout for your emails. This has a very similar look and feel to something like MailChimp or other email marketing tools that you might have seen, so that you can actually use them to create this template for newsletters or other math email features that you may want to send out. The second email marketing tool is this multi-send feature. Again, I didn't have the ability to test this myself, but it is a feature that should be available by now to everybody. And it basically allows you to use your contacts or create a contact list so that you can send an email to multiple people at once. And if you are using this feature, so it's called multi-send mode, you can see that here. If you use that, it will also give you this unsubscribed link similar to other email marketing software like MailChimp. All right, some changes for Google Drive. One of the things you'll notice is that they have added these search chips in the top of the search results. So if you start typing, if you do a search and hit Enter, you'll start seeing these search results with these little chips they're called. And this is a great way to be able to filter down your search results in more detail. I've found this really useful for files that have very similar names or may have lots of different types of files for a specific client with a client name in all the files. But I know I'm specifically looking for a PDF, for example, I can filter by file type and narrow that down. Or if I know I modified it in a certain time period, you can narrow it down. It definitely helps with the search results so that you can find what's important more quickly. Another new feature they've added is the ability to see your file locations. So once you've done the search again, so just note the difference that if you're just looking in your Google Drive without doing the search, you won't see this. You do need to do a search for these to pop up. So once you've done that search, if you hover over the location in the far right corner here, it'll actually give you the full file path for the file. I found this useful as well because sometimes they might have similar files that are again named similarly, but they're in different locations. Maybe I have a proposal file name that says proposal for client. We'll show up in different client folders. So by using the location and hovering over it, if you click those three little dots, it'll expand it for you. It'll help me identify the right file. Another new feature that was added is the ability to use shortcut keys to cut copy and paste files using your keyboard into different files and folders. So this is available on both Macs and PCs. I have tested this one out and I have to be honest. I'm not crazy about it. Maybe my internet connection was just wonky that day. I found it didn't do it as well as I'd like. It wasn't as quick as you can see in the little demo here. I found I had to wait a while for that control C to pick up the file and to have it ready to paste, but definitely a great tool and maybe it works for you better than it works for me, but you can give that a shot. Next one is adding shared drives to specific organizational units. With this update, if you're in the Google admin, so if you're in the back end of your Google workspace, you'll have a greater control and more options to decide how data is accessed and shared on a case-by-case basis. So if you're using shared drives and suborganizational units, then you may find that useful as well. Trust rules. So this is something else that has changed and this gives admins more control over how you can share files both inside and within your organization and internally. So I'm just double checking my notes here. So you can add all these different trust rules to enforce different policies. Sorry, I just saw a question pop up. Yes, so to go back to, so would shared drive structure also work for say different family members? Yes, you can. I think Google has some other features for family sharing if I'm not mistaken, but if you are, because Google, one might be a little different, but if you're using a Google workspace account for kind of family things, absolutely, you can give each family their own shared drive so they can share their own information, keep their own information in a shared drive. But when we're talking about personal use for Google, that having a Google workspace account might not necessarily be necessary. So I guess it depends if you want all of your family to see everything. So the benefit of having a shared drive is so that you can collaborate on things with other people. So each individual user that has a Google account will have their own my drive. I'm not sure when I last did it, but my drive, Google drive training, if you look back in the TechSoup events for the Ontario chapter, you might find a Google drive training that might explain the differences between shared drives and my drive that might help you with whatever problem you're trying to solve with that question. So hopefully that helps. But you could, it just, each person would probably share the drive with everybody else in order to collaborate. I'm not sure if that answers your question, but I'll move on. So we talked about trust rules, and this is basically setting up different ways to ensure your data safe and secure, whether you're sharing internally or externally. Alright, so there's a new way, and this was another one that I wasn't able to test. It hadn't been released to my instance yet. So this is another way to share using Google drive. So it's called visitor sharing and a concept here is that you're able to assign a pin code to a file you're trying to share with a visitor or somebody external to your organization. So they would use that pin code in order to access the file. And I believe you can also set a limit as to how long the file can be shared for like you can put a cutoff time. Again, I wasn't able to test it. But if you do search for file sharing, it's called a search for pin sharing or visitor sharing, you may be able to find where to turn that on because it does need to be turned on in the admin section in the back. But like I said, that wasn't available to me. So I don't have any screenshots there for you. But definitely something you want to look at as a nonprofit. So if you're sharing any sensitive information with potential donor or other external partners, especially any financial information, that might be a good option for you for sharing files externally. Alright, some changes in Google Meet. Alright, you may have already noticed this by now because this change was I think a while ago, but the app icons have now changed. So Google Meet has essentially become Google, sorry, Google Duo has become Google Meet. So it's all one app now. I don't know if anyone was actually using Duo. I think that was more of a personal app before. And now everything's just become Google Meet. An improvement for Google Meet. So you may have noticed this if you've been attending any Google Meet meetings and shown up by yourself. So if you, if everybody leaves a call except for yourself, or you start a call and nobody shows up, and you know, I have the tendency to, if I started meeting early, I may go to another tab and do some other work and forget about the meeting because I'm waiting to hear somebody come on, but they don't. So what this setting does is help make sure that you don't stay connected to a Google Meeting for longer than you should be when you're the only one there. So you'll get this notification to remind you that it's going to automatically end in two minutes because you're the only one there. Picture and picture is available. So basically this helps pop out your, the video so that you can do some work on the side or maybe look up a file or something that needs to happen, but still have the video playing there in the side without needing to kind of rise that entire screen so that you can easily jump back and forth. And I have used that one. It is quite handy. All right. So Google Calendar, sorry, Google Meet now has the ability to see the guest list in Google Meet. So this was something that Microsoft Teams had, which I really liked because you invite a whole bunch of people to a meeting and you start the meeting and you're not sure as to are you waiting for that or are you waiting for anybody else to join. So having that list here and people on the side makes it easy to see that Susan hasn't joined yet and Susan's critical for this meeting. So let's wait or let's use this little chat icon to quickly send her a message and make sure she shows up or find out if she's tied up with something else. So that's a great great. Oh, and it also, if you saw that there, but you're also able to quickly add people from there as well. Okay. So this is one that you may find useful as well is the ability to ask your participants questions and have them respond anonymously. So you may find this useful in some of your board meetings or other meetings that are where you have a large number of people and maybe you don't want you don't want people to feel awkward for being tied to their answer or being able to provide more truthful responses, perhaps sometimes. So by allowing them to actually respond anonymously, you have that option now. So those questions, all responses. So this will be marked as anonymous by default and you can change it on an as needed basis. Oh, sorry. I did that backwards. It will be off by default and you need to turn it on when you share a poll and they don't carry over from meeting to meeting. They won't be anonymous polls will be off by default for all meetings and you need to set it to anonymous any for any meeting you want to use. Oops. Too fast. Nero is now available within Google Meet as an app. So if you haven't checked out Nero yet, it's you may have to pay a subscription fee to use it, but I believe there's a free plan if I'm not mistaken, where you can use it for smaller teams. It's a great collaborative tool for online meetings and collaboration of any type. It comes with a whole bunch of different templates that you can use to collaborate with others on team calls. And the add in here is really just helping you connect it so that it's easier to create new boards or create a new template so that you can share it right within your meeting. And that's an example there of some of the types of things you can use it for. But there's a whole bunch of other templates that you can use as well. Yes, France five. I've used it in a workshop as well. It's really great, especially for large teams. It's really useful. Okay, so live streaming Google Meet events. Now I believe this one I think is only enterprise teaching. Yes, so this one's only available on the enterprise teaching and learning upgrade and education plus workspace additions. So if you're only using Google for nonprofits, you may not have this option. But if I know there are probably some people around here that are using the education version or teaching versions, you may then be able to use this feature, which basically lets you live stream your Google Meet to YouTube. So you can you might find this useful if you need to if you're presenting a class or a workshop or something for some something and you want to save it to YouTube channel, you can I believe also make it private. It doesn't have to be public, but that will automatically send it to YouTube for you. All right, Google Calendar updates. So the appointment scheduling. This is new to Google Google Calendar this year. What this feature does is essentially allow you to create these appointment slots that people can think of it as a replacement for Calendly. It's maybe not as feature rich as Calendly, but it will give you the basics. It'll give you an appointment page similar to this one that you see here, where somebody can go click on an available time and book an appointment with you and it'll get tied to your calendar. There's some little wonky things with it, but for the most part, it'll definitely help with a basic needs appointment booking for individual users. If you have that need or if you're paying for something and you're looking to replace it, you may want to take a look and fool around with this and you may find some benefits there. This is a secondary piece to the appointment scheduling where you can request an email verification in order to book the appointments in the Google Calendar. So this will help eliminate anybody who may accidentally enter the wrong email address and not get their notifications, for example. So that way they need to validate their email before they can book an appointment on your calendar. They would need a Google account to use that. All right, another other changes for Google Calendar is they've improved the user interface for sharing your working location. So for those of you that may have remote teams and working in or working in a hybrid type of environment where sometimes you may be in different locations, you'll see along the top here you can easily see where you are scheduled to be on any given day and you can easily change it from your calendar as well. What this does is help others when they're booking time with you or looking up your status. They'll know what location you're in and you can set, this would be in the Google Admin backend as to what locations you have, but this could even be helpful if you have multiple office locations perhaps or cities that you work in. You can set those up a bit differently as well. Again, this is the work location. Again, it's enabled by default just so you know you don't have to change that. Okay, so if you are holding a Google Meet meeting virtually, you can set your host controls ahead of time now. So previously you needed to start the meeting and then go in and change all these things for them to take effect, but now you could actually set all this up ahead of time through your Google Calendar. So in your Google Calendar setting up a meeting, I don't think you can see it behind here, but in the calendar there's another little button you can click to pop up your video call options and you can change all of your host control and cogo settings and you can even set out your break rooms ahead of time, your breakout rooms ahead of time. Improved email notifications for Google Calendar invite, that's something you'd probably already noticed by now. So previously you'd have to dig to figure out what was changing, so if somebody updated a meeting invite and you received it, it wasn't always clear exactly what had changed. So they've made it a little more evident now. They've got this green box here that kind of highlights what has changed so that it's easier for you to identify it. So this is related to the other, the changes to your office location that you saw in the calendar up along the top, so this is where you can add different locations as to where you may be working, building A somewhere else or you can add other locations here. So this is better location context for events and RSVPs. So as you're responding to meeting invitations based on what, based on where you've set your location to for that day, it may give you different options for your RSVPs. So you can choose to RSVP and say yes, I'm going to join in the office or yes, I'll be joining remotely. So you can select how you're going to join that specific meeting when you RSVP. This is a neat little feature. It's called time insights and I don't have it. So if you're looking at your Google calendar in the far left, actually I can show you a thing from here. It's not showing on this one because this one maybe didn't have it, but you should be able to see time insights somewhere around here just under the calendar and you click on that and it would open up this box on the right that shows your time insights and it breaks it down by color. So you can, this basically just helps you see how your time is being used if that's something you're interested in. It's not entirely sophisticated in my opinion, but it might be something you're interested in learning more about. So you can take a look. All right, some chat update. All right, so if you are chatting with somebody, you can now automatically add a task right from the chat. So if you see there, I know it's a little bit fuzzy, but if you click those little icons, you can add to task. So that's a great way to, in the middle of a conversation with somebody, they ask you to do something you quickly added to your task list. All right, moving on to docs. So Google Docs has added some assistive writing suggestions. So these are automated and as you type it will give you considerations on how to better word things, better phrase things, and basically just to help you create more impactful documents more quickly. It may help you give you some alternate wording or suggest if you need to use an active voice versus a passive voice. It can help with sentence structure, making things more concise, or also even using more inclusive language and identifying any potentially inappropriate words. So you'll see that by default. So this is another feature in Google Docs. You can add these little chips. So we saw these earlier in the search bar changes on Google Drive, but you can actually add these little drop downs to your documents. I find this useful when I'm creating any sort of project status report or any kind of document that's going to be a living document that gets updated regularly. It's handy to have these little drop downs and you're able to quickly change them as you go through things. You could even use them on meeting agenda templates, for example, for any action items, and reuse that document for the next meeting and keep your action items updated that way. Okay, so taking action on multiple tech selections in Google Docs. So this new feature allows you to select. So using the control button, you can see here you can select project overview, hit control, select market trends, and select any other text, and you can change that text all at once. So make it bold or underlined, etc. Okay, so changes to document content. So they've added the ability to set notifications for anything that's changed. So if you need to keep on top of a specific document and know when something was modified or changed, you can use this notification settings to be notified of those changes. Similar to the chat, you can also easily assign tasks right here from Google Docs. So if you see when you're using the checklist feature here, there's a little icon that shows up just to the left of the checkbox there, that will allow you to automatically add a task. And you can see that the person, I know it's the animations going a little quickly, but you can see as you enter that the person's face shows up or icon avatar, sorry, shows up next to that checkbox so that you know it's assigned to that specific person. All right, emojis. In Google Docs, you previously know you were able to add a comment and add information. Now you can also add an emoji. This is really useful on collaborative documents where maybe somebody's entered a comment and you don't actually need to go and sort of enter some sort of status update and you just need to acknowledge that you've seen it. You don't need to add a comment and type yes and read this, thank you. You can actually just use the emoji and either celebrate it or give it a thumbs up, for example. And you can do the same. You can use the at symbol plus whatever emoji shortcut to enter, quickly enter emojis in line with your text in Google Docs as well. All right, moving on to Google Sheets. So Google Sheets has increased its element. So if you are a heavy user of Google Sheets, you will probably be happy to hear that it doubled the cell limit to 1 million, I think, 10 million. It's 10 million cells and they will be doubling that as well. Let me just get the date here. So they moved it from 5 million to 10 million cells and they are planning to go. I know they were planning to double it. I thought I had that noted here, but I think they're planning on doubling it again over the next year or two. So keep an eye out for that if you're a super heavy user of Google worksheet. Yeah, I know, right? That's a lot of cells. All right, moving on to Google Forms. If you use forms, they have added a few more options for styling your fonts in Google Forms before they only had one option. So now they have a few more options and you can change the different headers and question or text so you can make them all look different. There really isn't that much to choose from as far as the type of font you get to choose. It may or may not be useful for you. The options there, at least you can change the size as well. So that's handy. I can change the color, which is nice. All right, on to sites. So Google Sites, if you haven't heard yet, if you are using Google Sites, you need to migrate your classic Google Sites before December 1st. I would assume if you're using Google Sites, then you're hopefully already aware of this. You should have received a number of emails for it. But if you haven't, you're using them, just make sure to move everything over. I believe they have, yes. So there is a site manager, there's a classic site manager that can help you migrate everything over as long as you do it before December 1st. After January 1st, 2023, they're going to replace each remaining classic site with a takeout archive, and they will attempt to convert it. But that's not guaranteed. And depending on how you have things set up, it might not go as well as you'd like. So make sure you do it early. Yeah, so that's a good point, Francois. So if you're using Google Forms to capture data, and you just keep adding and adding, and you don't archive any of that, then yes, those can be, can add to your Excel file that's tracking them significantly. All right, so on Google Sites, if you are using the new Google Sites, you could now add these handy little social media links, and you can add little icons there for each of them so that you can use them for social media, or you can really use them for anything that you want to link to. But that option is there as well now. Some updates to Google Tasks. Let's see what I'm doing for time. Okay, so mark your important tasks with the star. So if you are using Google Tasks and you star any of your items, you now have the option up here to look at everything that is starred. You can now print your task list. So if you go to your three little dots, you could print your list, and some general Google Workspace changes. So if you're working on an Android device, you might find this useful to be able to use a larger screen and split your screen to work back and forth. You might find that handy. And some other multi-app updates. If you're working in Google Docs, Sheets, or Slides, you will see a little Google Meet icon at the top. So you can quickly join a meeting or start something so that you can quickly have a conversation with everybody regarding that document. If you have been using Currents, that will be going away as well. And the future is called Spaces. So Spaces has already been launched. It was launched last year. But I'm trying to see if there's a date here for Currents. Currents will be going away. So I think there's still a little bit of time. There should be a timeline coming out for that as to when Currents will go away. But encourage you to start moving over to Spaces to be prepared for that. This is another handy thing. If you're using Forms, first of all, you might find this interesting. In your Forms, where you look at your results in your Google Forms, you can use that to embed into another document. And that way the results will be linked. For example, you can take the results and put them in a status report with other information. And you can automatically have it update the Word document with the Forms results. View additional calendar statuses in Google chat. So when someone sees you're out of office, you can also see additional statuses now. So in a meeting or in focus time, and you can write your own status as well. So this is just some additional notifications that you may see show up. And this is just there by default. They're basically trying to make it easier for you to identify any issues that might be coming up with any of the files you're working on. That'll display by default. Accessibility preferences. So if you need to use these, it's great to provide more accessibility options. So that's what they've done here in doc sheet, slides, and drawings. You'll see it in your settings or preferences. And you'll be able to turn these on or off as needed. Yes, it is key for AODAs. So this is great when you're sharing any of these to make sure that these are turned on. Work insights reporting. So this is more of a back end feature that will help you show. Don't think it's released yet. It started release on September 2020 in September. So I haven't played around with this, but basically it would help admin back and see how different apps and different Google workspace apps are being adopted across the organization. So this is probably more useful for larger organizations to see who's using what, especially any organizations that maybe have moved from a Microsoft based environment to Google workspace. And you want to make sure that people are adopting Google docs, for example, and not relying as much on Microsoft. You want to see that adoption of Google docs is maybe increasing. This might be a useful tool for you to be able to get some visibility on that. And that brings me to the end of my presentation for all the updates I had so far. Now, as I mentioned, there were other updates. I thought I had the link in here. I'll send the link with the slides. There is a Google blog site that lists all the updates that come out. So you can subscribe to that, or you can also go check for any specific products that or apps that you're using to see what any of the updates might be or might be coming for those because they do also sometimes have features planned ahead of time that you can read up on so that you're prepared for it. If you're interested, I think this was a leftover from another presentation. But if you're looking for other tips and tricks or reviews of other apps, if you want to go to this link, you'll be able to get a download for your, the ultimate guide to top systems for entrepreneurs that was leftover from my other slide. And that's all I have for today. So I'm not sure if anyone has any questions. Feel free to reach out. Thank you guys. Thank you. Good. I didn't, I guess I should have mentioned at the beginning that this isn't every single update that Google did. Google does so many updates to so many of their products. I tried to keep it to what I think would be most relevant for most people and more on a functional level. There were also several technical backend type updates that I think the typical user might find boring. So I tried to keep it relevant for most users. Thank you. I'm glad you guys found that useful. All right. With that, I'm going to say goodbye and hope to see you for our next event. And again, if you have any ideas for anything in person or any other virtual topics you've covered, please feel free to reach out and let me know. Thank you everyone.