Businesses that don’t have a proper productivity workflow can find it hard to maintain edge over their competitors. Investing in an office productivity tool allows your employees to make the most out of their work shifts and attain peak productivity. Let’s go through a brief overview of the most popular productivity software: Zapier and Google Sheets.
What Is Zapier and What Can You Do With It?
Zapier is an automation tool that is commonly used to integrate Mailchimp, Slack, Gmail, and other popular applications. You can use it to link multiple apps and automate routine tasks, without writing code. This reduces dependence on developers. Zapier is easy-to-use – anyone can use it to create their application workflows via a few clicks.
For instance, suppose you get daily email attachments in your Gmail inbox and save those files in the Dropbox. As soon as you receive an attachment, you can follow these steps:
- Click on the email to show content.
- Locate the attachment.
- Click on the attachment to save it to Dropbox.
All of this can be automated in Zapier, saving valuable time and effort.
Similarly, you can create a multitude of workflows with Zapier. Other examples include:
- Add events in Google Calendar from Trello cards.
- Post tweets via different Twitter accounts.
To learn about other methods to use Zapier, you can check out this link.
Common Zapier Terms
Zap
An automated workflow between two or more applications is known as Zap. For instance, you can use a Zap that saves your Google Drive files to Dropbox. Zap is made of two components: A trigger and an action.
Trigger
A trigger is an event in an application that initiates the Zap. Once you configure a Zap, Zapier monitors the application for that event. For instance, considering our Gmail to Dropbox example; you may get several emails, but only an email with an attachment will trigger the Zap.
Action
An action refers to the event that completes the Zap. For instance, in the Gmail to Dropbox example, moving the attachment is an action.
Google Sheets
Google Sheets is a web-based program used to create and edit spreadsheets. Along with Google Slides and Google Docs, it is a component of Google Drive. This is similar to how Microsoft Office comprises Microsoft PowerPoint, Microsoft Word, and Microsoft Excel.
Google sheets are ideals for users who have basic spreadsheet requirements, work from remote locations, use different devices, and collaborate with others.
Compatibility
You can access Google Sheets as a web application via Microsoft Edge, Firefox, Chrome, and Safari. Thus, Google Sheets can be used in Linux, Mac, and Windows easily. On mobiles, you can use Sheets in both iOS and Android by downloading and installing the official app. Sheets provides support for the following extensions: .tab, .tsv, txt, .csv, .ods, .xltxm, .xltx, .xlt, .xlsm, .xls, and .xlsx.
Users can also import, export, open, edit, and save documents and spreadsheets through Google Sheets. You can even convert Excel files in Google Sheets.
Working with Google Sheets
Since you can use Google Drive for accessing Google Sheets, you are going to need a Google account to create, save, edit, and share files. This account is a sign-in system that allows access to a wide range of Google products. It’s worth nothing that you are not limited to Gmail use for working with Google Sheets. Hence, you can use any email address to work with Google Sheets.
Google Sheets provides the standard and useful features that are required for creating and maintaining spreadsheets. These include:
- Import and search for data in spreadsheets.
- Add graphs, charts, images, and pivot tables.
- Implements scripts, macros, and functions.
- Work with cells, columns, and rows.
- Customize the data and spreadsheet with auto-fill feature.
Some of the benefits of using Google Sheets over tools, such as Zapier include:
- Work on the same document – even while working from different locations, platforms, and devices –as Google Drive stores the files in the cloud. Any change you make gets automatically saved in the cloud and there’s also the much-needed support for offline editing via browser and mobile applications.
- Instead of emailing files continuously to others, you can share files for the purpose of real-time editing, collaboration, chatting, and commenting. With built-in revision history, you can monitor revision history and track your team’s changes and provide users with the option of restoring files to a previous version.
- Google Sheets has a minor learning curve – and you can use it for free.
- Since Google Sheets is part of Google’s product catalog, you can use it to access and integrate with other Google products, such as Google Finance, Google Translate, and Google Forms.
Final Thoughts
Zapier and Google Sheets are terrific productivity tools. If you aren’t using them yet, it’s a good time to add them in your workflow and introduce it among your employees. Since they are user-friendly and free, your team can adapt to them in no time. To get more information about them, reach out to us.
