Google Workspace vs. Microsoft Office in the workplace

Between all the job changes I went through this past year, I managed to land at a company using Google’s office suite, not Microsoft’s, as it was the default for most of my career. Coincidently, a good friend also recently switched jobs and discovered her new company uses Google Workspace as well. Naturally we exchanged tips and complained privately about the various ways this suite is different, mostly for the worse, than what we were used to.

I wanted to gather these in a blog post, since it feels relevant to other people and to the general themes I write about. I am not touching on the Docs/Sheets/Slides portion of Google Workspace, as we almost never use those – both companies also provide Microsoft Office to their employees, just older versions, not the subscription-based Office365. And I hope no one in their right mind would use the web-based Sheets for complex accounting tasks instead of Excel…

Fast Company: “26 incredibly useful things you didn’t know Google Calendar could do”

If you rely on Google Calendar like I do—or even if you just use it casually to keep track of occasional appointments—you’ll get more out of it once you’ve discovered all of its advanced tricks and time-saving possibilities. And if you’re too busy to tackle this right now, no worries: I happen to know a spectacular tool for setting reminders and making sure you never forget anything on your agenda.

JR Raphael

‘26 incredibly useful things’… and not one of them is being able to send birthday reminders for the people in your address book!

After switching to Android last year, this is possibly the most frustrating and baffling missing feature I’ve encountered. There are forum discussions requesting this going back to 2013, and there’s still no sign of solution on Google’s part. It doesn’t work in their web interface, nor in the official Android app, not even in third-party apps like Outlook! The only viable workaround for the moment is to set up an ifttt recipe, but I would hate to rely solely on that, given how Google can, at any point, restrict access rights for third parties – as it has recently done with Gmail.

Beyond embarrassing for Google!

Official Gmail Blog: “Google Calendar for iPhone. It’s about time”

Today we’re bringing the new Google Calendar to iPhone.

Just like on Android, you’ll get the following features:

• Events from Gmail, which turn emails into Calendar events automatically
• Assists, which make suggestions that save you time creating events
• Schedule View, which makes your calendar easy to scan and lovely to look at

Robin Züger

The Twitterverse welcomed this announcement with a small burst of enthusiasm about a month ago, so that I reluctantly decided to test the app for myself. It offers some advantages over the stock app, but those are relatively few and of small importance. The default ‘Schedule’ view shows a beautiful list of upcoming events, color-coded by source calendar and complemented by external images – for example pictures of your destination, if you have a trip planned. You can set custom reminders for all-day events in the settings, something Apple still hasn’t managed to offer after 8 (!) versions of iOS. Birthday notifications also include the person’s age – probably only when his or hers year of birth is added to the contact. And the wide selection of colors available for calendars is a very nice touch, giving the app a playful tone so like Google.

Jump to any date in Google Calendar

It’s difficult to find flawless applications, either native or cloud-based. Despite their popularity, Google products also have their share of missing features, which everyone is asking for. Google Calendar is no exception: from the launch in 2006 it lacked a way to jump to a specific date in the past or future to revise it’s events. I discovered this the hard way, after I added a couple of birthdays some 20 years in the past without making them recurring. I had to click hundreds of times to get to the right month view and edit the events! I was very puzzled by this lack in the web interface, because such options are build-in to most mobile phones, like the Nokia model I used for almost three years. Other calendaring applications like Rainlendar have buttons for jumping to the previous/next year, making the navigation much easier.

New event scheduler in Google Calendar

Since last week, Google Calendar previews a new interface for advanced events options, which helps users to easily find suitable times for meetings with other people. Of course, all of the guests have to use Google Calendar and share their schedules between them for this to work. TechCrunch calls the newly introduced feature “Sneak Preview”, but I see no indication that’s an actual name. For the moment, the feature is opt-in; you must explicitly enable it once you open the edit event page, but everyone should have access to it now.