Teach Yourself VISUALLY Google Workspace. Guy Hart-Davis

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      Google Forms enables you to create a wide variety of online forms, from a job application to an order form, and from a self-marking quiz to a registration form for an event. After creating the form, you can preview it and test it before sending it or otherwise sharing it with its respondents, the people whose answers you want.

      When the respondents submit their responses, Google Forms collects the data automatically, letting you browse the data as a summary, by individual response, and by the responses to each question. You can also export the data to Google Sheets for your own custom analysis.

      Chapter 12 explains how to use Google Forms.

Evaluate Google Workspace and Choose an Edition

If you are considering Google Workspace as a solution for your organization’s needs, you will likely want to analyze how it stacks up against its main competitors, such as Microsoft 365 and LibreOffice. You should also determine whether your organization can safely and legally store all its data online.

      Assuming you go for Google Workspace, you need to decide which version, or edition, to get and work out how much it will cost. As of this writing, Google offers four editions — three Business editions, with varying prices and features, and one Enterprise edition for larger organizations.

      Compare Google Workspace with Its Main Competitors

      As of this writing, Google Workspace has two main competitors: Microsoft 365 and LibreOffice.

      Microsoft 365 is Microsoft’s subscription-based plan for its Office productivity apps, cloud storage on OneDrive, collaboration with Microsoft Teams, and email and calendaring using the Outlook client and the Exchange Server software. Microsoft 365 is a full-featured offering that competes head to head with Google Workspace. For example, Microsoft Word competes with Google Docs, and Microsoft Teams takes on Google Meet, Google Chat, and some collaboration features of Google Drive. To learn more about Microsoft 365 and what it costs, go to www.microsoft365.com.

      LibreOffice is a free office suite, the successor to the popular OpenOffice.org. LibreOffice includes apps that compete with those in Google Workspace; for example, LibreOffice Writer competes with Google Docs, and LibreOffice Calc competes with Google Sheets. However, LibreOffice does not offer features such as storage or conferencing, so it is not a direct competitor for Google Workspace. To learn more about LibreOffice and its capabilities, go to https://libreoffice.org.

      Assess the Viability of Storing All Your Organization’s Data Online

      Before committing to Google Workspace, assess whether your organization can realistically store all its data online. This is pretty much a requirement for using Google Workspace, because the apps are designed to store their files on Google Drive, enabling them to be accessed from anywhere and making it easy to share them both with people inside your organization and with people outside it. But online storage can also increase security threats to your data. Beyond those threats, you should consider any compliance issues that storing the data online may raise; these issues vary by region and by business area, and you may well want to get legal input to make sure you understand them fully.