G Gems 34: user accountability & tracking in G Suite

Google for Education's G Suite offers a wealth of tools for tracking purposes.

Whether that be tracking user access and trends, collaborators' input, document updates or as an audit trail for email conversations.

Here's a summary of some of the tools I and my colleagues use regularly both in the classroom and in the office.

Activity Dashboard
The activity dashboard for Google documents, available by clicking the sparkling icon (top right) 

gives document owners full access to see who has viewed the document, who has been shared the document as well as a trend timeline of when it was accessed.

This proves very useful when sharing documents with a number of users to contribute and update as you can easily see who has been working on the document and who hasn't at a glance.

Version history
This feature is often overlooked by new users to G Suite. You can access via the file menu or by clicking the hyperlink at the top centre of the toolbar that usually reads something like "all changes saved to drive" or "last edit made X minutes ago by ......"

The side bar will open up giving you the various autosaved versions of the document from its very beginning, including which users have made changes (using a handy colour code).

All versions can be renamed (I often rename version 1 "original") and also copied at any time.

Any previous version can also be restored with a single click if changes are rejected.

Cell history
This great new feature works like version history but for each specific cell within Google Sheets.
Using this feature you can exactly which user has updated a cell and the timestamp. Where a cell has been edited multiple times a full history is visible by edit, user and timestamp.

Comment history
Within Google docs, once a comment has been resolved, it flies away. However, click on the comment icon (top right) and the full comment history can be brought back at any time.

Perfect for demonstrating an ongoing dialogue on the progress or changes within any document.

Gmail delegated access - allows access to send on behalf of a service account/team account within your domain (but shows who you're dealing with)

To set up delegated access for another user, from the main account go to settings > accounts and invite specific users.

Those users will then get an alert asking them to verify their account. It can take about 30 minutes for the change to take effect but soon they'll be able to select the delegated account in the drop down.

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If delegated access to Gmail accounts isn't for you or your organisation you could consider setting up a Google Group as a collaborative inbox.

Collaborative inboxes allow members of the google group to send and share across the group with all messages arriving via Gmail ( I use the forum option in my Gmail settings).

G Suite Gem 6

🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄Who's ready for a Christmas Party ?🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄

Let's start at the Office.

Be Awesome this Christmas and use Office Documents in Drive!

I work with a number of people who are very used to and comfortable with Microsoft Office and have a large number of historic files that they want to keep using without converting them to Google Docs, sheets or slides. This is often due to concerns that some formatting might be affected.

These guys were very grateful to hear about Awesome Drive from aodocs.com and have gone away to give it a try. Essentially, this clever extension allows you to create, edit and save Office files within Google Drive. Great hey? 

Here's a short video from EdTech Tutorials to show you how it works. Enjoy! 

Teach yourself about Script Editor

Prior to visiting the Appsevents Google Summit for Education in October, I had never written any sort of code or script. As I swapped workshop midway (which was encouraged) I was fortunate to find the excellent Oli Trussell just finishing up with instructions and letting everyone try appscripting for themselves. Massive Faux pas on my part! However, just a short conversation with Oli and a further look at the resources from the day in my own time got me interested. 

That was October.  

Fast forward to December and I've finally found some time to do some research and have successfully written a code to embed Twitter into one of my Google Sites (only to find the feature was added anyway 2 days later 🤣🤣🤣) and also learnt to code a pop up message to show on opening a document using HTML and Script Editor. Check out https://www.w3schools.com/ and click on the try it yourself to learn for yourself. 

Attaching emails in Gmail 

A friend of mine uses Gmail at work but has been frustrated an when he used Outlook he could always attach an email another email for referencing or providing context. He asked me to see if it could be done in Gmail and the answer is YES!. 

Follow the steps here to attach an email to another email message in Gmail or 

(watch this video from Bettercloud) 

The great news for me is that it also work with Inbox for Gmail, which personally, I L💙VE. (Another thanks due to Oli T for introducing me to this extension - I've never had such an organised and empty inbox!)