Free productivity with Google Docs & sheets

I’ve been exploring the internet for online productivity tools and the same ones keep on occurring. You can look online to see the posts yourselves.

What I did come across though were some interesting tools withing programmes I use a little and should use more. As I’m transitioning away from Microsoft Office and looking at free alternatives there are some features in Google Doc’s that I’m  impressed with.

Now, I do have an issue with Docs. When I want to use them, I have to go online, find my Google account, then sign in and then get to the docs. A bit more complicated than just clicking an icon on the taskbar.

Because of the interesting features I’ve been finding out about Doc’s that I want to try out,  I’ve built myself a logging in macro in AutoHotKeys that I have linked to my Voice Macro for activation,  it logs into my account and opens up google docs to the document directory page.

So now I can access Doc’s quickly I am able to access them more readily to avail myself of its features.

Google Docs

1. Text Expander

I have been exploring Text Expander free programmes and at the moment am still using Phrase Express.

I saw an interesting video that showed the process for using this feature within Google Docs.

In the example of the screenshots above I could type:

-xx (enter)

and it would be replaced by:

the quick brown fox goes to this url https://zapier.com/blog/google-docs-autocorrect/

So you can put whatever strings you use a lot in to a short key to expand the text.

This video demonstrates the process:

Comments

I inadvertently opened up this video, thinking it was the one above and although it uses a different text expander, I was impressed with using the highlight part of the document to be able to add comments with reference materials, eg links to YouTube video’s and forms. I can see myself using this as a good method to reference things I have in my document.

Voice typing in Docs

I had some trouble getting this started as I was using Firefox browser. It only works in Chrome. When I switched to Chrome it ran beautifully. I was extremely impressed with its accuracy.

The one thing that got me flummoxed was I’d normally say “Full Stop” but it prefers “Period” then “New Line” .

For the brief tests I’ve used it for, I found it quite accurate, and I’m a bit aware of voice recognition using “VoiceMacro” which sometimes does not like the way I speak.

I’ll need to setup another macro to start Doc’s in Chrome too to use this tool.

Checking the meaning of words in Docs

Defining and exploring words in your document.

I would be a bit of a technical writer as an architect/engineering designer and my education has left a lot to be desired. I would use “Word” in its basic form, just using the spell checker for getting the words spelt correctly. This tool, which I think is a benefit of being an online tool accesses information so quickly, so you’d use it to check that you had the correct term in the correct context. I much prefer something like this to “Grammerly”.  I like both the ” Define” and “Explore”

Google Sheets Time sheets

I got quite enthused about the text expander feature in Google Docs, so I headed over to sheets to see if it was in that too. It isn’t! Shame.

The reason for that is I have been doing my Tax Expenses, I have a lot of repetitive receipts from the same shops, so I used Phrase Express to add a lot of short keys for those. It was quite a useful tool and sped up the process of filling in all the cells, and less typo’s too. I think the first time it was not productive as I had to set it up but it will be useful in the coming months.  I was using LibreCalc for sheets as I’m trying to get away from Excel.

BUT, I did find quite a nice add-in that I will definitely be exploring.