CloudHQ

I keep running into times where I am told to create an account for CloudHQ. I tend to be skeptical at first of creating accounts for things that are new. So, I decided I needed to do a little look into what CloudHQ is and decide if I really need an account.

I now understand that CloudHQ is a cloud to cloud management service. I know that is a lot of tech talk. What it means is that since every company has their own cloud service (One Drive for Windows, iCloud for Mac, Google Drive, Dropbox, etc...), it allows them to talk to each other so that you can get all of your "stuff" in one place.

For example, I have a Dropbox account, use Google Drive and iCloud. I also use Gmail. I think it was with Gmail that I was required to sign up for CloudHQ. AHA!  I was trying to learn about Gmail Templates!

The Research
When I want to learn more about something I just go to Google and type a question into the search box. For this I just typed "review CloudHQ" and got 29,100 results. I almost never go beyond the first page of results.

What I learned is that there are other management systems that do what CloudHQ does, but it is the most used. It is a completely web-based app meaning that you do not have to download anything to your computer to make it work. If you want to sync multiple services (let's say Google Drive, Dropbox, and iCloud) you will have to pay for it, but if you are just pairing two services (Google Drive and Dropbox) you can use the free version.

The free version is enough for the average user. They make money especially by working with companies who use it so that their employees can be more effective at their jobs. I guess signing up for a free service is OK for me.

This review from 2013 is where I learned most of this information:
https://www.pocketables.com/2013/01/app-review-cloudhq-syncs-your-cloud-from-the-cloud-but-at-a-price.html

Another article that was helpful was from 2018
https://blog.leadfeeder.com/cloudhq-growth-hacking-examples/

EDITING WITH GOOGLE DOCS

EDITING WITH A GROUP
Track changes is helpful, but what I am really amazed with lately is Google Drive. I am on several boards and on committees that use it. It is a GREAT way to share documents so that multiple people can comment or edit a document without messing up what someone else has done.

When you go to http://drive.google.com you have to sign in with a Google account. You can get one even if you do not want to use gmail. Go to https://accounts.google.com/signup/v2 and either get a gmail account or sign up with your own email address.







Once you have a Google account and sign in to Google Drive you can start a new document or go to a document that has been SHARED with you.


The person who creates the document is the owner. They can share it and set the permissions for each person who it is shared with.

If you choose File - Version History you will see who revised the document, what they did and when it was done. If you don't like the revision you can return to a previous version!

It is even great when you just want to share documents, but you don't want anyone to change them. When you share the document you just mark that everyone should VIEW only. They will not have the rights to change anything, but can view the document at any time.

This is becoming a very popular way to share documents on a committee or board.

10 Ways to use a Spreadsheet (Excel)

Spreadsheets are one of the most under-appreciated pieces of software. People don't realize how helpful they can be. I use them all of the time. With a spreadsheet you can easily sort by any column to bring up the information that is helpful to you. You can also put in formulas and graphs to give your information more meaning. My favorite way to use a spreadsheet is to do a Google Drive Spreadsheet. If you use Google Drive you can share the spreadsheet with others and work on it together or even make it so that the other person can see it, but not edit it.

Here are 10 ways that Spreadsheets can make your life easier!

1. Any Check List - There are other ways to make check lists, but a spreadsheet is a great way to keep track of dates. You can also sort or create a notes column to remind you of anything that is important. I used to use a spreadsheet to keep track of students who brought in signed field trip forms. I had a column for their first name, last name, a column with the date they handed it in and a column with notes that would remind me if I had called their parent. When most were brought in I could easily sort on the column with the dates and find which ones were blank and follow up on them.

There are many things in life that you can keep track of this way if you want/need to. You can keep a list of what you ate, figure out car mileage easily, keep track of dates and where you ate out, keep track of medications dates and times for taking and check off if you have taken them. Comment below if you think of other things!

This How To article might help you.
http://www.techrepublic.com/article/use-excel-check-boxes-to-create-a-list-totaling-spreadsheet/1041101

2. Login/Registration/Password Data - These days you have to keep track of SO MANY different passwords and log in names for different websites that you use. Most people have a system of scraps of paper or notebooks where they keep lists of all of their passwords.  What if you created a spreadsheet with one column that has a link to the website, one column with the login and a third column with the passwords. What if you kept all of this on a thumb drive that you could take with you easily anywhere?  That way it would not be on your computer where it could possibly get hacked into or on little pieces of paper that get lost or that you don't have when you are somewhere away from your desk. (it is 4 years later and I realize that this is a BAD idea!)

3. Christmas Gift List - I tend to forget what I have given people from year to year. I am sure that I think of giving certain people the same thing from year to year. So, I started a spreadsheet where I list the people I give gifts to.  It has columns with a year title for each column. Then when it is Christmas time I add the gifts next to each person. I can see what I have given people for the last years. It is really helpful. I suppose if I cared I could add a column for money spent each year and total it at the bottom so that I can have an idea of how I am doing with spending.

4. Anything that you might want to sort. I enter clients into a list on a regular basis, but occasionally want to sort by last name, or where I met them. Sorting is extremely easy. Depending on the Spreadsheet you use all you do is click on the letter at the top of a column and then either look for the down triangle to click or got to DATA-Sort Ascending or Sort Descening. This will sort the whole table by whatever column you have chosen. It really helps to bring to the top the information that you might be looking for. One example is a spreadsheet with data about what was donated to a Silent Auction. One of the columns was who asked for the donation. If I wanted to find out who got the most donations I could sort the spreadsheet by the ASKED column. It would be easy to scan down and see who got the most. OR it is possible that I have forgotten to type some information into a column. To find the blank spaces I can sort by that column and the blank spaces will come to the top. This does not permanently change anything. A spreadsheet can be sorted any way and then sorted back.

5. Anything where you have to add or average a lot of numbers. There are tons of formulas for figuring out different things in a spreadsheet, but I do not have much occasion for using most of them. The two that I regularly use are SUM and AVERAGE. Spreadsheets are made to put in formulas very easily.

1. Click on the space you where you want the answer to showClick on one of the three symbols to the side. fx means Formula, the second one that looks like a capitol E means Sum and of course the third means Equal.
2. If you choose fx it will give you a list of all of the fomulas you can choose from. There are a lot. If you choose the second one it will give you the formula to sum the numbers you indicate. If you use the third one you will have to choose from the pull down list to your left and choose one of the formulas.
3. When you choose this it should put the answer to the formula in the box you have selected.

I know that these instructions are a bit hard to follow, so feel free to call and set up an appointment if you want to really learn how to do this. Or check on YouTube to see a video of how to do this: 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJPjs-lITAw

There are lots of videos to help you learn how to use various formulas in Excel. It is worth checking out!

6. To create a graph to show information in a way that is easy to understand. You have seen lots of graphs that help you to better understand various information.

Here is one that shows which the places that people use to get to this blog.





Here is a pie chart showing the World Distribution of Wealth in 2000.











To create a graph first enter all of the information that you want to show in your graph. Then highlight the columns that contain that information and click INSERT>CHART and select the type of chart that you want to create. When you are done the chart will be inserted onto the page. The chart is editable by color and titles and many other things. 

In order to learn better how to do this you can go to http://youtube.com and search for creating a graph in a spreadsheet. 

This is a good one, but there were about 7,000 to choose from!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iv5m00YS_4I


7. Financial Record Keeping - There are lots of premade spreadsheets for keeping financial records, so I will not go into this thoroughly. I do simple things like keeping track of my mileage so that I can get an easy total of it at tax time. I also use it to keep track of what I make working with people each week. When I want to do more complicated record keeping I use Quicken. Many people use Quickbooks or other software already created to keep that sort of information and give you the reports that you might need. There are also templates that can give you a preformatted spreadsheet so that all you have to do is fill in the cells with information and numbers.

Microsoft Office-Recipe Tracker, Invoice, Financial, Personal Inventory, Flow Chart and many more
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/templates/excel-templates-FX102828204.aspx

Free Spreadsheet Templates - Wedding Planner, Vacation Home Manager
http://www.spreadsheetmarketplace.com/frsp.html

There are many others. To find them I went to Google and typed "spreadsheet template" and there were a whole bunch of them listed. 

8. Donations to a silent auction - The board I am on kept this one on a Google Spreadsheet. It was easy that way for all of us to share the document. We could add to it and see a current copy. This allowed us to check before going to a business to ask for donations.  It also allowed the person coordinating to see that donations were coming in regularly.

9. Keeping track of about anything - I use a spreadsheet to keep track of the places that I have called to make contact for I'm not a Geek.com. I have a column for the name of the place, the date I called or visited, who I talked to, the phone number, the website and other notes. 

10. Managing Vacation Property, Gardening, Wines, Exercise Plans, Grades, Investments, Sports, Games, Household Budget, Calendar, Agenda, etc...  Again, there are templates online for all of these that you can freely download and use. They have the formulas built in and so are easy to use.

Ten Tech Skills That Everyone Should Have: Part One

This post is based on a blog that I read online a while ago. I thought it had some helpful tips, so I have edited it and added a bit of my own stuff. It was written by someone who was thinking about what students need to learn about using technology in school. We are all long passed school, so I wonder how many of these skills you feel comfortable with? Here is the URL of the post it is based on:

http://educationaltechnologyguy.blogspot.fr/2012/01/10-tech-skills-every-student-should.html

Do you know how to do an

effective Internet search?

Common Craft videos are a great, simple and fun way to learn things about technology. This one is about searching. It does have some extra words on it to protect people from downloading and using it because they make their money from people who subscribe to use the videos.

Common Craft Video on Web Search Strategies

Do you know how to create, edit, and save

documents, spreadsheets and presentations?

These are common uses for computers. Almost everyone knows how to create, edit and modify documents. There are many people who are unsure of themselves when it comes to spreadsheets or presentations. Most people use Microsoft Office to create documents, spreadsheets or presentations. 

There are other low cost and even free options now. Open Office is a free product that is very much like MS Office. You can download it for free and try it out. When you save your document you have to tell it that you want it to be a .doc so that anyone can open it. Otherwise it is automatically an Open Office document and can only be opened with that program. When I downloaded the newest operating system to my Mac none of my Intel programs would work. MS Office was one of the casualties. I have downloaded and used Open Office and it takes the place of word just fine. I have not tried it for presentations.

Another possibility is Google Drive. It used to be called Google Docs and was upgraded to Google Drive. The difference is that you can download a program to your computer so that you can access your Docs even when you are offline. A future post will have more about Google Drive. It has a word processor, a spreadsheet and a presentation software and some other things. All of your documents are automatically saved and you can even share them with other people and work on the same document collaboratively.

Open Office

Google Drive

Do you know how to get help when you need it?

Recently I have learned that you can find answers to almost everything by just going to Google and typing in what you want to know.  I am soon going to do a post on maintaining your computer and so just to be sure that I don't miss anything important I am going to go to Google and type "computer maintenance". In the first page of links I will probably find links to some very helpful pages. The main problem with this approach can be that you do not understand what they are trying to tell you. If that is an issue here are some links to other sites that may be helpful.

This site is a lot of fun. It is posted as a letter to your parents where you send them videos about things that they may need to learn. You fill in all of the blanks and then press the PREVIEW button at the bottom and it takes you to where you can watch the video. This is a great way to learn and there are lots of choices of videos.

TechSupport help

Can you type?

For the longest time I have been told that "soon people will not need to type because they can just talk to their computers." This has been possible for a long time and maybe sometime we will get used to doing it. Until then it really makes a difference in how fast you can get something done if you can type. Here are a few free programs you may want to try:

Kiran's Typing Tutor

Learn to Type Free

Key Blaze Typing Tutor Software

Typing Tutor - This one has games

If you want to pay for a great program my favorite is Mavis Beacon. There are many others. Just do a Google Search!

Mavis Beacon

Do you know how to use Social Media

(Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, etc...)?

There is so much to learn in this area. It is like an explosion. The Internet used to be static, meaning that it basically stayed the same. You could not change anything on the Internet. Now everything has changed. You have the power to add, comment, post, and change many parts of the Internet. The most popular is Facebook. Many people have gone to using it as their main way of communicating with other people. There are also many more. I am adding links to many of them. It is not the purpose of this post to explain how to use them all. If you would like me to write specifically about one of them or a part of one of them (more than I have in other posts) please let me know.

Twitter

Facebook

LinkedIn

YouTube

Flickr

Picasa

I have run out of time for this posting, so I will have to do the second five in the next post. Let me know what you think I may have missed and what you want to learn about!

Keeping a Christmas Spreadsheet

I don't know about you, but I can never remember what I gave to someone from year to year. I will go to the store and see something and think, "That would be perfect for Susie", but I am not sure if I get it for them every year, or if it is a new idea.




So I have started to keep a gift spreadsheet. It is very simple. In the first column I type the name of each person I want to give to each year. Then across the top row I type the number of the year. Then every year at Christmas shopping time I get out the list and I can see what I have gotten people for the last several years. I then add a new column for the current year and enter what I am giving this year.

This could also be done for gifts that you receive. Start by typing names of people that you have received gifts from in the first column. In the second column you could type what gift you received. The third column could be for checking off that you have written a thank-you note.













We use Google Spreadsheet in order to share the information for a silent auction for Child Development Center. On this shared spreadsheet we collect lots of information. Some of the columns include the item donated, the value of the item, the value of the minimum bid, how much it sold for, the address of the business, who found the donation and a place to check off that thank you notes were written. This is really handy because we all have access to the spreadsheet and can enter our information as soon as we find a donation. We can also look at the list to see what companies have already been asked, so we are not sending people to ask for donations to the same businesses and irritating them. Each year we start a new sheet of the spreadsheet, so that we can compare how we have done from year to year.

You can create a Google Spreadsheet by going to http://drive.google.com and then signing up for a free account. Once you are into the program you can choose if you want to make a webpage, write a document, create a spreadsheet or create a presentation. All of these programs work similarly to the programs you have used in the past. The main difference is that they save automatically on the cloud (Google's server bank) and you can share them with someone else. You can give the other person the option to edit the document or limit them to just reading it. You can also make the document private so that only you can see it.
Take a look at Google Drive and let me know what you think about it and if you have questions for me to research.

And finally Merry Christmas.

I hope you have a wonderful break

and can spend some time with family

doing things you love.

FREE Ways to Word Process, Collaborate, etc...

TWO STORIES 

At the end of September my son got married. He lives in Ohio and we are in Texas. We were helping him plan and design the ceremony. Instead of sending files back and forth or using lots of email David set up a Google Doc and invited us to share it. We could all work on it at different times or even at the same time in order to collaborate!  Amazing!

Recently I updated my MacBook to Lion, but to my unhappy surprise I found out that it does not support Microsoft Office. It has something to do with programs that used the Intel chip... I can't explain it... I'm not a Geek, but anyway there I was without some expensive software that I used all of the time. (side note: now when I receive an excel or word document I have to open up the Open Office first and then use File-Open to find the file and open it up.





You wonder what these two stories might have to do with each other?  Well, it is just that there are so many ways to get around having to use expensive software to do word processing, spreadsheets, and presentations now!

In this post I want to share with you some of what  I have done to fill in the gap from the software that no longer works on my system.

ONE

I downloaded a free program called Open Office. It is very similar to Microsoft Office, but it is Open Source which means that anyone can work on the code of it and make it better and it is FREE! I have been using it regularly for word processing. I have not used spreadsheets or presentations or anything else yet, but I think it will be fine. When I save something in Open Office I have to remember to change the format before saving because it has its own format (.odt) which other programs cannot open. When I save under "save as" I choose .doc and so far it seems to save everything just fine. 

TWO

I have been using Google Docs and Spreadsheets. The biggest benefit of these programs is that they can be shared online with others. You can give them rights just to look at the document or to edit it. You can make it public, so that everyone can see it or make it private so that you are the only one who has access to it. Google has just updated to Google Drives which I have not worked with much yet. It looks to me like you can download all of your Google Docs into a free software on your laptop. Then when you are not online you will still have access to your Docs and you can work on them. Then when you are online the newest copy syncs so that you have the same copy in both places. 

One drawback of using Google Docs is that you will be relying on Google to keep all of your stuff. It is all saved on one of their servers. If this is a problem for you avoid Google Docs. You will not have total control of everything. 

However, it is probably safer, in terms of not losing your documents because their servers are duplicated and regularly backed up. You can ALWAYS get to your stuff. It will be accessible even if you are in a flood or a fire and loose everything. You can access it from anywhere on any computer. 








  THREE

For some presentations I have started using Prezi. It is a whole new way of presenting ideas based more on networking thoughts and graphics together rather than presenting them in a linear way. The best way to see what it does is to go to their website and see some of their samples. 

So, we are getting to the point where we do not need expensive software to do the basic things that we want to do!