Reminder Messages with Google Calendars

One question that's often asked is about sending calendar event reminders to participants. While Google Calendar doesn't actually do this, you can use the event's notifications to help you out.

When setting up notifications (which only applies to me - they're MY notifications), I create three notifications for important meetings:

1. Notification meeting's starting in 15 minutes
2. Notification meeting's starting 5 hours
3. Notification meeting's starting in two days

The 15 minute notification is for me to get to the meeting; the other two are notices to send reminder messages to the attendees. You can do that in a couple of ways. Using Gmail from your browser, just open the event and right above the guest list you'll see a link to email guests:

The link is also available in Google Calendar:

Once you've clicked on the link, you can quickly send a reminder out:

Collaborating with Google Apps

A lot of people belief collaboration means having your Microsoft Word files in a shared folder, but that's not collaboration — that's sharing a folder.

Collaboration means work on a file together. Whether at the same time, or at different times of the day, Google's collaboration tools (Comments and Suggested Edits) removes the needs of multiple copies of a document as it gets sent back and forth between collaborators.

In this new video from Google, you'll see the best of the collaboration tips in action. Specfically, Comments and Suggested Edits, Notifications and Revisions (ie. versioning).

Another tool that is often under-used is the Email Collaborators command from under the File Menu. The best part is that it automatically include a link to the document you are currently working on.

What's your favorite collaboration tool?

Easily Send Email to Everyone Working on a Google Apps Document

There are many times while working on a document that I want to send an email out to everyone who's working on it (example: upcoming deadline). The Comments function (http://goo.gl/AljfqM) is great when want to ask a question about a piece of text, but it's really not the right tool for general messages.

I used to spend time trying to remember who I shared the document with or actually went looking under the Shared settings, but there's a better way. From within the document, select Email Collaborators from under the File menu. Google will display an email window with all the collaborators of the document listed. Now it's just a matter of updating the subject line, the message, and select who I want receive the email.

Send Emails with Google Forms

Google Forms is a great tool for collecting information, but you can also use it as a contact form on your website. Unfortunately, it doesn't email you the contents of the form - at best you can have Google send you a notification when there is a change in the spreadsheet.

That's where scripts come in. Thanks to the genius of others, there are many scripts you can use to extend the functionality of spreadsheets. The one I use is FormEmailer by +Henrique Abreu. This wonderful script makes it easy to send emails with customized messages. Check out the video below and be sure to visit the FormEmailer  site!

Creating Filter in Gmail to Flag your Newsletters

A couple of incredibly power features in GMail is filters and labels. With a few clicks, you can setup filters to quickly organize messages by assigning useful labels to them.

A handy filter I've created allows me to quickly identify Newsletters. These are messages I receive weekly or monthly that I quickly peruse and then delete:

• weekly flyer from Best Buy
• travel deals from Expedia
• Costco News
• YouTube notices (someone has subscribed to your channel)

Most people understand how to create filters and people will spend hours ensuring they have a filter setup to address each message. But there's a way you can combine a number of filters into one instead of creating individual filters.

Let's look at the list above. I want to create a filter that will assign the Newsletter label to any messages send by these companies. First I need to identify the return email address:

• Best Buy (newsletter@bestbuy.ca)
• Expedia (caenmail@expediamail.com)
• Costco News (costconews@online.costco.com)
• YouTube (noreply@youtube.com)

Normally you would create a single rule for each email. First you identify the criteria the filter is to look for:

Then you indicate the action that should be taken:

Now, instead of creating more filters that will do the same, you can combine all the email address together in the search criteria by separating each email with the word OR (in all caps).

Now I have one filter where I once had four! All that's left is to select all the messages, read through them and delete!  :-)

Tip: If you have a large number of emails to filter on, edit the list in a text editor (the filter field is very small). When the time comes, you can add your email at the beginning of the list.

What kind of message can you filter with this?