Google Features I Use Everyday

In a typical day I have to check my 5 email accounts, collaborate on documents, make new documents, store documents and data, plan my calendar and share those events with others, look at multiple calendars for various organizations I am involved in, watch my finances and research stocks and companies, read the news, get updated on my favorite sports teams, look up what movies or shows are playing tonight on television or satellite, look at the weather, and translate or look up words in other languages. I know that is an extremely long sentence and I wrote that intentionally to demonstrate how chaotic most peoples lives are and how tough it is to remember that you have to do all of this stuff.

I have now been using google services for the past 3 years, not counting all of the searches I have done using google.com. Google continues to come out with innovative and useful tools for everyone. By using google services I have almost eliminated the need for a private computer at work, or the need to carry a data drive. I also manage all of my email accounts and my calendars using google calendar. The first screen I look at in the morning is my home page from iGoogle, which provides me with a quick glimpse of everything I have to do for the day, the news , my finances, and pretty much everything I am really interested in knowing. The following is a brief description of these wonderful services.

IGoogle- This is the command center for all of my day to day operations. Here is a “heads-up” display of everything I need to know at a glance. My appointments and commitments for the day, my finances, sports and news, the TV guide and that is just the beginning of what you can add using gadgets/widgets.
Gmail- Gmail is by far the best mail service I have used. I have tried Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL, Netscape, hosted my own, used my college and employer email. None of them have offered so many services. Some of my favorite features are the powerful search feature that can find virtually any email in your inbox. I also enjoy the contacts manager that adds new contacts from your email into a nice screening box to be added or deleted. I also have to mention the over 7 gigabytes of storage that google is currently offering.
Calendar- I use google calendar for my personal calendar several websites that I host and maintain for different organizations, group projects for which I create an individual calendar, for my family, and for work. All of these calendars can be shared with other google users and I can view theirs as well. This is great for coordinating meetings and does away with the need to have a pocket based calendar as I have access to the internet almost everywhere I go.
GoogleDocs- This service has the ability to act as your primary word processor, make powerpoint presentations, create spreadsheets, and something I haven’t seen in another free service is create web-forms. For any of you that have created web-forms from scratch you will know that it is tedious and has lots of security issues depending on whose server you are using to collect data. You can save money by making your own surveys instead of using services. I use this service to conduct surveys, balance my checkbook, and collect data from research projects that I am conducting. I also store most of my important documents here for two purposes. First for easy access and collaboration with others and second for back up. There is also a unique feature that you can use to upload documents straight from the internet just by inputing the URL. You bypass downloading it to your computer and go straight to storage for editing, commenting, or reading. I have yet to run into any formatting issues.
Google Finance- I use this feature to track my portfolios, create ‘fictional’ portfolios for stocks that I would like to track but don’t want to invest in quite yet, and to try out different investment strategies. This service also provides updates on all the stocks that you are following such as financial report releases, stories in the news, or other actions. You can also research various companies, look them up by code, industry, or other criteria. You can use Stock Screener to input variables like EPS, PE, 52 wk highs or lows, market cap, volume, etc to narrow down stocks that you would like to invest in.

Google Adsense-While this service isn’t something I actively use everyday, it is something I use. When I build web-pages, I use the Adsense search code to add a google search bar to my pages. By doing this I can earn money on advertising. I can also generate code for advertising on my website from the Google Adsense service that I can make money from.