4 Google Add-Ons That Rock The House

It's not secret I'm a fan of Google products.

Legit privacy concerns aside (no love for NSA here, trust me) I find Google’s ever-expanding array of ridiculously awesome products to be... well, ridiculously awesome!

Fun to use, and almost always nudging me ever forward into being more efficient and effective.

Some of my fave Google toys include:

Gmail (obviously)
Google Drive (my whole team runs our biz on this)
Google Docs & Sheets (like MS Word and Excel, but not)
Google Apps (runs all my company's email)
Google Hangouts (like webinars, but awesomer)
YouTube (you knew Google owned them, right?)

Enthusiastic fanboy that I am, you may recall a previous lesson I penned for you on
5 Things You Didn't Know You Could Do With Google Drive, which covered things like scanning docs to PDF and storing in your Drive, sending gigantic, 10 GB attachments, saving Gmail attachments directly to Drive, and more. Handy stuff and definitely worth a read if you missed it.

Well now I've discovered yet another cool G-toy to add to tmy G-toybox – Google Add-ons.

Google Add-ons are basically little, 3rd party tools that help you supercharge your Google docs and Google sheets – so you can do more with them, like printing address labels with Avery Label Merge add-on, or creating customized mailing lists in the Mailchimp add-on, etc.

Here’s a short video about Google from the Big G themselves…

If you want to get started trying out some of the add-ons for yourself, just click on the Add-ons menu item at the top of any Google Doc or Sheet, then select Get add-ons from the drop-down menu.

I’ve been perusing through their list of offerings so far, and here’s a quick look at some of the ones I’m most intrigued by right now:

Mapping Sheets

Basically the Mapping Sheets add-on give you an easy way to make custom Google Maps.

So let’s say you have a Google Sheet filled with names and addresses – click a few clicks, and you can instantly create a Google Map from it, geographically plotting out whatever the heck it is you want. You can plot out pretty much any data you want and it only takes a couple of seconds.

mapping-sheets.png.png

So for example, you can create a giant map with all your contacts.

Or maybe create your own little "heat map" of local cash buyers. Just grab the data from one of the many places you can acquire it (Freedomsoft, Realquest, etc.), plug it into a Google Sheet, apply the Mapping Sheets plugin, and now you can visually see all the “hotspots” where these guys are most frequently buying.

Same thing for local private lender leads, right? Get data…splat into Google sheet, apply fancy, new Mapping Sheets tech… and Ka-pow! Now you can visually see where these cats are lending.

Here’s a 3:35 video that shows you exactly how easy it is. There’s lots of other creative ways you could use this in your real estate biz – but you get the idea.

MindMeister

I loves me a good mind map. But turns out I don’t actually enjoy making them.

What I like about mind maps is the visual-ness of it (if that’s even a word). I love seeing a plan, org chart or whatever from a bird’s eye view like that.

It’s the process of getting the software to do what I want it to do, while in the process of actively brainstorming that gets me. I just find it personally exhausting to try to actually think about what I’m thinking about, while simultaneously trying to get the mind map software to do what I want it to do. A total impediment to my free-flow thinking. I know for a fact that I brainstorm much faster by just typing out quick bullet points and sub-bullets as they roll off my brain.

Enter Mindmeister. This handy little Google Doc ad-on makes embedding mind maps a snap.

Simply whip up a bulleted list of items,
Turn on the MindMeister add-on,
And then – splat! – It creates a mind map for your list.

It’s a great way to visualize lists and add a graphical element to your Google Doc in seconds, without fussing with the software to make it happen. You can see it in action here if you want.

UberConference

This one really blew me away. With the UberConference add-on, you can literally create an actual conference call with all document viewers, right from a Google Doc.

I know this sounds a little odd at first, but you really gotta see this one in action to really get how ridiculously cool it is. Here, take a look…

Now how ‘bout them apples?!

Bottom line, my entire team works remotely from wherever the heck they happen to be, and we all use Google Docs extensively. UberConference can let us be more productive by quickly and effortlessly getting all the editors and viewers of a given document on a conference call.

HelloSign

I previously introduced you to HelloSign in a lesson on 1 Easy Way to Go Paperless. Short story, it’s a simple suite of online software that lets you digitize most (if not all) of your business’s paperwork, including real estate contracts, etc. Very cool stuff.

Now with their handy-dandy Google add-on, you can sign or get documents signed right inside Google Docs. No more do you need to endure the tedious process of (i) printing, (ii) signing, (iii) scanning, then (iv) re-emailing back. Instead just deploy the add-on, then sign your signature with your mouse, and drag it wherever it goes on the Doc.