Tag Archives: calendar

How Google can help keep your resolutions going through 2019

Get active. Get some extra sleep. Find inner peace. They’re excellent New Year’s resolutions, and they’re also achievable with help from Google. More than 325,000 people with fitness goals for 2019 joined the #GetFitWithGoogle challenge during January to earn as many Heart Points as they could with Google Fit.

After looking at the statistics, Google Fit challengers were a seriously impressive bunch.

Get Fit With Google infographic

In Russia, people went cross-country skiing. In India, people loved their badminton. Brits hit up rowing machines while Americans got into weightlifting. Edinburgh, London and Kawasaki took top prizes for the most active cities around the world—while in the U.S. New York, Boston, and Washington braved the cold and topped the charts.

About four in ten of the people who joined the challenge earned at least 150 Heart Points on average per week and met American Heart Association’s weekly physical activity recommendations.  And seven percent of people achieved all the milestones, earning more than 1500 Heart Points during the New Year Challenge.

Just because the #GetFitWithGoogle challenge is over doesn’t mean the fun needs to stop. Google is still here to help you stick to stay fit, sleep better, practice digital wellbeing and live mindfully throughout all of 2019. Here are a few final tools and tricks to make sure your resolutions last all year long.

1. Set reminders in Google Calendar.

Reminders in Google Calendar

Keep up with the goals you set in early January by creating recurring weekly reminders in your Google Calendar. Reminders don’t go away until you actually do the activity, which can be a helpful self-imposed guilt-trip to push you out the door for that weekly run you promised yourself you’d do.

2. Embrace the selfie. 

Whether you’re looking to eat healthier or get more active, actually seeing your progress is a great way to keep focused on your resolution. Take weekly selfies and keep them in a Google Photos album, so you can scroll down memory lane when you need a pick-me-up. If you’re feeling proud about your progress or just enjoy compliment-fishing, share them with a friend so they can help keep you motivated, too.

3. Set up routines to turn your aspirations into habits.

Routines on Google Assistant

Do you find it hard to get out of bed in the morning? Or perhaps it takes you ages to unwind after work? Routines with Google Assistant help build healthy habits by doing multiple things for you with a single voice command. You can personalize them to suit your lifestyle and they’re a great way to set the mood for setting aside “me time.”

4. See how you stacked up with the 2019 #GetFitWithGoogle challenge.

For the last four weeks, six teams of influencers from around the world have been competing against each other to earn the most Heart Points during January.

After overtaking Switzerland in Week 2, Colombia just managed to hold on and take out the inaugural #GetFitWithGoogle challenge with a collective total of 17,465 Heart Points. Switzerland had a strong final week, finishing just 530 points being Colombia in second place—the equivalent of just 15 minutes more exercise per team member per week.

Get Fit With Google leaderboard

Team Belgium had a strong last few weeks to take out third place ahead of the U.S. in fourth.

Check out the top five individual influencers' performances from around the world. Congrats to Melissa Peláez for absolutely killing it, with 6602 Heart Points during January.

Get Fit With Google winners

We hope you all enjoyed taking part in the #GetFitWithGoogle Challenge. And hey, if you lose your way a bit here and there during 2019, worry not. We’ll be right here cheering you along next January, too.

Want to get fit in 2019? Here’s how Google can help

It's been more than a week since we entered 2019. And for most of us, that means we're still working on our New Year's resolutions—or forgot what they were in the first place.

Every January, our searches for resolutions spike around the world. We proclaim our best intentions for the new year, but it’s tough to keep promises to ourselves. By the end of the year, most of us are 20 percent less interested in picking up the weights, 30 percent more likely to hit snooze on getting proper sleep and 50% less interested in sticking to a diet.

We all feel it. The struggle is real. Let’s make 2019 different.

Google is here to give your resolutions a boost, with tools and tricks that will help you form good habits to get fit, sleep better, practice digital well-being and live mindfully. Let’s start with some of the most popular resolutions every year: getting fit and eating better.

1. Set your goals in Google Calendar.

Goals in Google Calendar

First up, set some realistic goals for yourself and make yourself accountable by blocking time in your calendar. Goals in Google Calendar automatically finds time in your busy schedule to go for a run, or prep some healthy meals for the week. If an important clash comes up, no worries: Google Calendar will suggest a better time for you.

2. Track your workouts and earn points with Google Fit.

From swimming to gym workouts, Google Fit works with many of your favorite apps and health devices to give you credit for all your moves. Use Google Fit on your Android phone to earn Heart Points and track how your progressing towards meeting your goals.

3. Blaze new trails on your bike with Google Maps.

Bike lanes and trails in Google Maps

Check out the bike paths in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park.

For the two-wheel enthusiasts out there, you can find biking routes near you by turning on the cycling layer in Google Maps. Dark green lines on the map show dedicated bike trails and paths without cars, green lines show streets with dedicated bike lanes, and dashed green lines show other streets recommended for cycling.

4. Stick to your diet goals with Google and YouTube.

If your resolution is to count calories as part of your diet, Google makes it easy. If you’re in the mood for French fries at lunch, just search “how many calories in French fries” and you’ll get your answer — 312 calories, plus 23 percent of your daily recommended daily intake of fat. You can also turn to YouTube to learn how to make healthy recipes. Thanks to YouTube creators like Veggie Recipe House, The Serious Fitness, and Health Nut Nutrition, you can create nutritious and delicious dishes all year long.

5. Follow along with the #GetFitWithGoogle challenge.

To get you motivated, we’ve invited people from around the globe to show us how it’s done in the #GetFitWithGoogle global challenge. From January 1-28, teams of four influencers per country are competing against each other to earn as many Heart Points as possible during the month with Google Fit.

Here’s the global leaderboard after Week 1.

KEYWORD WEEK 1 RESULTS.png

Get to know the teams!

  • KEYWORD WEEK 1 SWITZERLAND.png
  • KEYWORD WEEK 1 COLOMBIA.png
  • KEYWORD WEEK 1 USA.png
  • KEYWORD WEEK 1 BELGIUM.png
  • KEYWORD WEEK 1 ITALY.png
  • KEYWORD WEEK 1 INDIA.png

Follow their progress with the #GetFitWithGoogle hashtag on Instagram, and see who’s taking part in the challenge around the world. Don’t forget to share your fitness progress using the hashtag and let others know how you #GetFitWithGoogle, too.

Our goal: helping webmasters and content creators

Great websites are the result of the hard work of website owners who make their content and services accessible to the world. Even though it’s simpler now to run a website than it was years ago, it can still feel like a complex undertaking. This is why we invest a lot of time and effort in improving Google Search so that website owners can spend more time focusing on building the most useful content for their users, while we take care of helping users find that content. 

Most website owners find they don’t have to worry much about what Google is doing—they post their content, and then Googlebot discovers, crawls, indexes and understands that content, to point users to relevant pages on those sites. However, sometimes the technical details still matter, and sometimes a great deal.

For those times when site owners would like a bit of help from someone at Google, or an explanation for why something works a particular way, or why things appear in a particular way, or how to fix what looks like a technical glitch, we have a global team dedicated to making sure there are many places for a website owner to get help from Google and knowledgeable members of the community.

The first place to start for help is Google Webmasters, a place where all of our support resources (many of which are available in 40 languages) are within easy reach:

Our second path to getting help is through our Google Webmaster Central Help Forums. We have forums in 16 languages—in English, Spanish, Hindi, French, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese, German, Russian, Turkish, Polish, Bahasa Indonesia, Thai, Vietnamese, Chinese and Korean. The forums are staffed with dedicated Googlers who are there to make sure your questions get answered. Aside from the Googlers who monitor the forums, there is an amazing group of Product Experts who generously offer their time to help other members of the community—many times providing greater detail and analysis for a particular website’s content than we could. The forums allow for both a public discussion and, if the case requires it, for private follow-up replies in the forum.

A third path for support to website owners is our series of Online Webmaster Office Hours — in English, German, Japanese, Turkish, Hindi and French. Anyone who joins these is welcome to ask us questions about website appearance in Google Search, which we will answer to the best of our abilities. All of our team members think that one of the best parts of speaking at conferences and events is the opportunity to answer questions from the audience,  and the online office hours format creates that opportunity for many more people who might not be able to travel to a specialized event. You can always check out the Google Webmaster calendar for upcoming webmaster officer hours and live events.

While how a website behaves on the web is openly visible to all who can see it, we know that some website owners prefer not to make it known their website has a problem in a public forum. There’s no shame in asking for support, but if you have an issue for your website that seems sensitive—for which you don’t think you can share all the details publicly—you can call out that you would prefer to share necessary details only with someone experienced and who is willing to help, using the forum’s “Private Reply” feature.

Are there other things you think we should be doing that would help your website get the most out of search? Please let us know -- in our forums, our office hours, or via Twitter @googlewmc.

Posted by Juan Felipe Rincón from Google’s Webmaster Outreach & Support team

New ways to help teams work faster and smarter with G Suite

Today’s workplace is vastly different than it was 30 years ago. It used to be that a business could rely on a single team in a single location to get things done. These days, business is more diverse, dynamic and distributed than ever before. Decisions have to be made fast, teams need to align quickly and time can’t be wasted on repetitive, manual tasks. Consequently, companies that rely on decades-old, legacy work systems may find they aren’t agile enough to compete and stay relevant.

Imagine that your team needs to close a major sales deal. Stakeholders in multiple locations have to be consulted on the strategy. Customer needs have to be identified, a winning pitch must be drafted and the entire team must align on the right pricing approach—all before the end of the quarter.

G Suite makes this possible. It transforms the way teams collaborate, with intelligent tools that help them solve problems faster and focus their time on work that matters. Today, we’re announcing new, intelligent updates to G Suite to give businesses even more ways to manage projects—like closing a sales deal or bringing a new product to market—from one place.

Use a new, centralized platform to stay aligned on projects and make decisions quicker.

Available today, Hangouts Chat makes it easy to collaborate efficiently so teams can make faster decisions. With team chat rooms and threaded conversations, powerful search functionality and intelligent bots that connect workflows and speed up tasks (even with 3rd party apps), you can work on projects from one spot—like opening a new store location or launching an advertising campaign. Chat has deep integrations with other G Suite apps like Google Drive, Calendar and Hangouts Meet, and built-in security to meet retention, eDiscovery and regulatory/compliance needs for enterprises. Read more about Hangouts Chat or learn how you can build your own bots.

Spend less time setting up meetings and more time accomplishing goals.

We want to make it simple to manage meetings, which is why we’ve built tools to help you surface conference room information and find times to meet. In the coming months, Calendar will use artificial intelligence to automatically suggest rooms for you to book. And because they’ll be optimized for each attendee based on their building and floor location, previous booking history, audio/video equipment needs and room capacity requirements, you can feel confident that you’re booking the right space for your team to be productive.

ARS - GIF

Solve problems face-to-face with teammates over video, right away.

Sometimes it’s best to jump into an online meeting face-to-face with colleagues so you don’t hold up progress. Now, your team can quickly transition from a conversation in Chat and join a Hangouts Meet video conferencing meeting with just a few clicks.

Spend less time searching for the right documents and more time crafting ideas.

Today, we’re bringing Quick Access to Docs to help teams focus their time on work that matters (similar to Quick Access in Drive). Quick Access uses artificial intelligence to suggest relevant files based on signals like Drive activity and information in your documents, so you can work with the most up-to-date information and create new material quickly. Let’s say your global marketing team needs a central project plan; the team can start a Doc and use Quick Access in the Explore panel to find information from related files and add it into the plan quickly.

Image 3 - Bundle

To stay relevant, businesses must transform how they operate. Try today’s updates in G Suite and empower your teams to work better together.

Time for a refresh: meet the new Google Calendar for web

Check your schedule. Starting today, a fresh look and new features are coming to Google Calendar on the web to help you manage your time more efficiently and get more done.

We’re taking a lot of what you know and love from Calendar’s mobile application, like the modern color palette and sleek design, and bringing it to the web with a responsive layout that auto-adjusts to your screen size. We’ve also added more features for enterprises to help teams schedule and prepare for meetings.

New Calendar UI on web

Over the years, you’ve shared valuable feedback on how we can enhance Calendar to better fit your needs and we’re excited to bring new improvements. Now, it’s even easier to manage your schedule at your desk. In the new Calendar for web, you can:

  • See conference room details when booking a room. G Suite admins can now enter detailed information about their organization’s meeting rooms—so employees know where a conference room is located, how large it is, and whether it has audio/video equipment or is wheelchair accessible. Employees can simply hover over the room name in Calendar when they want to book a space, and a hovercard will pop up with details about the conference location and resources.

SRI in Calendar - GIF
  • Add rich formatting and hyperlinks to your Calendar invites. Link to relevant spreadsheets, documents or presentations in your Calendar invite and open them directly from the new “Event Detail” view. This can help you create more detailed agendas and ensure all materials are in one place before your meeting starts.
Rich text formatting in Calendar
  • Manage multiple calendars side by side in “Day” view. Now you can view and manage calendars in separate columns. This makes it easier for employees who manage multiple calendars, like administrative assistants, to schedule meetings on behalf of their teams. Click “Day” view and select the calendars you want to compare.
Side-by-side Day view in Calendar

There are a number of other changes in Calendar, too. Now you can see contact information of meeting participants when you hover over their names in a Calendar invite. There’s also a new way to view and restore deleted items in one place in case you accidentally delete a meeting. Additionally, "Day,” "Week,” and "Month" views are now more accessible, featuring better compatibility with screen readers. For more detail on changes, check out this post.

These new changes in Calendar can help your teams better manage their time, and G Suite admins can enable these new updates starting today. Read this post for more information on rollout options.


And if you use Calendar for personal use, click “Use new Calendar” in the upper righthand corner of the main Calendar view to get started.

Time for a refresh: meet the new Google Calendar for web

Check your schedule. Starting today, a fresh look and new features are coming to Google Calendar on the web to help you manage your time more efficiently and get more done.

We’re taking a lot of what you know and love from Calendar’s mobile application, like the modern color palette and sleek design, and bringing it to the web with a responsive layout that auto-adjusts to your screen size. We’ve also added more features for enterprises to help teams schedule and prepare for meetings.

New Calendar UI on web

Over the years, you’ve shared valuable feedback on how we can enhance Calendar to better fit your needs and we’re excited to bring new improvements. Now, it’s even easier to manage your schedule at your desk. In the new Calendar for web, you can:

  • See conference room details when booking a room. G Suite admins can now enter detailed information about their organization’s meeting rooms—so employees know where a conference room is located, how large it is, and whether it has audio/video equipment or is wheelchair accessible. Employees can simply hover over the room name in Calendar when they want to book a space, and a hovercard will pop up with details about the conference location and resources.

SRI in Calendar - GIF
  • Add rich formatting and hyperlinks to your Calendar invites. Link to relevant spreadsheets, documents or presentations in your Calendar invite and open them directly from the new “Event Detail” view. This can help you create more detailed agendas and ensure all materials are in one place before your meeting starts.
Rich text formatting in Calendar
  • Manage multiple calendars side by side in “Day” view. Now you can view and manage calendars in separate columns. This makes it easier for employees who manage multiple calendars, like administrative assistants, to schedule meetings on behalf of their teams. Click “Day” view and select the calendars you want to compare.
Side-by-side Day view in Calendar

There are a number of other changes in Calendar, too. Now you can see contact information of meeting participants when you hover over their names in a Calendar invite. There’s also a new way to view and restore deleted items in one place in case you accidentally delete a meeting. Additionally, "Day,” "Week,” and "Month" views are now more accessible, featuring better compatibility with screen readers. For more detail on changes, check out this post.

These new changes in Calendar can help your teams better manage their time, and G Suite admins can enable these new updates starting today. Read this post for more information on rollout options.


And if you use Calendar for personal use, click “Use new Calendar” in the upper righthand corner of the main Calendar view to get started.

Source: Google Cloud


Modifying events with the Google Calendar API

Originally posted by Wesley Chun (@wescpy), Developer Advocate, G Suite, on the G Suite Developers Blog.

You might be using the Google Calendar API, or alternatively email markup, to insert events into your users' calendars. Thankfully, these tools allow your apps to do this seamlessly and automatically, which saves your users a lot of time. But what happens if plans change? You need your apps to also be able to modify an event.

While email markup does support this update, it's limited in what it can do, so in today's video, we'll show you how to modify events with the Calendar API. We'll also show you how to create repeating events. Check it out:

Imagine a potential customer being interested in your product, so you set up one or two meetings with them. As their interest grows, they request regularly-scheduled syncs as your product makes their short list—your CRM should be able to make these adjustments in your calendar without much work on your part. Similarly, a "dinner with friends" event can go from a "rain check" to a bi-monthly dining experience with friends you've grown closer to. Both of these events can be updated with a JSON request payload like what you see below to adjust the date and make it repeating: 

    
var TIMEZONE = "America/Los_Angeles";
var EVENT = {
    "start": {"dateTime": "2017-07-01T19:00:00", "timeZone": TIMEZONE},
    "end":   {"dateTime": "2017-07-01T22:00:00", "timeZone": TIMEZONE},
    "recurrence": ["RRULE:FREQ=MONTHLY;INTERVAL=2;UNTIL=20171231"]
};

This event can then be updated with a single call to the Calendar API's events().patch() method, which in Python would look like the following given the request data above, GCAL as the API service endpoint, and a valid EVENT_ID to update: 


    
GCAL.events().patch(calendarId='primary', eventId=EVENT_ID,
    sendNotifications=True, body=EVENT).execute()

If you want to dive deeper into the code sample, check out this blog post. Also, if you missed it, check out this video that shows how you can insert events into Google Calendar as well as the official API documentation. Finally, if you have a Google Apps Script app, you can access Google Calendar programmatically with its Calendar service.

We hope you can use this information to enhance your apps to give your users an even better and timely experience.

Track projects with G Suite and Asana

Technology has transformed the way businesses operate—your teams likely do not look like they did 10 years ago. Now, companies rely on a mobile workforce and require productivity tools to help them collaborate no matter the location, and more importantly, without holding up work.

Businesses are using Asana  and G Suite to collaborate and manage projects from start to finish. Asana is a project management tool that helps teams plan, manage and track work, and is a part of the Recommended for G Suite program. With these two tools, your organization can:

  • Create tasks in Asana directly from Gmail
  • Add files directly from Google Drive to tasks in Asana
  • Keep track of deadlines by syncing your tasks in Asana with Google Calendar
  • Build custom reports in Google Sheets to analyze project data in Asana

Asana and Google

How OutSystems uses G Suite and Asana to drive marketing launches

OutSystems is a low-code application platform that uses Asana and G Suite to manage digital marketing and advertising projects to reach its more than 7 million users. With 30 marketers across the globe, it’s important that OutSystems uses tools to streamline reviews and track project status. 

With more than 90,000 apps built on their platform, OutSystems relies on Asana to prioritize projects and create templates for marketing launches. G Suite apps are built in, which means OutSystems employees can access their favorite productivity tools, like Google Drive, Docs and Sheets, in one place. 

Teams use Drive to attach files to tasks in Asana, Docs to edit web content, and Sheets to analyze project data. OutSystems marketers also work with external freelancers, and G Suite’s permission sharing settings make it easy to protect proprietary information.

You can get started using Asana and G Suite at your business. Sign up for this free webinar on Tuesday, June 27, 2017 at 9 a.m. PT / 12 p.m. ET.

Source: Gmail Blog


Track projects with G Suite and Asana

Technology has transformed the way businesses operate—your teams likely do not look like they did 10 years ago. Now, companies rely on a mobile workforce and require productivity tools to help them collaborate no matter the location, and more importantly, without holding up work.

Businesses are using Asana  and G Suite to collaborate and manage projects from start to finish. Asana is a project management tool that helps teams plan, manage and track work, and is a part of the Recommended for G Suite program. With these two tools, your organization can:

  • Create tasks in Asana directly from Gmail
  • Add files directly from Google Drive to tasks in Asana
  • Keep track of deadlines by syncing your tasks in Asana with Google Calendar
  • Build custom reports in Google Sheets to analyze project data in Asana

How OutSystems uses G Suite and Asana to drive marketing launches

OutSystems is a low-code application platform that uses Asana and G Suite to manage digital marketing and advertising projects to reach its more than 7 million users. With 30 marketers across the globe, it’s important that OutSystems uses tools to streamline reviews and track project status. 

With more than 90,000 apps built on their platform, OutSystems relies on Asana to prioritize projects and create templates for marketing launches. G Suite apps are built in, which means OutSystems employees can access their favorite productivity tools, like Google Drive, Docs and Sheets, in one place. 

Teams use Drive to attach files to tasks in Asana, Docs to edit web content, and Sheets to analyze project data. OutSystems marketers also work with external freelancers, and G Suite’s permission sharing settings make it easy to protect proprietary information.

You can get started using Asana and G Suite at your business. Sign up for this free webinar on Tuesday, June 27, 2017 at 9 a.m. PT / 12 p.m. ET.

Source: Drive


Track projects with G Suite and Asana

Technology has transformed the way businesses operate—your teams likely do not look like they did 10 years ago. Now, companies rely on a mobile workforce and require productivity tools to help them collaborate no matter the location, and more importantly, without holding up work.

Businesses are using Asana  and G Suite to collaborate and manage projects from start to finish. Asana is a project management tool that helps teams plan, manage and track work, and is a part of the Recommended for G Suite program. With these two tools, your organization can:

  • Create tasks in Asana directly from Gmail
  • Add files directly from Google Drive to tasks in Asana
  • Keep track of deadlines by syncing your tasks in Asana with Google Calendar
  • Build custom reports in Google Sheets to analyze project data in Asana

Asana and Google

How OutSystems uses G Suite and Asana to drive marketing launches

OutSystems is a low-code application platform that uses Asana and G Suite to manage digital marketing and advertising projects to reach its more than 7 million users. With 30 marketers across the globe, it’s important that OutSystems uses tools to streamline reviews and track project status. 

With more than 90,000 apps built on their platform, OutSystems relies on Asana to prioritize projects and create templates for marketing launches. G Suite apps are built in, which means OutSystems employees can access their favorite productivity tools, like Google Drive, Docs and Sheets, in one place. 

Teams use Drive to attach files to tasks in Asana, Docs to edit web content, and Sheets to analyze project data. OutSystems marketers also work with external freelancers, and G Suite’s permission sharing settings make it easy to protect proprietary information.

You can get started using Asana and G Suite at your business. Sign up for this free webinar on Tuesday, June 27, 2017 at 9 a.m. PT / 12 p.m. ET.

Source: Gmail Blog