G Suite for Support Staff

For the past 4 years, schools across the ACT have made the shift to G Suite, Classroom and Chromebooks, and most teachers and students are operating happily in with Google tools. However, the admin staff, business managers and other support staff in schools are also using G Suite to share, collaborate and work together. This workshop will look at some of the important skills of G Suite that may be more relevant to people in supporting roles, and how G Suite differs from traditional office tools.

Before we get started...

What specific things are you hoping to get out of today’s workshop? Do you have any particular challenges, issues, problems or questions about working in G Suite?

Please take a moment to write them down in this doc

Gmail and Calendar

Support staff are typically heavy users of email and calendars. In the ACT, support staff and teaching staff continue to use Microsoft Outlook for these functions. Google offer similar tools with Gmail and Google Calendar, which perform many of the exact same functions as Outlook, but these are currently only used by students.

Google Sheets

Managing spreadsheet data is a fairly common requirement for support staff. Let's look at a few key spreadsheets skills and how they apply in Google Sheets.

Open this sample Sheet

Work through the tabbed samples:

The Basics
Student Information
Gradebook
Menus
Sport Choices
Filter Views
Tax Pivot
Food Diary

Skills to Learn

Frozen Rows/Columns
Resize Columns/Rows
Formatting numbers/text
Sorting
Filters and Filter views
Splits and Concats
Pivot Tables
Insert/Delete cells
Create charts and graphs
VLOOKUP formulas
IF formulas
Data Verification

Google Forms

Google Forms is a great way to create surveys, polls, quizzes and questionnaires. The collected information goes directly into a Google Sheet for analysis. Using a Form to collect data is a fast, easy and saves a lot of time going back and forth with email.

Create a Google Form that could be used to collect data that might be useful for your work.

Mail Merge with Autocrat

Create a new folder called Mail Merge Demo, and inside that, another folder called Merged Letters.

Open this Merge Template (Force Copy). Move this new copy to the Mail Merge Demo folder.
Merge the Student Information Sheet into this Doc to create a collection of merged letters.

File Conversions

Can you successfully convert Microsoft Office files to Google format? You bet.

And can you convert from Google Docs to Microsoft Office format? Absolutely.

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