Forum Tools

Many community groups either coordinate or support forums, workshops or conferences. There are some very useful tools available via Drive to assist your group with these.

Planning Tools

Like any major activity, planning and organisation are critical to the success of an event. Tools available which can assist this include:

• Google Sheets templates for budget, project management, scheduling. Refer to the Drive Templates page for information on accessing these.
• Registration Forms to simplify participant registration
• Event Management Template to plan and manage events

Presentation Tools

Google Sheets is the equivalent of the Microsoft PowerPoint software, with some particular advantages.

• Like all Drive tools, Sheets can be developed and used via a browser on PC, Tablet or mobile, is not restricted to machines with expensive software, and is not subject to pc and software version issues.
• Sheets has the capacity to enable collaboration on the design and content of Presentations, and enable all the key tools and capacity required for quality presentations.
• Presentations can be presented live from an online version, synced to a PC to be available offline or downloaded in common formats.
• Presentations can be embedded into websites for future access.
• The new Slides Q&A now enable direct, live feedback and questions from audience during a presentation, to be covered by the presenter live. This can reduce or eliminate the need for additional roving microphones, and enable scored questions to identify the most popular questions. See below.

Slides Q & A - Accept and Present Audience Questions

Presenters can start a live Q&A session with an audience during a presentation with Google Slides. You can present questions at any time, and people can ask questions from any device.

Instructions on how to enable this are here: https://support.google.com/docs/answer/6386827

Hints for Presentations

This Hints page has a range of tips and hints on effective presentations. It includes a presentation for PowerPoint, and another for Slides.