Tips for administrative assistants

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Manage your boss

Stay in touch using Google Chat

Is your boss out of the office and you urgently need to get in touch? Use Google Chat to instantly chat from any device, anywhere.

Handle your manager’s contacts, email, and calendar

Whether you’re someone’s assistant or you’re just stepping in for your manager for a week, you can access and manage their contacts, compose and respond to Gmail messages, or schedule and coordinate Calendar events on their behalf.

Send a daily agenda to your manager’s inbox

Help your boss stay organized by showing them how to receive a daily agenda to review first thing in the morning. While looking at their morning emails, they can easily keep track of upcoming meetings and events.

Manage your team

Organize team events, travel plans, and more

Need to organize travel or event plans for your colleagues? Create and send a Forms survey to gather information on flights and hotels, or to get an event date that suits everyone. Then, create a Groups mailing list to share important updates with people who are traveling to or attending an event together.

Prepare everyone for meetings with event attachments

Prepare your boss and team members by giving them a chance to preview relevant files before meetings. When you send a Calendar invitation, you can attach documents, spreadsheets, presentations, agendas, and more—so everyone on the team is ready to contribute ideas. Keep your boss and team up to date before a meeting by attaching an agenda, notes, or presentation slides. Now, everyone can have a chance to look through relevant files before the meeting so they can come prepared.

Keep track of facility requests

Looking for an efficient way to coordinate facility requests? Use Forms so that team members can fill out requests for services, such as catering or maintenance. Then embed the form in a Sites website so employees have a go-to place for facility requests that they can access from any location or device. When someone submits a form, capture the responses in Sheets. You can even set up email notifications for new responses so the facilities team can carry out the request as quickly as possible.

Coordinate schedules and availability with team calendars

With large teams, it’s challenging to schedule dates that suit everyone. With Calendar, you can layer your team members’ calendars to see when everyone is available. You can even create multiple team calendars to keep track of meetings, trainings, vacations, and more. Now that you know when people are free, it’s easy to schedule team meetings or events.

Print your Google calendar

Keep track of your schedule the old fashioned way by printing your Google calendar. Choose any date range, set fonts, print event details, and more. You can even print in full color to track different event types.

Keep track of multiple time zones

If you work with people all over the globe, you need to know when they’re available in their time zone. You also need to make sure your bosses and co-workers don’t miss important meetings or events because of time differences when traveling. Quickly see the time in other countries by adding world clocks to your Calendar.

Gmail tips for admin assistants

Auto-organize your inbox with filters

Create filters to automatically delete, star, or forward your mail, and to apply labels to relevant incoming messages. For example, your manager’s inbox might be full of irrelevant messages such as event acceptances and declines. Set up a filter to have Gmail automatically archive them so your boss has a clean inbox and can focus on the most important messages.

Easily undo sent messages

Make a typo in your email? Forget to add a recipient? Change your mind about sending a message? Take back a message you just sent up to 30 seconds later by enabling Gmail’s Undo Send feature.

Save time using prewritten replies

Do you frequently type the same message over and over? Want to find an easy way to replicate important information like directions to the office or how to install and access a video meeting, and more? Use Gmail’s templates to save a reply—now, when you send email to new clients on your manager’s behalf, you can use the same template so you don’t have to type the same information every time.

Easily manage multiple signatures

Need to use different signatures for email within your company or externally? With Gmail, you can use templates to create different signatures. The next time you compose an email, just choose the template with the signature you’d like to use.

Shortcuts for working faster

Use keyboard shortcuts

Want to save time and work faster? Check out keyboard shortcuts in GmailCalendar, and other Google services. Get more done with fewer clicks.

Add tasks from your Inbox & Calendar

Stay organized and prioritize your assignments with tasks in Gmail or Calendar. You can easily convert email into tasks and create due dates that automatically appear on your calendar.

Get detailed search results for your contacts

Need detailed information for a person on your team? With Cloud Search, you can search all your Google Workspace products for work information related to a particular person. See a profile card with their contact and work details, email address, and any shared drive files and Calendar events.

Tips collaborating on documents

Access your files on any device, any time

Need to access an important file for your boss when you’re away from your office and don’t have email? After you store a file in Drive or a shared drive, you can access, share, and edit it on any device, any time.

Keep track of file and folder updates in Drive

Want to view changes and updates to your documents? Save work files and folders in Drive or shared drives and instantly share them with your boss and co-workers. When someone incorporates feedback and approvals, Drive shows you what files have changed, so everyone stays in sync.

Easily collaborate on documents with your co-workers

Need feedback from your manager or team on an important document? Want to chat instantly with people reviewing a file instead of emailing back and forth? Create and share a document with everyone and communicate in real time using DocsSheetsSlidesForms, and Drawings.

Find changes in documents faster

If you’re collaborating on a document with your boss and colleagues, it can be difficult to pinpoint who made certain changes and when. Use the revision history in Docs to review all the updates to your document. If you prefer an earlier version, you can revert to any previous versions at any time


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