Excel-Hxll, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying & Love the Google Cloud

 What's up, happy Saturday! I've drank so much cinnamon this week, I'm thinking seriously about chai and listening to that new Silk Sonic album (I love Bruno Mars, the cornier the better). I've been working on redoing all of my budgeting this week as I wait eternally for new quotes (see last week's blog). I was really hoping I could take those quotes and budget accordingly, but without the luxury of time I'm just going to do hypothetical spreadsheets so I'm battle tested ahead of time. 

The Google Cloud used to suck.

My relationship with the google cloud began when I got my Chromebook a couple of years ago, and it was one of the only programs I could use to write in without my computer crashing. The Chromebook was the only laptop I could afford (about $250-300), and the google cloud was free, so I would make it work.

At that time you couldn't organize documents in folders from individual programs like docs or sheets by clicking and dragging. You had to open each one and change the file path. you could kind of share files individually and you could kind of hold meetings through hangouts to talk. The ability to create and share existed, but the navigation was very slow and chunky.

I learned to love the Google Cloud this year.

Flash Forward to 2021 and you have faster, better file sharing through Google drive. The drive had existed for awhile, but now click and drag made it much more practical. It's a remote hard drive where you can create folders and move files around from any of googles widgets like Docs (word), Sheets (Excel), and Slides (Powerpoint). When you share a link to a folder it gives the person you share it with access to everything in that folder.

This means if I need to share a handful or large documents like my architect permits, I can put them in a folder and email someone a link. Rather than hoping we aren't kneecapped by the file size limit somewhere along the way. Or hoping they don't miss something in that email because of how it's formatted. 

Because you can access the drive through apps or mobile browsers, if I need any one piece of business information for a phone call or meeting it's easy to find. I'm constantly hitting walls where I need my EIN or some other piece of obscure information and I'm saved by the cloud. 

So that brings me to today

I'm making my 8th giant "sheet," which has a link up top tying it to my millionth giant "doc", which has dozens of smaller links to equipment buying locations. These are all easily managed and opened/closed through web browser tabs in Chrome. As a power user at my day job of tons of Microsoft/third party applications, I hate it! Juggling dozens of apps and their performance sucks, when Google makes it feel so much better. 

That's all I wanted to say, as I am creating more and more it's just nice to have stuff in a cloud. Thanks for reading, peace. - Elias