Using Google Docs at Work

If you’ve read many of my previous posts you probably already know I’m a big fan of Google Docs. I’ve written about being hooked on Google Docs and also using Google Docs for wedding invitations.  I’ve also been trying to push Google Docs at work so that our marketing team can collaborate on spreadsheets without having to do the extra work of copy and pasting them all back together.

We’re trying to get a direct mail piece out to some of our prospects, and we needed to refine our list of potential customers.  We have leads from quite a few different sources, and not all of them have complete information.  Some might be missing an email address, others a city and state, and some might be missing annual revenue which we need to qualify them as a prospect.  We exported all of this information from Salesforce and got it into an Excel document so we could clearly see where the missing pieces were.  To get this completed as quickly as possible I thought the best solution would be to open up a Google spreadsheet so the 5 of us on the marketing team could all work on it at the same time.  We couldn’t do that with Excel because we would need to first break the spreadsheet down into 5 equal parts, send it out to each person via email, and then copy and paste their information into a master sheet once they completed it.  With Google Docs everything can happen at once and there’s no need to have separate versions of the spreadsheet.

I’d love to get a chance to try out applications like SmartSheet that distribute repetitive tasks like list management to services like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and they’re completed for you through crowdsourcing.  Anyone using the Mechanical Turk can complete tasks for a set price.  Using a spreadsheet with incomplete leads as an example, you could put the document on Smartsheet and agree to pay 10 cents per completed record and very likely find someone that’s willing and able to complete it.

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