GoogleLife:About Google Life

From RandomWIKI

Google Life is a video series for the internet-unsavvy, or as I like to put it... those about to become Internet Savvy.

Whether you've stumbled onto the internet and thought to yourself "where do I go to make my idea a dream?" or whether you came on the internet without a focus, just curious about the circus that's been raging for the last couple of decades, this video series is set to establish some concepts, provide you with a direction, and give you a home-base to operate from out on the great wide interweb.

The internet is a huge morass of chaos, dotted with small arenas of sanity. Some people have websites that literally hand over control of your computer to their malicious whims and others have websites that are nothing more than blank pages with an image or some random text thrown in. The internet can be a crazy place, or... if you have a decent guide, and a solid sense of security, it can be a wonderful place to share ideas with the rest of humanity (sometimes whether you mean to share or not!)

Guide to the Guide : Or Who the heck are you and what is this supposed to be?

I want to be honest with everyone who stumbles across my digital playground here. I am not going to turn you into a computer hacker. I am not going to teach you everything you need to know, heck, I don't even have that much information. As we'll find out in this series, as soon as you learn everything you need to know, you'll discover that part of what you needed to know brings to light a whole plethora of things that you just learned you can't live without!

This series is intended to teach you about navigating the web according to Google.

I will present to you a list of commonly used applications from google that are generally free. Generally easy to use. Generally simple to use. I will go as in-depth as I can. I hope to give you a world you didn't know about, demystify the majority of it, and present you with a solid truth I discovered... you can do this.

I am not a smart person. I am a lazy person. This means that if there are thirty steps to completing a project, I can usually discover a way to reduce those steps to 10... or 5... or 1.

So when I tell you that I am a programmer, you need to understand. I started learning programming because I didn't want to rely on other people to provide me with solutions that were within my grasp. I started in 1995 working with Microsoft Access 95. I was working for Thrifty Rent-A-Car in their WorldWide Headquarters in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I had recently been promoted to supervisor and the company had just started to move their supervisors from Black-n-Orange CRT's to personal computers loaded with Microsoft Windows 95 and Microsoft Office 95. I was in heaven!

I started playing Microsoft Word, then Excel, and I landed in Access. Access was (and still is) a relational database application for managing large amount of data. I had uncovered the magic that was Word and how it integrated quite nicely into Excel and Access. I started making Databases of my Telephone Agents and their work, then linking them via templating to Word Documents. Now through one input process in Access I could track my agents, then print out nice looking reports collected in Word from Access. But I wanted my forms to do more!

So I started playing with VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) which was really difficult for me. With less than 0 prior computer experience, I discovered (much later, and much to my chagrin) that I was programming. I couldn't stop there. I started pushing on further.

My search out into the internet led me into an