Geek On Fleek

Best resources to improve your presentations

Whether you have to create a presentation for a marketing pitch, a virtual class, or even a YouTube video, I’ve got you covered.

Presentations that are heavy on text tend to make you quickly lose your audience’s attention. Here are some websites I would recommend to pucker up your presentation. Use with moderation.

Canva

If you need something very, very visual that could work well with pre-made templates, such as a presentation for an English class, I’d recommend to go with Canva as your tool of choice.

Although there are some premium features and content, if you remove the premium pictures off existing templates, you should be able to use it for free.

Everyone will think your presentation was made by a designer!

Color Calculator

Sometimes, you will need help picking colors for your presentation, or perhaps, just want to include colors that combine well with the colors in your company’s logo. I’d recommend to check out this color calculator if that is the case for you.

This tool will help you find the best colors to create a theme according to your needs. If most of your presentation is made out of a specific color, you may want to use the complementary color that comes up on this site for specific content that you want to really highlight.

Flaticon

A little can go a long way, and that’s exactly why icons make up for a great addition to your presentation. You can check out this page in order to find the perfect icon that fits your needs best.

The Noun Project

Another website that I would highly recommend to find icons to include in your presentation is The Noun Project. If you did not find what you’re looking for on one the first site, this one may be worth to check out.

Pexels

In Pexels, you will be able to find stock stock photos and videos you can add to your presentation. I wouldn’t recommend to add too many stock photos to your presentation, but they’re great if you really need something a little more human, something that clearly represents a concept, or something that just evokes a certain feeling.

Pixabay

This website also offers a wide variety of stock photos and videos for your presentation. You can find vector graphics too.

Screencastify

In these harsh times, most teams are working remotely, and students are learning remotely too. If you need to make a presentation that works as a tutorial of something that you can reproduce or test on your computer, you may want to include short videos taking certain actions. Screencastify is a perfect option for this, whether you are working on Google Slides or PowerPoint, you will find it useful.

This is a Google Chrome extension, so this takes into account that you have the right browser. After you finish recording the video, you will be given the option to cut it, in case you only want to save specific moments.

I hope all this information can help you design stunning presentations!

Google Drive files automatically deleted after 30 days

Yes, I know that this might have seemed intimidating the first time you read the email they sent, or read about this change on a forum. Here’s all you need to know on how this will benefit you.

This will only affect items you have sent to the trash. — No other items from your Google Drive folders should be affected by this change.
Your trashed files will no longer take up your storage space indefinitely! — Items used to stay in your trash bin until you decided to permanently delete them, and they took up storage space until then.
More consistency. — In their efforts to innovate, collaboration suites often have behaviors that change from one service to another. This change will help bring more consistency in regards to what you should expect, as other Google features already worked with a similar approach for items sent to trash.
Less retention efforts from administrators. — Sometimes, G Suite administrators may require to set up special retention rules to ensure that things that are meant to be deleted are really deleted and purged, due to the sensitive nature of the data that an organization could potentially handle, or just for the sake of avoiding storage issues. This change should make for one less retention rule to be necessary for administrators to implement.

For more information about this change, you can check out this blog post from the G Suite Updates Blog.

Hope this information helps clarify any doubts you may have had. Stay safe!

Do I really need to purchase extra Google Drive storage?

If you’re checking this out, you’ve probably hit your free storage limit and are wondering if it is worth it to pay for extra storage. The answer:

It depends

See, if you’re just above the limit and you don’t think you will be uploading 1 Terabyte of stuff anytime soon, there may be other alternatives.

Clear your trash!
- Unlike other online services, Google Drive does not clear your trash. It stays in there until you decide to permanently delete it, and it also counts towards your storage limit. Check their article for more info on this.
Delete your orphaned files.
- I know this sounds weird, but stay with me. Google Drive files can get sort of lost inside of your own account when someone else tries to delete a file you own. If you frequently use shared folders, you may have content taking up storage that you think someone else deleted for you a long time ago without even realizing it. You can easily find these files with the search option in this article.
Download files you don’t need on the cloud anymore.
- If you have a lot of historical data that you can store offline, you can also download it and delete it permanently from Google Drive. If you think you may need to download and delete data often, you could use the Backup and Sync tool from Google and move things out of your Google Drive folder when you want them offline. This will allow you to download your content and have it handy, but also to control how much you actually want to keep online.
Check your Google Photos and Gmail for anything that may take up storage.
- Remember that your account’s total storage is the sum of the storage taken up by all of these three services, so it may be helpful to check for any other loose ends. Always keep in mind the clear the trash part for all of them, though.

Now, if you are really going to need a lot of storage, go ahead and get the extra storage. If you’re managing a lot of data, you will also have some backup on the perk that Google One now allows you to contact Google experts. However, if you’re really going to use this for your business and you’re going to need more than 10 TB of storage, going for the G Suite account route may come in cheaper, as paying for 5 users or more will get you unlimited storage on all accounts and access to more advanced Google Drive features.

Hope you find this info useful! If you have any doubts about your case scenario, feel free to contact me for advise!

Create your custom website with New Google Sites

Why New Google Sites?

If you want a website that doesn’t add a lot of complexity by default, I would recommend to go for Google Sites. Although it doesn’t have a lot of advanced features and perks as paid website builders do, it is quick and easy to use. Those who often create work presentations will easily find their way around Google Sites, as its interface is very intuitive and feels like you’re adding content to a slide.

Things you can’t do

As of the moment, there are a number of things you may have in mind that you may not actually be able to achieve with a New Google Site. I personally recommend it if you want to create a website where you can easily enter and organize text, images, documents, forms and videos. If you’re not techie, this is pretty much all you will be looking for at the moment, however, in case you’re trying to do any of these things, you may not be able to at the time:

Editing the site’s code, in consequence, some SEO techniques will be out of the question
Export your website
Create your own theme
Advanced design features
Blogging pages

Hands down, I would recommend it if you want to get on the web and have a site that is easy to show the information that you want to share with the world, but that will not be your main way of attracting customers. I would treat it as a menu of sorts for your services or portfolio.

Making it yours

We’re going to assume you already have a free Gmail account in here, if you don’t, you will have to create one too. When you sign up for a New Google Site from a free Gmail account, you get a URL starting with sites.google.com. If this is good enough for your purposes, you can just continue editing your site and then hit the “Publish” button. In this case, we want to make our site look and feel as professional as possible, so we will associate it with a domain name to have custom URLs.

A URL is basically what people will have to type in on a browser to find your website, so we want it to always be as simple as memorable as possible, think of it this way: example.com/sayhello is way more memorable than sites.google.com/view/examplecomcontactus. A domain name is the name in the “root” of the URL and it can be purchased from companies dedicated to provide this type of service. If you already have a domain, you may skip a couple of lines, otherwise, I would recommend to purchase a domain in GoDaddy due to the hassle free setup. Make sure that you buy the domain and nothing else, as nothing else that they offer is necessary for your site to run with New Google Sites, and check your cart to make sure you’re purchasing your domain for the right amount of time. Now, you’ve gotten yourself a domain.

In order to associate your domain with the New Google Site you’ve created, you will have to click through the following options:

Select the three dot menu at the top right side.
Go to the option “Custom URLs”.
Enter your domain as “www.yourdomain.com” in the blank field. It has to include the “www” in it.
Click on “Verify your ownership”.
Follow the steps Google will load automatically for you depending on where you bought your website. Once you’ve finished all the steps, keep in mind that the DNS changes you will do may require up to 48 hours to take effect, depending on your provider.
While you wait for the verification to go through, you will also want to add the CNAME record you will need for your website to work. The process will be pretty much the same as the instructions you just followed but instead of “TXT” the type of record will be “CNAME” , instead of your host being an “@” sign or anything else, it will be “www” and the last thing that changes is that the value of the record will be “ghs.googlehosted.com” instead of the verification code.
Once enough time has passed, go to your site and repeat steps 1-3. You will now see the option to “Assign”, click it.
You’re now done!