App tips

Google Docs lets you collaborate on documents; Gmail doesn't really let you collaborate on emails. That's kind of weird, right? 

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Draft and collaborate on emails in Google Docs

Find large files in Google Drive, Gmail, and Google Photos to free up storage space.

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How to free up space in your Google account

In most cases, switching from one tool to another isn't nearly the amount of work you think it will be. I'd go so far as to say that switching apps is, in most cases, simpler than you're imagining. 

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Switching apps isn't scary

Productivity tips

We talk about automation a lot on the Zapier blog, and I really do believe that automating your work can give you time back in your day. But I don't think we should automate our work just to free up time to...do more work.

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Automate and chill: Put the computers to work so you don't have to

Google Drive can grab the text from any image or PDF using a built-in optical character recognition (OCR). Here's how to use it.

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How to convert images to text with Google Drive

English is full of expressions that make no sense without context and even less with it. "Pull yourself up by your bootstraps" is the best example I can think of. This expression isn't just literal nonsense—it's figurative nonsense.

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You can't pull yourself up by your bootstraps

Here's how to record your screen in Windows, Android, macOS, and on iPhone or iPad. 

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How to record your screen on any device

Remote and hybrid work used to be an edge case. They're not anymore and major software is changing to reflect that. 

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 5 Google Calendar features every remote or hybrid team needs

It's bad enough that you have five Zoom meetings this morning. Why, when the meetings are done, do you have to come back to a browser with five "Launch Meeting" tabs? 

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How to automatically close those annoying "Launch Meeting" tabs from Zoom

Yelling at someone who actually ripped you off isn't effective because con artists don't care. Yelling at someone who is actually trying to help only alienates a potential ally.

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The time a dance instructor made me cry

Since we're all going to be wildly fluctuating on the good/in-between/bad spectrum for the foreseeable future, we might as well plan around it.

Use the good days to set yourself up for the bad ones

Google's work location tool will help everyone know who's in the office and who's working from home. Here's how to use it.

Every hybrid worker should enable this Google Calendar feature

Calendly isn't particularly hard to use, which is part of why it's one of the best meeting scheduler apps. That doesn't mean every feature is obvious, though, and some of Calendly's best features are just a little bit hidden.

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6 hidden Calendly settings to make scheduling easier

Team chat apps make remote work easier. I'd even say they're what make remote work possible. But that doesn't mean team chat apps are only useful for remote work: these tools won't stop being useful just because your team is moving back to their desks. 

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Why messaging apps are still useful in the office

Simplicity is a big part of Typeform's appeal: you can set up a great-looking form or survey in just a couple of minutes. But that simplicity doesn't get in the way of customization. 

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4 hidden Typeform settings you should know about

It's the most important question: what's the Wi-Fi password? Here's how to retrieve your Wi-Fi password from your phone or computer.

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How to find and share your Wi-Fi password

Spend any time reading about software, and you'll see the words "open source," likely without any sort of explanation as to what that means. Why doesn't anyone bother explaining it?

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What is open source software?

If my manager ever texts me "hi", "hello", or "hey" without any further context, I will assume that I'm fired. It's the only logical conclusion. The same goes for "are you around?", "let me know when you get in," and "can we talk?"

Managers: Never just text your reports the word "hi"

As people start transitioning back into the office, I hope they'll take some of the lessons they learned from online meetings to improve the in-person ones. Here are four remote meeting rules that I think should follow us back to the office.

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4 video meeting rules that should follow us back to the office

Recently, Keren Kinberg, a frontend engineer here at Zapier, discovered a simple way to make her paper task list more effective: highlighting completed tasks instead of crossing them out.

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Try highlighting your completed tasks instead of crossing them off

Best apps

RSS feeds are the ultimate power user tool for keeping up with the news. And if there's one thing a power user can't stand, it's clumsy software. For Mac users, that means the best choice is a native app. Here are the three best RSS readers for Mac.

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The 3 best RSS readers for Mac

There are too many apps. Most of them don't talk to each other. Fixing this yourself is time-consuming and expensive.  That's the basic logic behind integration software, which makes it easy to connect all the software you use.

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What is iPaaS? A guide to integration software

Predictive text has precisely one acceptable use: generating unhinged gibberish for text messages to disturb your friends.    This is wonderful and makes the world a better place. In Gmail and Google Docs, though, predictive text is distracting. 

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How to turn off Google's Smart Compose feature

It might seem odd, building Lego sets in your office. But digital jobs don't give you a lot of physical indication that you're making progress. LEGO sets do.

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Why you should build LEGO sets at work

Remote work tips

Meetings are generally unpleasant, and video makes it worse. This is why it's important to avoid unnecessary meetings on remote teams. But certain conversations really are better out loud—in those cases, a little fun can go a long way.

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How to make virtual meetings fun

Productivity isn't the point. It never was. I'm trying to teach myself this, but it's not easy, and that's why I think my relationship with work feels off. 

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Productivity isn't the point

The idea of networking makes me cringe. Here's the thing, though: I actually love connecting with people, and that enthusiasm works out for me professionally. I got this job because of a friend I made on Twitter. That's networking. 

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Forget networking—connect with people because they're interesting 

Starting a new job is overwhelming. So is learning new software. It's a good thing no one expects you to do both things at once.

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4 tips for learning your way around Airtable

It's not just you: the internet is actively hostile to readers—and it keeps getting worse. Most pages are so cluttered that it can be hard to find where the article even is. Here's a solution.

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The internet is a nightmare now, but reader mode makes it better

Spreadsheets are anarchy. You can type whatever you want in any cell and no one can stop you. I could write "orange" in a column labeled "birthday" and no one could stop me. Like most freedom, this is great until you make a mess.

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What is data validation in Google Sheets? 

Spend enough time on the internet, and you'll end up on a GitHub page, usually when you want to download an app or tool that doesn't have its own website. As you fumble your way through that process, it's pretty clear that GitHub isn't designed to do that.

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What even is GitHub?

Zoom recently added easier pronoun sharing, but the setting isn't easy to find. Here's how to use the official pronoun feature, along with a workaround if your organization decides not to enable it.

How to add your pronouns on Zoom

Actual impostors don't experience impostor syndrome. They don't wonder if they're qualified for their current position, or if they measure up with their peers. They just lie, lie, lie, until they have access to what they want, then they take it—and leave.

Actual impostors don't get impostor syndrome

We asked our pets what they need from us as officemates. Here's what they said.

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​​How to be a good coworker to your pets

In a world full of BS, the best way to stand out is to resemble an actual human being. Admitting you don't know something is the most human thing you can do.

Admit when you don't know things

Microsoft recently announced that Skype for Business Online is shutting down on July 31, 2021. But the consumer version of Skype, which you can download for free, isn't going anywhere. So: what's happening? 

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Wait, is Skype shutting down? 

Career progression is one of the most important stories in our culture. The American Dream. You're supposed to start at the bottom and work your way toward the top. But you know what? The top sounds like a nightmare to me, and so do the steps in between.

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It's ok not to have goals 

I don't mind useless Zoom meetings—they're a great time to get some work done. The problem: you can't really respond to Slack messages during meetings without your coworkers noticing that you're working instead of paying attention to the meeting.

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How to use Slack during meetings without anyone noticing (and other reasons to schedule messages)

I've run multiple blogs in my life, but you know what I've never had to do? Manually add a byline field, publish date element, or related articles section to a post. Those are all taken care of by a content management system (CMS). 

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What is a CMS? An actual explanation 

You try to paste something in Google Docs. You get a cryptic message instead. Here's why—and how you can get around it.

Why won't Google Docs let me paste without installing an extension? 

Hi. I'm being paid by a very profitable tech company to write this article. Does that make you question my motives?  It should.

How to spot content marketing in search results

You open a video link while listening to music. You reflexively hit the play/pause key on your keyboard to pause the music. The video pauses; the music keeps playing. Here's how to fix that. 

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How to stop Chrome from hijacking your media keys

What corporate jargon do you hate the most? I asked this question on Twitter recently and was surprised by the most common answer: "family." 

A company is not a family

If you're doing a presentation on Zoom, and I can see the top of your browser, I am not listening to a word you're saying. At all. 

How to share a presentation on Zoom without sharing your browser tabs and address bar

The tools you use to coordinate at work can also work for other parts of your life. Here's how two Zapier employees brought their work apps home.

Work software also works at home

Small business tips

Sometimes it makes more sense to pay for products than to build them yourself. This might sound obvious, but it can be a hard thing to realize in the context of a bootstrapped company like Zapier. 

The limits of building everything yourself

Newsletters are the new blog. Most of the web's best essays and curation have moved to the inbox, for tech and economic reasons I won't break down here. The problem: some of us don't like reading things in our inbox. 

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How to read newsletters without clogging up your inbox

Most businesses pay for at least one large software bundle. Whatever bundle you have, there's a good chance there are apps in there you don't know about. And that might mean that you're paying extra for software that you already have access to.

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You might already be paying for the software you need

It's hard to notice oddities in your culture—they just feel "normal." But there's nothing universal about what you consider common sense. It's all shaped by the world you grew up in. 

Work and life don't have to be balanced

Is your Google account asking you to check your Android phone, or open the Gmail app on your Apple device? Nothing is broken—Google just changed how signing in works for most users.

Why is Google suddenly asking for two-step verification? 

App comparisons

To summarize: Google Sheets is a spreadsheet, while Google Tables is a database with built-in automation tools. Let's talk more about what that means. 

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Google Tables vs. Google Sheets: What's the difference?

Plenty of small businesses use chatbots to answer questions and otherwise better serve their customers. These bots aren't just a gimmick—they make it more likely that customers will work with you. And with no-code tools, bots are easier to build than ever.

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4 chatbot tips from business owners 

It's not just you: finding the free versions of software is getting harder and harder. Companies are starting to hide them. 

How to find the free version of apps

There is something about unnecessary meetings that can turn a group of intelligent, kind, charismatic people into one collective brainless, mean, boring monster. 

4 things you shouldn't use meetings for

A lot of people want to edit their tweets and complain about not being able to do so. I've never understood this. Editing your tweets isn't hard. 

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How to edit a Tweet

The free version of Todoist, largely unchanged since 2007, just got a bunch of new features—and new limitations. 

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Todoist's free version is now limited to five projects—here's what you need to know

Your Mac goes to sleep after a few idle minutes, which is a good thing—your battery wouldn't last very long otherwise. Every once in a while, though, that's not what you want. 

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How to force your Mac to stay awake

I make a lot of mistaeks. We all do. Sometimes, while trying to fix my mistakes, I make another mistake. Like this:    Clicking that option added my typo to my computer's dictionary, meaning spell check will no longer point it out for me.

How to remove typos you accidentally added to spell check

Have you noticed how long URLs are lately? Me too. I get a little tired of copying a URL and seeing a bunch of nonsense. What's going on? And can you delete any of that stuff? 

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How to figure out which junk you can remove from URLs

TikTok reminds me of what the internet used to be. YouTube is increasingly professionalized—every trending video seems to be shot in a professional studio by an actual crew, and all of it is a half-hour long. 

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7 TikTok marketing tips from small businesses

Vacations shouldn't be stressful. This seems obvious, but a Zapier survey discovered that the dread involved with coming back from vacation can be crippling. 

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5 things to do before going out of office

Apple's "There's an app for that" campaign dates back to 2009, meaning it's 12 years old as I write this. The idea that you should find a specific app for every specific use case is deeply ingrained at this point. 

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Stop paying for software you can build yourself

Zapier has been a remote-only company since the beginning, and clear communication is the only way to make that work. How we use emoji is a big part of that—reacji in particular. 

12 emoji we use every day that Slack doesn't come with for some reason

Dropbox is great on computers because it syncs your files and stays out of your way. I love it for exactly this reason: I don't have to think about it. It just works. 

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How to make Dropbox run in the background again

Customer stories

Imagine not seeing a loved one for 15 years, or being separated from your entire family for that long. Think about the background radiation of it—how it would hang over everything you do. 

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How a small team connects hundreds of people with long-lost loved ones

You can still print on Chromebooks, thanks to native printer support, and there are other apps you can use for cloud printing—including connecting with Zapier. Let's talk about why Google killed Cloud Print and how you can get some of these features back. 

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Google Cloud Print is no more—here's what to do

Reminding someone they're behind on a project can be awkward. Reminding someone they're behind on a project during an all-hands meeting, in front of the entire company, is worse. 

Transparency has its limits

 The workday evolved in 2020, and tools are adapting to accommodate that. Google announced a few subtle tweaks to Google Calendar. The main one: you can segment your work day into multiple chunks. 

You can now split your working hours in Google Calendar

There are so many sayings with the same basic message: quitting is bad. This idea is instilled in kids, internalized by adults, and generally just considered common sense. It's also often wrong. 

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Quitting is good, actually

Maybe you're running a gym with online classes that need music. Maybe you just want some low-fi hip hop beats to relax/discuss quarterly earnings to. Whatever the case, sometimes you want to share music during a Zoom call. 

How to play background music on Zoom—without sharing your screen

It's been brought to my attention that some people think you shouldn't wave at the end of video calls. Those people are incorrect. 

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You should absolutely wave at the end of video calls

I recently noticed a lot of people use the words "startup" and "small business" interchangeably, which strikes me as odd. For one thing, some small businesses are hundreds of years old. And plenty of companies we call "startups" are actually quite big.

Justin Pot

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