April was a busy month filled with taxes and Google Apps training sessions. There were also some really cool updates released for Google Apps that you may not have seen. Don’t worry! We made this helpful recap of the 4 most important updates for Sheets, Drive, and the Admin Console.

1. Conditional Formatting In Sheets Gains The Ability To Create Heatmaps

Originally covered in How To Turn Any Data Set Into A Heat Map
In order to visualize trends within large sets of data, you used to have to create a chart or graph. Google’s recent update to conditional formatting in Google Sheets eliminates that step by allowing you to quickly turn any data set into a colored heat map.

A data heat map highlights each data cell with a different color along a spectrum based on its distance from the statistical mean. As an example, you could use heat maps to quickly identify trends in expense reports, like which days you spend the most money.

2. Google+ Photos Now Automatically Back Up To your Drive

If you’re like me, you prefer everything related to your Gmail account to be accessible in one place. The value of having an integrated suite is that it saves you from searching from app to app to find what you are looking for. Thanks to a recent update, your Google+ and Drive photos can now be found in the same place as well.

The newly released Google Photos folder in Google Drive pulls in all your Google+ photos immediately after they are posted. Scroll through every photo you have ever uploaded to Google+ and get a clear history of what you have posted using this convenient backup folder.

3. Custom Alerts Allow Admins To Better Audit Their Domain

Admins could always use predefined alerts to keep up with everything that was happing on their domain. Now with the release of custom alerts Admins can create specific alerts for events that occur on their domain by specific users.

This update will allow you to create an alert that can notify you when a specific user deletes a calendar on your domain or when a user unsuccessfully logs in to their Google Apps account and from which IP address they attempted the login.

4. The Chat Compliance Update Provides Additional Control Over How Your Users Communicate

Originally covered in How To Manage Chat Compliance In Google Apps
Chatting has historically been the wild west of the Google Apps ecosystem. Users were free to communicate using the outdated Google Talk or the newer, more robust, Google Hangouts. Now that is all changing, thanks to the addition of compliance controls for Google Hangouts.

Admins have the ability to ensure all users in a domain have Hangouts enabled, simplifying their users’ chat communication. In addition to this, Hangouts can be forced ‘on the record’ or ‘off the record’ across the whole domain, providing an additional layer of control.