Working on projects can be an organizational nightmare, with teams often spending more time on keeping track of work than actually working. To solve this issue, Google’s Area 120–the company’s in-house incubator for experimental projects, has announced the beta launch of a new work tracing tool called Tables, to allow teams to track work and automate tasks to save time and supercharge collaboration—without any coding.
“Tracking work with existing tech solutions meant building a custom in-house solution or purchasing an off-the-shelf product, but these options are time-consuming, inflexible and expensive,” said Tim Gleason, General Manager of Tables, in a blog post. This is the reason why the company decided to launch a “user-friendly, intuitive work tracking tool,” which resulted in the birth of Tables.
The tool is Google’s way of investing in automation, which it’s doing by using bots, which can easily schedule recurring email reminders when tasks are overdue, message a chat room when new form submissions are received, or move a task to someone else’s work queue when the status is changed.
Moreover, Tables takes a lot of tasks that were earlier done manually, including checking multiple different sources of data, collating it all together and then copying and pasting it into another doc to hand it off, and automates them, making the actions quick and easy, saving teams time and making collaboration seamless.
The company has also tried to make the transition to Tables as seamless as possible, and will allow users to import data right from Google Sheets, share data with your Google Groups and assign tasks to your existing Google contacts, to start working with the tool.
However, as of yet, the feature is only available in Beta, and in the U.S., both in a paid and a free version. Hopefully, it will roll out for everyone soon.
