Google Apps

Google app icons

All Google Apps are connected with your NC State email account. There are several apps developed by Google, but students use these the most. Google has developed mobile versions of these apps too for smart phones, so you can access your email and files from a personal internet connected tablet or cell phone. For more detailed information on the G Suite at NC State, please click here: https://google.oit.ncsu.edu/

Gmail

To find information about Gmail, please check out the “NCSU Email” section.

Google Meet and Chat

Formerly called Google Hangouts, these are now separated into Chat (messaging) and Meets (video chats) — similar to Instant Messenger and Skype. These are convenient for a quick conversation with a classmate, a discussion with group partners, virtual office hours, etc. With Meets you can even share your screen with the other people in the video call. To access Chat or Meet, go to the lower left-hand corner of the Gmail window, or find the Google Apps panel in the upper right-hand corner of the Gmail window and click “More”.

Google Calendar

Google Calendar is used all the time by professors, advisors, and students at NC State. It makes scheduling meetings with professors easier, laying out your classes, and organizing your life.  MyPack even allows you to sync your class schedule to your Google Calendar, where each event includes the course name, time, and location of each class.

Drive

Google Drive is another highly used app that stores files. It is useful for backing up school assignments and sharing documents with classmates. You can download the Google Drive app to your personal computer and access your files offline. The next time you have internet connection, it will sync with the cloud, and you will be able to access the same files from any computer with internet access.

Currently (as of August 2024), students are given 15GB of storage space on Drive. As this value could be lowered in the future, you may want to have a hard-copy back-up of your files, or use the B: (ncsudrive).

Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Forms

In association with Google Drive, Google has developed its own suite of programs that edit documents, similar to Microsoft Office Suite, where you can easily create and share files with others, allowing them to view, edit, and/or comment on files. Google Docs is a word processing program that is convenient for group papers and projects. Google Sheets is a spreadsheet program that allows you to easily calculate and share data. Google Slides is used for creating presentations. Google Forms is great for taking polls and surveys, where you can store the results in a Google Sheet.

Authorization

You might like to use your NCSU Google Account as a way to outsource authentication to third-party site. You might have seen the ability to use your Google account or similar to log in to various websites.

A page that lets you sign-on using 3rd parties like Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, etc.

To see which third-party apps that have access to your Google data: visit https://myaccount.google.com/connections

You will need to use this to access certain university material. For example, if you want to read The New York Times using your school account (see: How do I get access to The New York Times?), you can use your NCSU email to register. The New York Times is then a third party app that you’re using Google to sign in to.