How to use Google Meet

1. Open Meet

To start a session with Google Meet, in your browser, simply go to this page: https://meet.google.com/. Please use your uap.asia email account to sign in.

For those on a mobile device and not a computer, an app is available for Android and iOS phones and tablets, and we’ll also cover how to use that in a later step.

But first, let’s get this meeting started.

2. Start or join a Meet

After launching Meet, you are presented with a clickable panel that has the option to ‘Join or start a meeting’. In the same section of the screen, it will also display any meetings that you’ve previously scheduled in Google Calendar.

To join a meeting, you will need to know the name of that meeting, and in our example, we had created a meeting called Tech Radar Pro, and clicked ‘Continue’ to join.

3. Be a Presenter

If the meeting we tried to join didn’t exist or we were the only person, Meet would assume that we wanted to create a new meeting, and also gives the option to ‘present’.

As the presenter, you can distribute your computer desktop to any other attendees. It’s important to realize that anyone can present. It’s not an exclusive feature of the person who creates the Meet or gets there first.

4. Control Camera and Sound

When a meet is created, your system is immediately checked for conferencing functionality, including audio inputs and outputs and video links. By default sound and video are off, but simply by clicking on the icons at the bottom of the display panel will toggle these features on and off.

One slight oddity that throws people slightly is that if you have video active of yourself, it appears mirrored. That’s because it shows you as if you looked into a mirror, but the recipients of the video will see you as you would be if not mirrored.

5. Add people

A meeting isn’t much fun without others, so once the meeting has been initiated, you can add people to it that aren’t already invited.

There are numerous ways to do this, but the typical way for most businesses would be to send either an email or chat message with a link to the meeting.

Meet creates a link for you to copy and use as you wish, or it can email anyone with that link if you provide an email address.

6. Show a Desktop presentation

As a Meet presenter, you can be either seen in person by the attendees or have the contents of your computer visible.

The control for this is on the bottom right of the panel, and you can select if the entire screen or just an application Window can be visible. This is an especially useful facility for a PowerPoint presentation, or if you want to use Meet for software training.

It’s worth saying that there are limitations to what you can present from the desktop, as the capture and compression of rapidly changing images can’t hope to keep pace with a video game or 4K video playback. Meet wasn’t designed to handle that type of problem.

7. Mute attendees

We’ve all used a conferencing tool where one attendee has audio feedback or someone with a power tool nearby. How do you deal with that?

If you click on any person in the list of attending people, their audio can be muted or video stream paused. Others can still hear and see them, but you can control what you hear and see from them.

For the benefit of others and smooth running of the meeting, it is always good practice to check that your camera and microphone are working correctly before joining a meeting and that the audio levels aren’t excessive.

8. Chat

Alongside the video and audio part of Meet, there is also a messaging solution that’s inbuilt. Chat allows you to type information to other attendees, and as well as words you might include web locations or attached files.

Where this is a better solution than using another chat tool, is that you can easily send a message to all attending without having to individually select them.

9. Using Mobile Meet app

It might confuse many people, but Google chose to call the Android version of Meet is called Hangout Meet, merging the two names of similar products.

Hangout Meet is the mobile version of Google Meet, and enables a phone or tablet user to access a meeting in much the same way as the Chrome interface.

What you can’t do is host a meeting, but you can join one that’s ongoing. You will be asked for a code, and that code is the same one that is listed after the meet.google.com/ in the meet link.

Once you’ve connected once, if you the phone disconnects due to a poor mobile connection, the code is kept handy allowing you to connect again quickly. The mobile app shows the same attendees list as the web app, and also allows the phone to ‘present’ if you want to show others an app or data.

10. Another way to Meet

Meetings are often organized ahead of time, to allow those involved to allocate time and clear their schedule accordingly. One way to do this with Meet is to arrange the event using Google Calendar.

If you use Google Calendar and create an event at a point in the future, once you add a single person to that event, a Hangouts Meet will be automatically created and shared with those invited.

This feature can be especially useful if you have organized shared Calendars via Google, but it will also help those who are from outside of the company.

SOURCE: https://www.techradar.com/how-to/how-to-use-google-meet