Thursday, February 11, 2010

Simple wedding planning with Google Docs

(Cross posted on the Google Docs Blog)

We all want important life moments — like graduating from school, getting married or having your first baby — to be perfect. For many couples, your wedding is a chance to celebrate with everyone you care about; it's also the largest, most complicated party you'll ever host. From tracking guest RSVPs, to picking the right florist, DJ and caterer, to coordinating every last detail with your wedding party, it's no surprise that the process can become overwhelming and expensive.

After proposing to the woman of my dreams with 100 red roses, six months ago I started planning my own wedding. My fiancee and I decided to use Google Docs to manage every aspect of our wedding, starting with shared budget, guest list, to-do list and venue-tracking spreadsheets and keeping all our docs in our "Wedding" shared folder. I ended up talking to other couples who planned their weddings using Google Docs and discovered I wasn't alone in thinking that it helped save time and avoid headaches.

Today, I'm happy to share this knowledge in the form of over 20 wedding templates available in the Google Docs template gallery. These tools make it easy to estimate and track your wedding budget, collect addresses for invitations, compare vendors and much more. For example, take a look at the address book template below. Instead of emailing hundreds of guests and copy/pasting hundreds of addresses into a spreadsheet, you can send a Google form and collect addresses in a spreadsheet automatically:


Because these documents, spreadsheets and forms live online in the cloud, you can easily get help by sharing them with your parents or bridal party, and you can access them from the bakery, bridal shop or anywhere around town using your smartphone. Plus, you never have to worry about versions and email attachments, because everything is always up to date.

Having the tools to plan a wedding is a good start, but you also need to know what questions to ask when interviewing vendors and which factors to consider when inviting guests or choosing music. To give you a leg up, we've teamed up with StyleMePretty.com, a popular wedding blog, to add tips from wedding experts to each template. StyleMePretty is also hosting a sweepstakes and asking engaged couples to share their wedding planning experiences. One randomly selected winner will receive free consultation with celebrity event planner Michelle Rago and a $500 gift certificate to Wedding Paper Divas.

We're excited to give more engaged couples tools to make the wedding planning process easier and more fun. To learn more about simplifying wedding planning with Google Docs and Style Me Pretty, check out docs.google.com/wedding.

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