Do you wanna get more out of Google Drive? Do you wanna be more efficient when managing all of your files and folders? Well in today's video, I wanna show you seven of my favorite tips and tricks to get the most out of Drive. Hello everyone, Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity, helping you to get more done and enjoy less stress.
Keyboard shortcuts for Google Drive
And let's get things kicked off with keyboard shortcuts. And no, not all of the keyboard shortcuts, but two of the shortcuts which I use frequently. The first one has to do with renaming a document.
Shortcut key for renaming a file or folder
Now, of course, I could open up the document itself and at the very top of that document I could go up here and rename that document. Of course, when I'm managing my documents, I can just right-click on it and I can come down here and say rename. But you know what? There's something that's an awful lot faster.
If you just hover over or select something here and press N on your keyboard, N as in rename, you can rename your document right here.
Let's say, "Some questions for you," let's just hit N and boom, we have this little rename dialog that pops up so you can rename your files in an instant.
Shortcut key for sharing a file or folder
The other one that I like to use a lot has to do with sharing. And of course we're sharing files and folders with a lot of different people. I could select this and then I could go up here and select the share icon, I could right click and say share here as well. But, why don't I just hit the period on my keyboard.
As long as I've got it selected, it's gonna instantly open up my sharing dialog here.
One more time, here's my test responses file, I'm gonna hit period, and boom, I can instantly go into this sharing window. So, two great shortcuts to make things easier
and move around a lot quicker and be able to do two things that you probably do a lot already.
Share Drive files but prevent downloading
Now the second one has to do with sharing as well. So why don’t I open up this one here.
Let me hit that period one more time so we can get our sharing window back up. And you’re probably already familiar with how to share a file with one or multiple people, but there’s something here that I want to point out to you.
Let me just add someone here as a test. I’m gonna add a test account here. I could say notify, could add a message. Now here on the right-hand side, we’ve got three options: we can allow them to be an editor, we can allow them to be just a commenter, or we can allow them to just be a viewer.
And in many cases, I often only want people to be a viewer. Why? Because I’m often sharing things such as audio or video with people and I just want to be able to share it with them but I don’t want them to be able to download that video because maybe it’s just a draft or something else.
Well, this is where you want to select the additional settings gear up here because here you’re gonna get two additional checkboxes. The first one we really don’t care about unless we’ve made them an editor. But it’s this second one: “Viewers and commenters can see the option to download, print, and copy.” That’s gonna be checked by default, but in my case, most often, I want to uncheck that option.
I want to uncheck that option because when I send it to this person here, I want them to be able to watch it but I don’t want them to be able to download it and then therefore share it perhaps with other people and that type of thing.
So, if you want that extra level of security, depending on what you are trying to share with people, make sure to select that gear icon and you can always uncheck this option down below.
Using the Explore Tool to search the web and your files
Now the third tip I'd like to share with you has to do with something that you may be a little puzzled by or maybe you’ve seen this within some of your own documents but were curious as to what it actually means.
Here in the bottom right-hand corner, there’s an interesting icon called the Explore icon. Let me show you how it works.
If you select this, you’ll get a little search window that pops up. By default, it’ll try to give you a few different suggestions. Now, I don’t have a lot of text in this document, so these suggestions might be rather poor.
What it allows you to do is search your own documents as well as the web. For example, let me type in one of my other favorite tools, Trello. I’m just going to hit enter here.
You can see I’ve got three different tabs:
- Web: Here, I could go directly to the Trello Wikipedia page or the Trello homepage from within this document.
- Images: I could find some images for Trello. In fact, I can just drag an image right into the document. It’s one of the easiest ways to get images directly into your document.
- Drive: It will show related files from your Google Drive. If it doesn’t find anything, you can try different search terms. For instance, typing "team" might show documents related to that term.
The Explore feature can be really handy. Again, it’s located in the bottom right-hand corner, represented by a little star icon. Just click on Explore to access it.
Let’s go back to my file and folder management here.
Adding color to your Google Drive folders
For tip number four.
And this is something that could make navigation of all of your files, and especially your folders, very very convenient.
So, I've got a very small example here, I've only got five folders staring back at me but you probably have something more like, oh I don't know, 30 or 142, staring back at you as well.
Well, if there are common themes amongst them or maybe if you want one of these folders to stand out, why not change the folder cover to a different color.
So for example, for finance, I can just right click here, say change color and maybe because it's dealing with money I want to make it green.
So now that really pops, maybe if this is something that you know, gets lost in the mix for me, or if I wanna find it that much easier.
And again, if I have 50 or 100 different folders here, I can quickly go to finance.
Maybe I want sales to be something like a red color, I can select that red icon or maybe sales and marketing work closely together so maybe I make them both red.
However you want to group your folders together beyond just their naming conventions, you can use colors to sort of spruce things up and make navigation that much easier.
Save images to Drive from websites
Now the next tip on my list may in fact just be my favorite.
And the reason being is that you get to use this one outside of Drive.
Let's say for example that you are browsing the web and you come across an image, such as this one, and I say to myself, oh, that would go fantastic with this document that I'm working on or maybe a slide show that I'm putting together, but I don't have my Drive tab open.
And instead of going up and opening up Drive, all I need to do is hover over that image, right click on the image and select save image to Google Drive.
What this is gonna do is pop open a little dialog box here.
Now it's gonna give the actual name, right this is what this website has chosen to name this particular image.
But before I close this dialog, I can actually say rename it and so here I'm actually gonna rename the entire thing, I'm gonna say, let's call this a matches image.
I'm gonna hit apply and I can hit close and now, when I go back to Google Drive, if I go to my top level drive and we scroll all the way.
In many cases you may have to scroll all the way down to the bottom, you may even have to refresh it if you're doing it immediately.
But here, if I refresh my screen, you'll see at the bottom I've got my matches image, so now I can take this, I can manipulate this, I can put this directly into the files or the other types of projects that I'm working on here within Drive.
So even if you're browsing somewhere else, remember, you can right click over an image and select save image to Google Drive.
Search files within a specific Drive folder
NNow my next tip has to do with finding a particular file or folder within Drive.
Now remember, if you've got a large quantity of files, sometimes the search bar at the top of the screen may bring back too many results.
And yes, it's true, you can filter by the type of file that you are looking for but sometimes you've got a much better idea as to where that folder is.
So what you can do is for example, let's say I know that the file that I'm searching for is within development, all I need to do is right click on it and I can say search within development.
Now, I'm still gonna use the search bar up here, it's gonna open up that particular file, but I can go up to the search bar here and start typing in the words that I'm after.
And now, it's not gonna bring back every single file or document that has team within my entire Drive, it's only gonna search within this file folder.
So if you've already narrowed things down, right, if you already have a good idea as to where that file may be, you can just right click and say search within that particular folder just to narrow down your search results.
Now the last tip that I have for you today is something
Use voice typing to create content faster
That is not used often enough, I don't think, in my case.
And I've been using it a lot more frequently lately, so I wanted to make sure that I shared it with you as well.
And that has to do with voice typing.
All of our devices, whether it's mobile, whether it's our desktop or tablets, are doing so much better when it comes to translating what we have to say.
And Google Drive is no different.
In order to use voice typing, all you need to do is put your cursor where you want to start and hit tools.
And under tools, about half way down, you will see that there's the option of voice typing.
Now it's not going to initiate immediately but all we need to do is click this button.
And immediately it will start to transcribe in real-time what I am saying, period.
So you can continue to write your documents the way that you want, period.
And then you can stop and edit them as you wish, period.
Now when you're finished all you need to do is click that big red button there, over the microphone.
And yes, you may need to come back and do some editing and punctuation and that type of thing, but what I'm so impressed with is how quickly, how quickly it transcribes what I am saying and also how accurately it happens to be as well.
Well, I hope you enjoyed these tips and I'd love to hear from you next, what was your favorite Google Drive tip?
And did I miss anything? What's one of your favorite tips that you'd like to share with me and others here in the Simpletivity community?
Thank you so much for watching and remember, being productive does not need to be difficult.
In fact, it's very simple.
