BEGINNERS GUIDE HOW TO USE GOOGLE DOCS! Learning the basics of Google Docs

hi everyone welcome or welcome back to my channel if you're new here i'm claudia and today we will be going over some basics of how to use google docs this is definitely for beginners it's for those of you who maybe have never used it before or are unfamiliar with it if you want me to make a more advanced video on the topic please let me know in the comments i would love it if you would give this video a thumbs up if you like it while you're watching it and subscribe if you haven't already unlike every other subscription in your life this one is free so topics i'll be covering along with their time stamps are in the description box if you want to skip to a particular topic so let's begin so let's start with how to actually get to google docs google docs isn't a program that you download to your computer it is web-based i'm going to be using google chrome since that is my preferred web browser so yours might look slightly different but all you have to do is go to docs.google.com and it will take you to this page right here as you can see in the upper left hand corner we know that we are in google docs and you might have to sign into your gmail account if you are not already signed in this is what the home screen of google docs looks like so as you can see here you're going to have any recent documents and this is going to be either documents that you've created for yourself or that have been shared with you if you just want to do documents that you've created you can just select owned by me but the default is going to be owned by anyone you can change from a table view to a list view you can also change the sorting options so last opened modified modified by me or title which should be alphabetical and you can also open up a file and upload it into google docs if you want to do that as well at the top here you're gonna see start a new document so you can start a blank document with this big plus sign these are also some just suggestions of templates from google docs so to get started let's just open up a blank google doc by clicking this plus sign right here so now that you're in google docs this is what it's going to look like and you're basically going to use this just like you would any other word processor like microsoft word or pages or anything that you normally use to type documents so it's going to start by giving you an untitled document if you just click into that field as you can see it'll highlight you can rename it so we can rename this example doc number one and it's going to automatically save to a folder in my google drive that is where everything is saved to on google docs it is saved to your google drive if you're not familiar with google drive leave me a comment and i can make a video about how to use google drive but this little folder and this right here will tell you which folder in your drive it's saved to so you can also move it if you want to by clicking this icon right here so as i mentioned before you can use google docs basically the same way you would use microsoft word by just typing in notes that you want you can use this to share and collaborate with other people so if you're going to be typing notes for a project or something for work you can type everything in here and share it so currently it's not shared with anybody but i could share it and then we could all collaborate together and you can see when somebody else is in the document making changes or what they've added to the document all within google docs so it's really helpful for collaboration with other people let's move on to an example of what it would look like if i shared this document with somebody so i will click this share right here and we can add people and groups so i will just add myself as a collaborator and i can send a message to the person that i'm going to be collaborating with and this person can now edit the document if i want them to if i don't i can drop this down and they can just become a viewer or a commenter so if you want to just show somebody something and you don't want them to be able to make any edits you can use them as a viewer or you can give them opportunities to comment on your document if you want them to be able to do so if you click notify people when you send it it's going gonna send an email to this person to tell them that the google doc has been shared with them you can also copy the link and send it to them in a separate email if you've already drafted an email and you just want to include the link here are some additional settings for sharing google docs so editors can change permissions and also share so you can turn that off as well if you want to have full administrative control over the document you can allow editors to make edits but not change any permissions or share it with anybody and you can also not give people the ability to download print or copy again if it is something that is more confidential that you don't want to be downloaded to people's personal computers or printed or copied here's what it looks like when somebody emails you that they've shared a document with you or if you're sharing a document here's what the email sent to the person you're sharing it with will look like so if you want to open the document that they send you just scroll down and you can click on the blue open button and it will take you into the shared document now we can see if we go up here it says it's shared with one person and if i click on it i can see who it's shared with it is shared with this person right here and myself i am the owner the default mode in google docs is going to be editing mode and this is where you can just type whatever you wish in your document make any edits make any changes if you want to change it to viewing mode then you can view it but you can't make any changes i am typing and no text is coming up suggesting mode is great for collaboration because this is gonna allow somebody to type in information but it's gonna pop up as a suggestion for the document not as regular text as you can see here and you can specifically if this note is for one specific person on your team or one person in your group that you are working with you can specifically tag them here and if you decide you want to remove the suggestion if you click on the suggestion you have the option of accepting it or rejecting it you also have the option of adding a document summary which is great again for workspaces collaborations if you want to tell people what the purpose of the google doc is so maybe this is christmas party suggestions and so when you send out the google doc you can kind of give a summary of what people should be expecting in this document and how they should be participating and collaborating now let's talk about this outline section right here so if i wanted to type let's just keep going with the christmas party suggestions theme so let's just say um decorations we have food and locations for the party so if i want these sections to have people write suggestions underneath i can highlight this and where it says normal text i can click the drop down and create a heading for this and now as you can see it created a section within our document for decorations if i do the same thing with food and we go to heading 1 now there's a section for food and we'll do the same thing with locations and now there's a section for locations so if i want to jump to a specific part in the document i can just click on that section and it will take me right there so headings can be great especially if you are going to have a larger document and you want people to be able to skip to specific sections the outline is going to be a really great tool to do that because these are actual clickable links to take you to different sections within your document if you aren't seeing this outline and summary section in your google docs or maybe you closed the document outline and you want to get it back as you can see you have the option of clicking this right here or you can go to view and show outline and it will pull this up for you another important thing to know about google docs is you can make them available offline which is really important for example if you're going to be going somewhere without internet or if you want to edit something on a flight where wi-fi is not going to be available if you go to file and make available offline as you can see there is a recommendation from google to not use it on a public or shared computer but if it's your own personal computer we're gonna go ahead and turn on document is now available offline so now if we go somewhere without wi-fi we can still edit this document another great thing about google doc is it will automatically save your changes every once in a while so as you can see here if we want to see the document status we can click on this cloud and it says all changes are saved to drive so we don't have to just constantly be saving our document for fear of the web crashing it will continuously save our changes and as you can see here last edit was made two minutes ago and we can actually open the version history this way as well so we can see what changes have been made and if we click show changes they will be highlighted in green i am now going to show you some page setup options so if we go to file and click page setup here are some different changes that we can make so you can change the orientation from portrait to landscape you can change the paper size if you're going to be printing it in a custom size you can change your margins and you can also change your page color so if for whatever reason you want to be editing on a coral pink background you can do that and then if you decide you don't want that you can go back to page setup and go back to normal you can also set any of these options as your default once you change them if you prefer half inch margins or maybe one and a half inch margins you can set that as default as well page list is basically as you can see here google docs is going to show you what that looks like it basically gives you the entire page allows you to add wide images and tables and consume content without interruption of page breaks you can also change the background color of the pageless setup if you're not sure who shared the google doc with you or you can't remember if there is a lot of people within the document if you go to file details it will tell you who the owner of the document is but it will tell you when it was created and where it is located as well if you can't remember what folder you put it in so this document details section can be really important if you want to show the word count in your document which i know is important for a lot of people especially with homework assignments you need to have a certain amount of words if you go to tools and click word count it will tell you what your word count is but you can also display the word count while you're typing so this will give you a running word count so if we're adding more words now we have six words added and it will tell you how many pages and characters and excluding spaces which is really really wonderful something i certainly wish i had when i was in school another great feature that google docs has is voice typing so if i wanted to dictate a sentence i can click this microphone and you might have to allow the microphone to be used on your web browser which i do and so now it's red as you can see it is dictating what i am saying and turning it into text you can also dictate punctuation and it is incredibly accurate which is wonderful period and when you're done you just click the red microphone again and it will go back to this right here and you can also change the language if you're going to be dictating in a different language if you want to use spell check on google docs um right up here where there is a little a with a check mark you can click on this to check spelling and grammar as you can see this u while we were dictating was not capitalized so we can change u to u we can accept that and now it says document looks good we are done with our spelling and document check that is it for today like i mentioned if there is more you're interested in learning about google docs leave a comment and i can make a part two to this don't forget to give this video a thumbs up and subscribe and i will see you in my next video bye [Music]

Channel: How Do You Do?

Views: 108,939

Keywords: claudia carlucci, claudia, carlucci, clauds carlucci, google docs, how to use google docs

Id: 4c0fn40-gyQ

Length: 13min 40sec (820 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 08 2022