Google Drive Tips and Tricks

[Music] hey everyone kevin here today i want to show you my favorite top 12 tips and tricks in google drive there are lots of great ones and i'm sure there'll be some new ones for you if you want to jump around this video feel free to use the timestamps down below otherwise let's jump on the pc and let's check these out tip number one you can pull text out of images using google drive and this works with jpegs pngs gifs and even pdfs here in my drive account i have a cookie order form and it's a png file when i click on it here you can see what the image looks like now i want to extract this text so i can edit it so how do we do this well back here in the main view i'll right click on this file this will open up the context menu and right at the top i have the option to open with here i'll select google docs this opens up a new google doc and at the very top i can see my cookie order form this is just the image inserted into a document but now when i scroll down below look at this it has extracted all of the text from the image and place it into the document and i could come through i could edit any of this text i could also copy it and i could paste it elsewhere now one thing that's also really neat google will index this image so i can search based on any of the contents so look here at the name of the customer it's toby parker let's go back to drive and let's try searching on this back now in drive up here let's type in the customer name toby parker i'll type in the name hit enter and i get two results back here's the dock that we just created and also it pulls up the image file so it's able to search against the text contained within images that's pretty cool along with images this also works really well with pdf files you can also extract the text from a pdf right here i have a pdf that lists out all of our delivery options i'll double click on it and here i can see a preview of that pdf and right up on top i have the option to open this with google docs i'll click on this and this opens up my pdf in a document and i can now make edits to my pdf now once i go through here maybe i make a few edits and i'm all done it'll by default save it as google doc but what if i want to get it back into a pdf file format well that's no problem i can go to the top left hand corner click on the file menu and right here there is the option to download and then i can choose the format that i want to download this as and right here i can download it again as a pdf tip number two you can install a google drive progressive web app why would you ever want to do that well it makes getting back to google drive even easier to install the pwa up on the address bar over on the right hand side you'll see an install icon for google drive click on this and then click on install once you finish installing you'll notice a new icon on your desktop also if you want to add this to your taskbar you can right click and then you can pin this to your taskbar i'll double click on this to launch the app this opens up the google drive pwa and i have the full functionality of drive right here so it helps me get back just a little bit quicker tip number three you can very quickly create new content using the dot new shortcut so in the past if let's say you wanted to create a new doc you'd come on to google drive go up to new and then click on new document instead what's even quicker you can open up a new tab and then simply type in doc dot new when you hit enter this will drop you into a brand new blank document this also works with sheets sheet dot new you could type in slide dot new form dot new and even site.new tip number four and this is mostly informational google file formats like docs sheets and slides consume none of your storage space so right down here i have two different files and they're the exact same file they're just different file formats this first one is a google doc and the second one is a microsoft word document here if we look at the google doc over on the right hand side you'll see that it doesn't use up any storage space at all while on the other hand the microsoft word document uses up one megabyte and that's consuming my storage space so why is that well google wants to encourage you to use their file formats and to use their applications and as a reward for that they won't use up any of your space tip number five you can turn on offline mode so you can continue editing docs sheets or slides when you don't have any internet to turn this on go to the top right hand corner click on the settings gear and then click on settings within settings click into the general category over on the left hand side and towards the bottom you'll see a category 4 offline check this box and then click on done next it'll sync all of your files to your pc once it finishes that you'll see a new icon appear that lets you know that it's now ready for offline here i can click on this and we can turn on an offline preview when i turn it on you'll see the files that i can't access are in gray and all the files that i can access when i'm offline are in black here i'll click on this and i can then make changes to my document even when i don't have internet any of these changes will be synced back up to the cloud into this document once my internet is restored tip number six you can access all of your google drive files directly within windows in file explorer using the backup and sync tool to use this go to the top right hand corner click on the settings gear and then click on get backup and sync next this will show some information about backup and sync and if you scroll down just a little bit you'll see the option to download it once you finish installing google drive will add a new folder to your pc and when you double click on this here you can view all of the different files that you have in google drive and what's nice is you can take a file from your pc and here i'll drag it over to the google drive folder this is now synced with google drive tip number seven you can use google drive to keep track of versions right down here i have a pdf file but this is an old version and i've made some updates to it here i can right click on it and there's an option to manage versions when i click into this i see my current version right here but i also have the option to upload a new version i'll click on this this opens up the windows file picker and here i'll click the latest version and then click on open my new version is now the current version and here i can see a previous version of the document if i go over and click on the ellipsis i can download a previous version i could also indicate whether i want to keep this forever if i don't check this it'll keep it for 30 days and then it'll just automatically delete that tip number eight you can use your browser address bar to search within google drive before we can use this though we need to configure some settings within your chrome browser go to the top right hand corner click on the ellipsis and then go down to settings within settings navigate down to search engine and right in the middle where it says manage search engines click on the arrow within manage search engines go down and click on add this opens up a prompt where you can type in details of this search engine i'm going to type in drive for the search engine and for the keyword i'll type in drive as well when you want to search on drive you'll type in a keyword followed by a space and then your search query down below paste in the following url i've also included this in the description so you can simply copy from there once you're done click on add now that i've added a new search engine i can go up to the address bar here and i'll type in my new keyword drive then i'll press a space and here you'll see that it says it's now going to search drive just like i did before let me search for that customer name toby parker and i'll hit enter here you'll see this drops me into drive and it searches for that file so this is a really quick way that you can access search even when you're not directly on drive.google.com tip number nine you can create shortcuts to files why would you ever want to do this well maybe you want to get back to a file in different places in your drive so here for example i have a shared folder with new recipes i'm working together with some co-workers on new cookie recipes for the kevin cookie company and independently on the side here i've been working on my cookie recipe and i've just about finished it up so i now want to put it in the new recipes folder so other team members can look at it now i could take the file and i can simply drag it into new recipes but then to get back to this file i would always have to go to the shared folder instead i can create a shortcut here i can right click on the file and right here i can add a shortcut to drive alternatively i could click on the file and then drag it over to new recipes and then before letting go i'll press the ctrl key you'll see the shortcut icon appear and then i'll release here it asks me if i want to add it to the folder i'll click on add shortcut now to access my file i can click on it here in my main drive folder or i can click into new recipes and here too i can also access this shared file tip number 10 you can drag and drop files or folders to upload now typically if you want to upload a new file you'd come into drive click on new and then you could select file upload or folder upload however what's even easier than that well you could simply take your file drag it over choose where you want to put it and then release and that'll just automatically upload it to drive tip number 11 google drive has a comprehensive set of keyboard shortcut keys that make it even quicker to work within drive to access all of these shortcut keys you can go to the settings gear and then click on keyboard shortcuts but we're talking about shortcut keys so there should be a shortcut key to get to the shortcut keys you can press the question mark to get to your shortcut keys or you could press the control and forward slash key and that'll also bring up the keyboard shortcuts here you can go through and you can look at all of the different shortcut keys to see if any of these are helpful for you some of my personal favorites you can press the v key to toggle back and forth between the grid view and the list view you can press the qq key to change the density of files so here it's the most space between i could press it again and again and this is the tightest view i could click on a file and i could press the n key this allows me to rename it or one of my favorites once you finish working on a file and you're ready to share it with the world press the period key and this will bring up the sharing dialogue tip number 12 and unfortunately this is the very last tip of today you can save email space for both yourself and for the recipient of your email by using drive attachments instead of traditional attachments to use a drive attachment within an email message down below click on the drive icon when you click on this you can attach any file from drive here i'll click on pictures and let me select these photos of my sun here i'll select a drive link instead of a traditional attachment here i'll click on insert it's inserted these three different files next i'll click on send here now the email message has arrived and at first glance it looks like your typical email with attachments so what's the difference well here when i click on one of these photos i'm viewing it on drive so there's just one copy of this image even if i sent this email to say 10 people anyone who comes in and clicks on one of these photos they would view that one copy on drive with a traditional attachment each one of those 10 recipients would receive their own copy of the image so overall by using a traditional attachment it just takes up a lot more space save space by using drive attachments alright well if you learned some new ones please give this video a thumbs up to see more videos like this in the future please consider subscribing also if you want to see me cover any other video topics on this channel leave a note down below alright well that's all i had for you today i hope you enjoyed and as always i hope to see you next time bye [Music]

Channel: Kevin Stratvert

Views: 153,713

Keywords: kevin stratvert, google drive, how to use google drive, how to use, drive, google, google drive how to use, google drive tutorial, using google drive, 2020, 2021, google docs, how to use drive, tips, tricks, tips and tricks, google docs tutorial, docs, sheets, slides, forms, how to use google docs, drive google, tutorial, how to, tutorial google drive, google one, google drive 2021, google drive desktop, backup, sync, pc, beginner, beginners, pdf, pull text, text, extract, offline, pwa, app, gdrive

Id: tbphPD_uzYw

Length: 12min 53sec (773 seconds)

Published: Tue May 04 2021