How to Use Google Drive - Beginner's Guide

hey everyone in today's video i want to show you google drive it's cloud storage from google now if you've ever used any google product like google doc google sheets google photos you already have google drive so if you've created a google doc for example or collaborated on one you most likely already have it if not i'm going to show you exactly how to get google drive and it's free to use up to a certain amount of storage so what's good about google drive is instead of using up hard drive space on your computer you're using the google cloud basically the storage that they offer you for free up to a certain point after a certain point you do have to pay for a upgrade pretty inexpensive you could start with two dollars a month i believe at the time that i'm recording this so let's jump into the computer i want to show you google drive exactly how to create files bring in files invite other people really everything you need to know to master google drive in order to access google drive you could just go to google.com drive and it will bring you to this page and on this page there is a business option you could learn about for enterprise businesses and there's a personal option this is what i'm going to show you where you get 15 gigabyte of storage at the time that i'm recording this completely for free so go ahead and press this now you should be inside of google drive or you will see a page to sign into your google account now if you have youtube or gmail or any other google application you already have it but if not just go ahead and create a google account so you could get your google drive now your page if you haven't used it before it's going to be empty so the center area is only showing the recent files that i've created recent folders but i'm going to kind of show you how to do everything from scratch so you could ignore this middle section here if you've previously made google docs or google sheets or other google type documents you might see them here but let's just kind of start from scratch the first thing you want to do is you want to press new and you'll get all these options for creating folders uploading files and just creating documents here the same option is available on this drop down to the same options that you see here so when you press new i usually like to just start with a folder so then when i make different documents or bring in other documents i could organize them nicely inside of the folder so i'll press folder here and let's say this was everything that was budget related i'm going to put in here so every document i make related to budget i'll put in here i'll press create and as you see right here right on top it created a folder called budget and i'm the owner of it we'll talk about owners and permissions in a little bit and it's going to give me the date that i modified this every time i make changes to this folder there's also a different view on this page if you like that better if you come up here there's this grid view if you click it it's going to change the way you look at things so it's going to have again the quick access on top which is your most recent documents followed by folders followed by files i usually work in the other view so i'm gonna go back to it now we could create multiple folders so again all your folders are gonna line up here but next i'm going to press new and i'm going to show you how to file upload meaning there is a file on your computer that you didn't create on google drive but you want to bring that in so i'll press that and let's say i want to bring a pdf which is not a google product pdf is an adobe product but i'm going to bring this in anyway i could press open and as you can see down here it's uploading to my google drive and i'll get the check mark right here and let me press x let me just slide down over here and this is the pdf way down here and i uploaded it twice so it will show up twice if you upload something twice but it's down here for me and it's a pdf file i'm going to show you something advanced at the end regarding pdfs but you could bring in just about any type of file movie file video file pdf file it doesn't have to be a google type of a file like the ones you see up here next i'm going to press new you could also do the same thing to bring in an entire folder of files so you don't have to do one file at a time you could also when you file upload let me show you another trick here you could select multiple different files so i'll select a couple of jpeg files even a photoshop file here and i'm just control clicking or command clicking on a mac here to select multiple different files and i could press open and it will actually upload multiple files at the same time so you don't have to do this one at a time i'm going to show you how to share this with other people and collaborate on files in a little bit too and you get the check mark here and now if i go all the way over here i could see that these have been added these are the three different files i just added psd is a photoshop file jpeg is an image it will show me even the size over here for example and i could always sort things a little bit differently too so instead of last modified i could say last modified by me instead or last opened by me and it will short things a little bit differently here i could also press this arrow and reverse the direction of the way it's sorting things as well so i could see my files here now in alphabetical order my how to images are all now right here then let's go back to new and this is how you would create documents now if you create a google doc a google sheet google slide google form any number of these google products it will by default go inside of your google drive so here i just click google sheet and it open google sheet and don't worry the other tab is still open you can still come back to it and you're in the same place this just opens a new tab for you but if you just create a new sheet here and type in some data here i could always go ahead and move it to my google drive by default is already inside of my google drive already let me go back just to this tab to show you where it ended up that document is called new sheet so if i come down here i see that document already i don't have to save it or anything it just appears on my google drive but the problem is it'll just be very disorganized like you see here a bunch of different types of documents are laid out here so what i could do is go back to that sheet here that i haven't closed yet and press this little move arrow and move it in the right place so in this case that budget folder i created i could press that and move this document there now i can still work on this document but if i go back to my google drive it's been moved inside of this budget folder so if i double click this folder now i'm inside this budget folder and you see that file i just created and moved into this folder and these little icons you see next to each one let me go back to my drive over here by clicking this all these different types of icons are created by google drive this one is doc google doc this is just a pdf file not a google product this is google sheet this is google form so you get all these little icons where you could easily identify files and your folders are laid out this way and again you don't have to create any of these products inside of google drive you could just go to google docs for example create that and it will just be here no matter where you create those files to begin with they will end up over here but it's definitely a nice technique to press this move arrow and create those folders for yourself to organize them there's also the star where you could star something and now if i go back to my google drive here there's a start section i could click that and see what i've starred in the past so if you want to create a favorite section for yourself in your docs you could go ahead and do that let me go to my drives tab you could also do this over here by right clicking or control clicking and you could go ahead and add to stard as well to add them as a favorite now since i'm showing you right clicking on different documents if you right click on a document you're going to get multiple different options so you could be able to open the document or preview the document sharing we're gonna talk about so these two are related to that you could go ahead and favorite or rename it but one of the most important ones is you could download a document too so it doesn't have to be on the cloud only you could press download and it will download it to your computer in this case it converted it to microsoft word so i could go ahead and open it on my computer so that's the download option and you could always remove it and that will move it into the trash can and inside of the trashcan you could go ahead and restore it if you made a mistake when you pressed removed over here and you could make a copy if you don't want to work on the original for some reason let me just show you this little icon to my computer under my drive under your drive that's where everything you created or moved into your google drive but my computer this allows you to actually sync google drive to your physical computer so then the same folder appears on your computer i don't like this because it takes up storage on my computer and that's why i have google drive so i don't use the storage on my computer but that is one way to know that you can do this using a different product right now we're just gonna focus on google drive and not worry about storing things in the computer this kind of mirrors your google drive on your hard drive your physical hard drive so if you wanted to get the version for your computer you could come to the settings icon and get drive for the desktop you could go ahead and click that and this is what it's called it's called backup and sync where it just basically syncs everything in your drive to your computer so you could go ahead and explore that i have a totally different video relating to backup and sync and before i show you how to share documents let me just show you the storage plan right now i do have a paid option but i wanted to show you the free option here if i click buy storage over here you could see that this is the plan that everybody gets when they get their google account and they get google drive but you could easily upgrade for just a couple bucks to a hundred gigabytes now i have this for my other account because i upload movie files and video files are much much bigger than text files or audio files for example so this kind of became necessary and if you use other apps like google photos i have a different video about google photos but google photos also takes up a lot of space so this does get used up quite fast and there's also other plans that you could see here much bigger storage files so let me go ahead and close this and go back and as you can see here i barely use the 15 gigs i have here because i'm only creating text files in this google drive so now let's go ahead and share a document let me just show you a sharing icon over here you see this little person on top of the folder that means this folder has been shared with someone else these other folders have not been shared with someone else so that's one way to tell if an entire folder has been shared with someone else but in order to share any one document or any folder all you have to do is select that document or folder you see how it's a little bit more blue here now it's selected and i have some options on top here that we haven't talked about yet and the most important one is this little person share icon press that and just like this i usually type in someone's email address and then on this drop down i have three options do i want them to edit so if you're collaborating on a google doc or google sheet make sure that's selected maybe you just want them to comment on the work you've done or you just want them to view you don't want to touch anything besides that and not edit that's the view option so select someone's name or email here choose one of these options and press done so let me show you as an example i just chose one of my other gmail accounts here and it says add a note so you could say something in the notes section here notify the people make sure that's checked on and you could go ahead and send it another way to do this that might be useful is there's a shareable link icon too let me click that just to show you what happens when you press that it creates this link that you could go ahead and copy and you could even message someone that link for example so if they're working on a mobile device maybe that's the way you want to go about it again this has the same drop-down options as well so you could see the drop-downs over here for commenting or editing as you have previously on using the email option to notify them and when you're all set you could go ahead and press send and i just want to show you the email that that other person received so it's going to say that you invited them to edit the following documents and check out this google sheet and then they could go ahead and open it here by just pressing open and it will open that document for them now you could collaborate on this document together or you could press share on top here and share it with other people as well and it's going to say it's already shared with one person the person that i invited over here i have different videos on google docs google sheets and i'll link those below but that is how you would collaborate on any one of these documents and the same thing back in my drive here again if i select this you could see that it has the shared icon now the folders have this little person and it's been shared with other people and it's a document like a google doc it has a different icon over here so the same things again get shareable link is over here and inviting people and the share option is over here you also have a powerful search option over here too so you could go ahead and search for pretty much anything here so here i just search how to use google translate i pressed enter and it showed me that jpeg that i uploaded earlier in this video just by using the search icon obviously google is powerful with search so this search bar does come in handy quite a bit you also have this drop down here and you have a lot of different search options you could type in if you wanted to really tailor your search you could even search in trash or your favorite section as well i'm going to press x and the last thing i want to show you is an advanced option but let me go back to drive if you bring a pdf to your google drive if you double click that pdf it opens it as a pdf again a non-editable pdf but let me show you this other option i just clicked off of it if i right click and that was the preview option the double clicking got me to preview i could go ahead and say open with and choose google docs now let me show you what happens it's going to take a couple of seconds here to scan your document depending on the size and after a few seconds it actually opened that pdf inside of google docs now now everything i could go ahead and select things and delete things add text and collaborate with other people and even add comments here on a shared document so this was a pdf converted to a google doc so we could all edit now it's not perfect but it's really a great way to quickly collaborate on a pdf and make edits to it you could always press share on top as well now that is a google doc to invite other people here or copy the link and send them a shareable link thanks so much for watching the video i hope you found it useful i have different videos related to the other products that i mentioned throughout the video and the mobile applications as well so make sure you check those out in the description below this video if you want to learn more thanks so much for watching again and i'll see you next time

Channel: Howfinity

Views: 721,514

Keywords: howfinity, how to, tutorials, google drive, google drive tutorial, cloud computing, how to use google drive, how to use google drive to share files, how to use google drive on mac, how to use google drive for business, google drive tips, what is google drive, google drive tips and tricks, google drive how to use, the beginner's guide to google drive

Id: EbVnObwFJic

Length: 14min 47sec (887 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 11 2020