How to use OneDrive (Full Tutorial!)

this video is a beginner's guide to onedrive what is one drive how do you set it up how do you use it and i'll also include some top tips on getting the best out of one drive but before we start a quick introduction my name is jonathan edwards i'm a business i.t consultant from yorkshire in the uk my t company helped businesses of all sizes with their it support and the cyber security so what is onedrive well onedrive is cloud storage google have a product called google drive apple have a product called icloud and there's dropbox who have a product called well dropbox so onedrive is actually microsoft's cloud storage platform so if you're new to cloud storage what are the benefits you get from storing all your files and folders and important photos in a cloud storage product like one drive why wouldn't you just store them on your computer hard drive well there are three main benefits to using something like onedrive to store all your data firstly what happens if you've got some really important data so excel word documents powerpoint presentations important family photos and it's all stored on the hard drive of your computer and then one day the hard drive of your computer breaks and you don't have a backup you've lost everything if you use something like one drive and the hard drive on your computer fails you haven't lost anything because it's all stored in one drive the second benefit of onedrive is the flexibility so if you've got everything stored on your computer and you're out and about or you might be on holiday you might not be with your computer so you can't access your data with onedrive you can access all your data on any computer in the world with an internet connection you can access the data on your smartphone and even your tablet let me give you a quick example recently i went on holiday to greece and i wanted to hire a car now i forgot my driving license so normally i wouldn't be able to hire one but because i had a scanned copy of my driving license in my one drive all i had to do was get my phone out and show the car rental company the scan copy my driving license i was able to hire that car the third great advantage with onedrive is geared more towards businesses and that's its sharing capabilities let's look at an example perhaps you you're working on a presentation using microsoft powerpoint how do you share that presentation with other people normally people might just email it backwards and forwards with different changes but onedrive you can easily share a link to that presentation so people can collaborate on the same document at the same time that's a really great benefit of onedrive so there are three great advantages of using onedrive but it's actually a fourth and that is microsoft actually offer a onedrive product for free they give you five gigabytes of storage absolutely free so to give you an idea what five gigabytes of storage is it might be a couple of thousand photos so you can use onedrive for free and that product is the one that i'm gonna be focusing on in today's video so without further ado let's get into how onedrive works so the good news is if you've got a computer running windows 10 or windows 11 onedrive will already be installed if you go down to the system tray here onedrive is the cloud and it'll have a cross next to it and if we click on there it's because we're not signed in so the first thing you need is a onedrive account and so to get one of those you can go to this page here now there's two tabs for home and for business the for home tab you can see there's a free account here and you can sign up for free you get only one drive and you get five gigabytes of storage now if you're on a budget this onedrive account is okay but i would encourage you to look at some of the other microsoft plans because for only 80 pounds 79 pounds 99 a year you can get a family pack and you get so much more with that you get lots of storage six terabytes of one drive storage plus you get all your microsoft office applications but as i said in this video we're just going to focus on the free account so you sign up for free what you will need is an email address so that's either a gmail address or a microsoft account and it will let you create a onedrive account now i already have one so what i'm going to do first of all is just sign in so i'll enter my email address and then i'll click on sign in and it's gonna ask me for my password which i will put in this is asking where you want the onedrive folder to be on your computer so i'm just gonna keep this as default if you've got loads and loads of data then you need to consider this carefully because you don't want your computer hard drive running out of space but i'm just going to click on next now this next bit is a really good one drive feature what it's asking me is do i want my desktop my documents and my pictures on the computer hard drive to automatically sync with onedrive now i know lots of people who always store documents and photos on the desktop because it's easy for them to access in this scenario all those files will be automatically synced to onedrive so it keeps them nice and secure so i'm gonna leave this as default i'm gonna click on continue now because i'm using the free account microsoft want me to upgrade so i'm just going to click on not now on here i'm going to click on next i'm going to click on next i'm going to click on next now it's asking me about the mobile app so at this stage i would go on to all your mobile phones your tablets and search the app store for one drive and install that we are going to look at the mobile app a little bit later so if you've got that already installed then you'll be ahead of the game so i'm going to click on later because i've got the mobile app installed already now onedrive is ready so i can just click on open my onedrive folder and we can see that some things have started to happen we've got a onedrive icon here we've got our desktop documents and pictures because in the previous setup we wanted those to sync with onedrive and we've got some more status icons here which i'm going to go through later in the video the next bit i want to look at though is showing the synchronization so i'm going to look at the online version of onedrive so if i go back down here again to my cloud i click on the onedrive icon and what i can do is click on view online that launches the online version of onedrive so you can see here that things have started to synchronize in i've got my documents folder in there now i don't keep a lot of data on this computer i use it mainly for youtube videos so you can see that a lot of my youtube videos that were stored on my computer hard drive and now synchronizing up to the cloud so they're nice and secure in the online version now just to show you a little bit around the online version you can change the view so these are tiles at the moment but you can have those in a list format you can have them in a compact list format you can change those things there you can also sort them by name file size and things like that you've also got a search function here so if you want to search for a particular name of a file or folder you can just type in there and it'll it'll search your onedrive now another great feature of onedrive that i want to show you is the online versions of word excel and powerpoint so what's an online version of that well if you click on the drop down here you can click on new and you can create a word document an excel workbook or a powerpoint presentation now i don't have microsoft office installed on that on this computer that i'm using but i've got the online versions with my onedrive so if i click on word document it'll open the online version of microsoft word so if you're familiar with google google predominantly is browser-based and they have their own documents and spreadsheets within the browser this is microsoft's version of that so you get a completely free office suite which is all browser-based now just a bit of a word of caution from what i understand it's not as advanced as the desktop versions so if you're an accountant and you're used to doing really advanced excel formulas and things you might not be able to do those in the online version but certainly for most people it's perfectly okay it looks just like word except it's over the browser so what i want to do now is just go back to file explorer to show you a couple of other things here we can see our files and folders here in the onedrive area we've also got a column now called status and in the status we've got various icons we've got a cloud we've got these blue synchronization and we've also got this green check mark and i'm going to start with this green check mark now what does the green check mark mean it means that the file or folder is available both on your computer hard drive and it's been fully synchronized to the microsoft cloud so it's available in both locations so why would this be useful well say you're getting onto an airplane and you wanted to work on a word document obviously on an airplane you don't have an internet connection so it's important that word document is actually stored on your computer as well as in the cloud or you wouldn't be able to open it in turn if you look at the cloud icon it means that file our folder isn't available on the computer hard drive it's only in the online version so again going back to this airplane example if you wanted to work on this pdf in an airplane it's got a cloud next to it so when you double clicked on it it wouldn't be able to download because you've not got an internet connection this is a really good design because what it means is that you can have lots of data stored in the onedrive cloud maybe you don't use that data that much but you still need to keep it rather than it taking up space on your hard drive you can just keep it in the microsoft cloud and only the data that you're gonna be working on a lot you can store a copy on the computer so the other icon here you can see is this little blue circle that means this folder is currently synchronizing with the microsoft cloud i've just set up onedrive on this computer you watch me do it so what's happening in this documents folder it's a lot of my videos for youtube so it's quite a lot of data you can see i'm using camtasia so that is still synchronizing with the microsoft cloud it's still uploading if we go down here to the system tray as well we can see it's uploading 2.3 gig of 3.1 so it's not finished uploading entirely to the cloud so that's what the blue synchronization circle means another icon we can see here next to this one here is a little person icon that means this document is currently shared with someone else i'm going to cover cover sharing later in the video but that's what this icon means now when i've talked about files on devices and files in the cloud you can easily switch between those so this getting started with onedrive pdf here you can see that's only available in the cloud version because it's got a cloud there now if i wanted that to be available on my desktop i can either double click and open it or i can right click and i can select always keep on this device and if i do that it's gonna download you can see it's synchronizing now it's downloading a copy onto my computer so that is now available on the computer i could decide at a later date that actually i don't need on my computer anymore but i want to keep it so i can right click again and i can select free up space free up space not going to delete anything it just takes it off the computer and puts it back in the cloud now these documents with the cloud next to them they're just kind of signpost they're not fully downloaded it's just saying you've got a document here which exists in the cloud and it doesn't exist on your computer until you download it another icon that's not listed here so i can't show you is you might see a big red cross next to a folder or a file the big red cross means it's having a problem synchronizing with the microsoft cloud so the best way to get around that is to go down to the one drive icon open it up and it'll give you some more information of what the problem is so hopefully you can resolve it that way the next thing i want to show you is how to share documents in onedrive that's another great feature if we go back to the online version we can see we've got some documents here now if i want to share this getting started with onedrive file or i can share entire folders but i'll just show you with the file it's the same process i'd simply right click on it and i click share and then i can send link so what i can do is just copy that link if i wanted so that is my link to that file if i just open an incognito browser i can send this link to anybody it's a long link and this is what it would look like at the other end so it would simply open that document for them it's opening that getting started with onedrive so i can share documents really easily now i can make it a bit more secure as well because um sometimes security is good when sharing files so i can click on this link here and we can choose specific people rather than anyone with the link so going back to this bit here sorry about that we can just click on here and type someone's email address in so we're only sharing it with someone specific other options in here you can select whether you want people to edit it or whether they're just getting shared on a read-only basis you can set an expiration date now this has got a little mark here that's not available in the free version and you can also put a password on it for extra security again not available in the free version so that is how you can share files and folders really easily with onedrive so the next thing i want to show you is this folder here called personal vol now i've not created this folder it's got a little save next to it it exists both in the online version and also only computer here so what is a personal vault well a personal vol is a protected area of your own one drive so if i click on it it'll tell me a little bit more about it so to access this folder you have to have two-factor authentication enabled and once you open the folder it will lock again after 20 minutes and you have to re-authenticate 20 minutes of inactivity also you can't share files or folders within your personal vault you use your personal vault for the most sensitive of your data you might have some files folders or other bits information that you don't want people to see so the personal vol is a really good place to put those things if i show you how it works i will go in here i will try and open my personal vault now i've set this up already so it's got my phone number here it won't open until i first confirm the last four digits of my phone number and then enter the code that it sends me so it's one three two six and verify right you can see here the personal vault is now open so we can get in there something to mention about the personal vol and the free version of onedrive with the free version you're only allowed to store three files in your personal vault so if you've got lots more data you want to put in your personal vault you have to upgrade to a paid version of onedrive or the microsoft 365 plan now whilst we're talking about security i really do advise you take your security a step further and enable two-factor authentication one of the great things about onedrive is it's available from anywhere in the world that's a great benefit to you but if it's available anywhere in the world to you it's also available anywhere in the world to hackers and hackers will always try to access your cloud storage using devious methods by turning two factual authentication on not just using you your personal goal but two-factor authentication on your entire one drive you really reduce the risk of getting hacked you can reduce the risk by about 99.9 percent so you do really reduce it so to turn two factor authentication on you can click on your initials you go to my microsoft account and that loads this page here and you can see the security tab here so this is a security dashboard we want to open so we click on there and you can see it's two-step verification you've got an option to turn that on and within there you've got various options you click on two-step verification turn on you can link that to your mobile phone i highly recommend 2fa on all your cloud accounts another important feature that you want to look at with any cloud storage product is the backup and recovery options it's one of the great features about using a cloud product you don't want to be manually backing up your computer at home or in the office you want the cloud storage product to offer you some protection so what does onedrive have in place for this well they've got two features one's called revision history and one's just the backup vault so let's talk about those in turn firstly the revision history say if i've got a document and i make changes to that document what happens if those changes were a mistake and i want to go back to a previous version that is when you would use revision history so you can see i've got this very simple word document i made this document and made changes i made more changes but i wish i hadn't now all those get saved as revisions so i can click on this drop down i can click on version history and it will show me all the different versions of this document when changes have been made so i can simply click on the drop down because i made a lot of changes eight minutes ago and i can click on this one here now it will remove the last change i made so now i've got a couple of options i can save as a new copy if i want to keep both versions i can simply restore the old version now obviously this is a really simple word document but if you were using a a complex excel spreadsheet or a presentation and you made lots of changes then the version history would come in really handy the second part of backup and recovery is simply the backup vault so i'll close this document here you can see i've got document one here so if i by accident i right click on it and i delete it or i deleted it from my windows explorer you can see that's just disappeared now because i've deleted it and it's synchronized that has gone but i've done that by mistake how do i get it back well we've got a recycle bin over here now this will keep documents for a period of 30 days so for a period of 30 days i can right click on that document and i can click on restore that will then restore that folder back if i go back to windows explorer you see it's now come back now after 30 days so if you leave it in the recycle bin for more than 30 days then i'm afraid you've lost the document so that's something to be wary of now the last thing i want to talk about when it comes to onedrive is the onedrive app now this mustn't be underestimated you can have the onedrive app on your ipad on your smartphone and you definitely should do so what are a couple of cool features you can do with the onedrive app firstly photo synchronization now you might be like me i take lots of photos i've got thousands of photos on my phone these are special events they might be family holidays or gatherings i certainly don't want to lose them so within the onedrive app we can check a box which means that every photo we take with our phone will automatically synchronize with onedrive so it'll keep them nice and secure that's a really good feature the second really cool feature with the onedrive app is it can get rid of all your physical paperwork so you might receive letters through the post you have a stash of paperwork taking up space in your office what you can do is you can use the onedrive app as kind of a scanner you can scan the documents and you can put them in onedrive so you can effectively go paperless so that's it that's an introduction to onedrive it's how to install it it's how to get the best out of it i would really recommend using a cloud storage product like onedrive i've explained some of the free version capabilities today but if your budget allows i would go for one of the paid versions i hope you've enjoyed this video i look forward to seeing you again soon

Channel: Jonathan Edwards

Views: 85,417

Keywords: microsoft 365, windows 10, onedrive tutorial, microsoft onedrive, how to use onedrive, office 365, cloud computing, onedrive for business

Id: QM4eXdETKOY

Length: 20min 57sec (1257 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 26 2022