8 Tips and Tricks for Google Drive
8 Tips and Tricks for Google Drive
Now that businesses and
individuals are preferring to use cloud-based information storage systems,
Google Drive has become one of the most well-known collaboration tools in the
market with hundreds of millions of users. As a college student, I personally
love the versatile suite of tools because they make collaboration with
teammates and study groups more productive and effective. If you’ve worked with
Google Drive and some of its more popular tools such as Docs, Sheets, Slides,
and Forms, you’re probably familiar with how these tools work. But, I bet you
didn’t know about these 8 useful tips and tricks for the Google software suite!
#1 Google Drive Apps
Google Drive gives you up to a maximum of 15GB of free storage. This makes it an ideal location to store, edit, and share larger media files like music, photos, and videos along with all of your documents. Google Drive provides you with a ton of useful apps for creating mind maps, converting files, signing documents, drawing diagrams, editing videos, filtering/editing pictures, and many, many more! Check out their selection of apps here.#2 Add-Ons
Similar to apps, add-ons allow
you to bring extra functionality to your Google Doc or Sheet. By clicking on
the handy ‘Add-Ons’ tab at the top of your document, you’re able to download and
install many different add-ons from Google’s open-source Add-On library. Do you
need help creating a bibliography for your paper? How about accessing a comprehensive
thesaurus on your sidebar or generating a mail merge? There’s probably an
add-on for that!
#3 Auto Upload
Usually, you click on a big
red button labeled ‘New’ in the upper left-hand corner to upload a file to
Google Drive, but with the auto upload feature, you can simply drag and drop a
file from either Windows Explorer or MacOS Finder. Easy!
#4 Work Offline Mode
Sometimes you may come across situations in which you don’t
have an internet connection. In times like these, it may be helpful to have
access to important documents from your Google Drive so that you can still work
on them. Using the Work Offline function, Google Drive will save your files to
your computer via Chrome so that you can work anytime, anywhere, no matter
what! Select the gear image in the far right corner labeled Settings, and click the General tab from there. You can check or
uncheck the “Offline” check box to control whether or not you want to keep your
Google Drive files locally on your machine.
Google Drive features a host of short-cuts that allow you to manipulate controls with only a press of a few keys. Once inside Drive, press the Ctrl key quickly followed by the backslash / key to open up the short-cut menu.
#6 Revision History
If you have accidentally
deleted a Google document or want to revert back to a previous version, you can
use the Revision History feature to restore files up to 30 days old. Either
select See Revision History from the
File tab, or quickly enter the keys Ctrl,
Alt, Shift, and g to open up the
Revision side panel. Each file will be displayed chronologically, with the
newest edit appearing first. This feature also comes in handy when you want to
audit a document to see who added what in a group collaboration.
Google Drive has its own clipboard, but unlike Microsoft’s
version, it can hold multiple clips at a time. This tool takes images, texts,
and other objects stored in your Google Drive and stores them on the Web
Clipboard. Add clips via the Edit menu by selecting “Copy selection to web
clipboard” from the Web Clipboard submenu. Re-access the Web Clipboard to
choose which clip you want to insert into your Google Doc or Sheet.
#8 Research Panel
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