How to Master Google Drive

If you don't already have one, we will learn how to create our own Google account.

Now that you have a Google account, this video will show you how to get into your Google Drive.

We will explore the Main Menu options available to you as a user of Google Drive.

Each file/document stored in your Google Drive folder has multiple options with which to interact with each item.

Rather than have all of your files in the one area, we will now look to create folders to help us better organise our files. It is possible to create folder within other folders and this is demonstrated in the video.

This lecture cover the steps required to upload a file from its existing storage location, perhaps on your hard drive or on a USB stick, into the desired place in your Google Drive account.

In the previous section we learnt how to upload a file into our Google Drive account. We will now learn the process of uploading an entire folder or group of folders simultaneously.

Having learnt how to manually upload either individual files or complete folders I would like to show you an alternative methods to perform these tasks. We will learn how to Drag & Drop our files into Google Drive. From my experience and because of its simplicity, most users will prefer to use the Drag & Drop method to upload their documents.

Google are the undisputed world champions of searching. We will see that you can search for specific files by simply performed a search.

In this lecture we will learn how to create a variety of document types from within Google Drive.

The ability to share a file with another person is why Google Drive and its associated apps are so great. Collaborating with colleagues or social groups using the same document simultaneously will seriously change how you work.

Sharing an entire folder or series of folders takes our control of our data to a higher level. Share folders with a few people, a specific department within your workplace or even with the entire business - the choice is totally up to you to decide.

Once you have shared a file or folder the sharing setting are not fixed, you can change easily who and what collaborators can access. We learn this important skill should the original constraints or access to documents needs to be altered.

On occasions, it is useful to save a document or folder that has been shared with you by someone else. By doing this you will have access to the contents in some form even if your access to the files is later revoked.

Being able to access your files from anywhere, at any time with any internet connected device is the real magic of Google Drive. We will see how syncing of data works between various devices.

Many people will still like to have a copy of all of their documents stored physically on some hardware eg on the hard drive of their laptop or backed up on an external hard drive. Installing the Google Drive software on your PC, either Windows-based or Mac, allows syncing between the PC and the cloud. Files flow freely between the two places with the software behind the scenes ensuring that the most recent version of a document is always available.

Being "cloud-based", Google Drive is accessible by the majority of internet connected devices. This lecture enables use to install Google Drive on a tablet, smartphone or similar device to access, and in some cases modify, our documents.

In an earlier lecture, we learnt how to sync of data by installing Google Drive software on our PC. In this way our files on the local hard drive is mirrored by our documents in our Google Drive cloud storage. Rather than mirroring every file or folder, it is possible to have only certain documents or folders syncing. This lecture will take you through this process.

To create a more personalised experience, Google Drive allows you to alter various settings depending on your own preferences. The settings which can be customised wlll be covered in this video.

In additional to the Google Apps suite of products there are thousands of "3rd party" applications that can integrate with Google Drive. We will learn how to access and implement these.