- Super exciting today. It's part four of our five part series on the Google ecosystem. Well actually the five part series has grown into a seven part series because there's so much to cover. But today's is awesome. We are talking about Google Drive. Queue the music. Steve Dotto here, how the heck you doing this fine day? At Dottotech we make technology easy so you can do more. Now as I said this is the fourth of our series of Google Basics where we look at the Google ecosystem. Today we're diving into Google Drive which is the online storage component of the Google ecosystem. But drive is more than that. Drive is two maybe three different things to us. First of all it is online storage, much like Dropbox or Box or other file storage systems. Google Drive allows us to store all of our documents within it. We have actually 15 gigabytes of storage space within Google Drive which is pretty darn generous when you consider that say Dropbox starts out with two gigabytes of free storage. Of course you can purchase an upgrade if you start running out of storage and we will have links in the description on how you can go about upgrading your storage should you choose. But you're probably going to be happy with 15 gigabytes for a little while because that's a lot of storage. However, one caveat is with Google Drive you share that 15 gigabytes of storage with some of your other Google accounts. So you share with all of your docs and sheets all of your word processors, spreadsheets, presentation. Anything you create with Google Apps that are also part of drive counts against your storage. As does any stored email that you have from Gmail. And as well, you can also have to use some of that space to store some of your photos if you're using Google Photos. But there's a caveat on the caveat as far as the photos goes and we'll be talking about photos in a subsequent episode of this Google Basics series. But with photos, if you store your photos in Google standard resolution it doesn't count against your storage. It's only if you store high resolution photos that it counts against your storage. Whew, I'm glad we got over all of that. But let's take a look at Google Drive so we can understand how it all fits together. When I said it's really two things, here's where we see it. If I go into the Google Apps menu and open Google Drive from the apps menu I'm brought into a browser window that allows us to organize all the different aspects of our drive. Now this is a pretty much brand new account that I've just been playing around with a little bit and I've got a couple of untitled documents that I've just been kind of setting up. But it starts with pretty much a blank canvas when you start with Google Drive. But if you take a look over here and you click on new. Here you see that you can manage all of your, you can create folders and you can upload files, et cetera. But you also have access to Google Docs, Sheets and Slides as well as more here. This is the other part of Google Drive. This is Google's Productivity Toolkit. These are, this is our word processor, Docs is a word processor which is free. Sheets is a spreadsheet. Slides is a presentation tool much like PowerPoint. And we see in the dropdown we've also got Forms and Drawings and access to Maps and Sites and Jamboard which I'm not even sure I've ever even looked at. There's so many things in the Google ecosphere. They're always adding. But the one that you'll be most interested in is of course, I think Google Docs and we'll start with that. Because this is a really full featured word processor. Google Docs, I use for doing all the writing that we do in our business now. I write all of our blog posts in it. All of the projects we work on, I work in Google Docs because it is a full featured word processor. And it's got, if we take a look here in the tools, in the menu, sorry. It's got all of the main features that you'd expect to find in a word processor. Now it's not quite as robust as a Microsoft Word, no. But it's free and it's online and available to us at all times. And I, the words are the same. The words work out the exact same. And you can do most of the formatting that you would do in a dedicated application. But that is not the main reason that I use this tool. Free is good, but free is not everything. Accessibility is great, the fact that it's easy to access online and that it's ubiquitous. I can work on the same document on multiple computers just by signing into my Google account. That is very important. But the most important aspect of this particular tool, actually of all of the Docs is found on the top right hand side of the document screen here which is the share button. I can take this document and I can share it with other members of my team. By sharing the document with other members of the team I turn it into a collaborative document which means they can edit the document even in real time. If I am writing on a document and someone else is editing that document, I can see their edits happening in real time. And we have all of the acceptance and rejection rules as far as editing documents so that you can make suggestions and then accept the suggestions. So you can do full proper full on editing of a document and work through it in a collaborative approach with the team all included here for free with Google Drive. That to me is one of the biggest benefits of this particular tool. And we've got that for word processing but we also have it for spreadsheets. We also have it for presentation tools and we can even create forms, et cetera. Now we have done a lot of videos on this topic over the years. So in the document in the blog post here and in the links below, I'm gonna make sure to add links to showing you how we use Google documents as a collaborative word processor. We did a great video on that. I'm gonna show you an introduction to Google Forms which is another one of the basic tools that's built into the Google Docs or into the Google Apps which allows you to create online forms which are mind blowing as far as the flexibility and the fact that they're free is again, an amazing feature. So I'll make sure that I link to all of the relevant videos so that you can dive deeper into each of these aspects. But today's video is kind of an overview so I'm not going to go into the nitty gritty details of using these tools. So this is the documents side of Google Drive. But if we go back here into the main menu we can also manage, let's bring out the menu, pop out the menu. We can also go in and click on the Drive location. And we can also, here, choose exactly what documents we're sharing and how we want to organize those documents. Because here's the thing about online file sharing is you don't necessarily always want to have all of the documents available on all of your devices. For example if you've got a lot of very large files that you're editing, say video files. You don't necessarily want to store them in your online storage solution because they take up a lot of space and they get mirrored on each computer in the system. So you want to be able to organize exactly what files you share and which ones you don't. And you can do all of that through these menus on the side. And one of them is for the different computers. These are the different computers that are attached and synced to your Google Drive system. Now I just set this up brand new. So there's no other computers syncing to it but if I log in with another computer into my Google account. The Google account we set up way back in episode one which I'm still using here. If you log in with a second computer, say a notebook computer, it will then give you access to all of the same information, begin syncing all of the documents that are in Google Drive on that other computer. So that's how we end up having ubiquitous access to all of our files is we've got them synced from computer to computer into the cloud. So that no matter what device you're on, you have access through Google Drive. That's one of the benefits of it. And it'll take you a little bit of time to figure out what you want to share and what you don't want to share. But that's basically how it's all managed. So you'll spend quite a bit of time in this particular interface here, figuring out how to get around and how to create new documents and then finally creating some sort of organizational structure for your Google Drive account. But the bottom line is once you've set up a Google Drive account, you have access to it on all of your devices and you can choose exactly which files live in Google Drive that you want to share. And if you want to share files with others, you can also share the files by creating a file sharing link. Let me do that, actually. Let me load. I think I should do that at least once. I'm going to -- upload a file to Google Drive. Let's say I'm just gonna upload this spreadsheet right here which is a spreadsheet that I have. So this actually Microsoft Outlook spreadsheet but it was sent to us from a client. So here we have, this has now been uploaded. So how do I find it? Well if I go into my drive, I have here that spreadsheet available to me right here. So if I click on this I will open it. But I can also choose to get a sharable link for this document. Watch this. I created a sharable link which then copies this link so that I can now send this link to somebody else and I can share this document with them. So all of the same things that we do in Dropbox we can do in Google Drive. I say graphically speaking it isn't quite as appealing as some of the other tools as far as it lays out all of our files and all of our structure. But you'll very quickly the nuances of using Google Drive as you spend time with it. But it's an important part of the Google ecosystem because now when you go into your email and you open your email and you create and compose a new email, if you want to attach a document to that email? Watch what happens when I go to attach file. Watch what one of my options are. One of my options are, oh sorry, I clicked on the wrong place. If I go here and I think it's attach, there it is! If I insert a file from Drive rather than attaching a document from my computer, I can attach the spreadsheet that I just created here, I can attach that as an attachment in the email. So I have instant access through the integration between Gmail and Google Drive to be able to share files. As well as, of course, anytime I save a document in Gmail, that document or that attachment is saved in Google Drive. So we see how it fits now as the storage layer. The storage and really sharing layer for the entire Google account. Google Drive, it is a great addition so it works in the background most of the time. It's not something you think about top of mind all of time as far as the storage side goes. But it is an integral part of the entire Google ecosystem. And that brings us to next video which we'll be posting next week, which is on Google Photos. You're gonna wanna stick around for that. If you have not yet subscribed to our channel, make sure that you subscribe and ring that notification bell so that you don't miss any of the videos in this Google series or any of our other videos for that matter. I look forward to your comments and suggestions below. Would love to hear what your thoughts are and if this video is indeed helping you out. Till next time I am Steve Dotto. Have fun storming the castle!
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