Google Drive: 9 Amazing Tips & Tricks to become a Drive Genius in 2024!

1. Introduction: Hey there and welcome to my course on Google Drive, tips and tricks, everything to get you started. In this course, we'll cover lobes from shortcuts, create a new files in new tabs. Quickly saving images to drive with a click of a button will cover how to use the voice dictation so you can talk into your microphone and Google Docs, we'll write that out on the page if you're looking to translate documents. We will also cover that in this tutorial and many, many more tips and tricks in this course to get you on top of your Google Drive game. If you are comfortable using Google Drive, then this is definitely a great top-up course for you to take if you're new to Google Drive? I haven't, No, the course to feel free to check out that one. It kinda gets you started with the tool first and then you can come to this one. But if you're comfortable using the tool, this is for you. My name is Kevin. I've been using Google tools for years. I was previously a Google technical support technician. I used to help clients with their Gmail there drive their Chrome and lots of other issues along the way. So I'm well used to using this tool and how to get the best out of these tools. If you believe this is the course for you, then I look forward to seeing you inside. 2. Shortcuts For Creating Docs: Hey, and welcome to the first video of this course on Google Drive, tips and tricks. So basically in this first video, it's going to be a quick one. I'm just going to show you how to create some Google Drive Docs Sheets and Slides with some very handy shortcuts. So let's jump right in. So here I am on the Google Drive dashboard. Okay, Now to get here, you go to drive dot google.com in the URL bar up here, make sure you're signed in. And just to make sure I didn't, you'd be at this page, but also, you might see a little icon up here which your name and email address showing you're signed in. So just to show you how to create a new doc by opening a new tab. So for example, right, I'm at Google.com. That's just say among the search page, right, like this. And my Drive link is closed on, My Drive tab is close. So I want to create a new doc. There's a really handy way if you go to the URL bar and type in doc dot nu, I bought a new document. Okay, amazing. It's very fantastic, very easy. And here you basically jump in and go. This is a new doc, whatever you wanna do. Okay, so there's your new document and it's going right to your Google Drive account. Okay. So it's going to the main My Drive folder. And you didn't even have to open Google Drive. You didn't have to go through 56 clicks. They get there really quick in handy way to do it. Now, there's also another way by typing sheets dot nu. And if I do that, guess what new spreadsheet very handy indeed, isn't it? So I can jump right in here and create a new spreadsheet. Very, very easy. Now, what if I wanted to create a new slide or a Google slide? What you do is open a new tab and type in deck dot new. And you have a new Google slide, slideshow. So very quick, right? This is a very quick video just to start off our course. But three really handy URLs for you to learn off by heart, they're essentially, you could bookmark these rides. You could bookmark docs dot google.com. Sorry, not dogs like we would like. But a doc dot new sheets dot nu and deck dot nu. And if you wanted to bookmark those, for example, let me see if I can bookmark. I can add a bookmark here, but I think I can change the URL, can I? Maybe not in this specific scenario, it's a very useful way to add these to your bookmarks, okay? And just even to remember, sometimes you don't even need to have them on bookmarks. You could just go doc dot new and you're rocking. So right, Let's get straight to the next video. That's the first tip. Okay, really quick on, really handy one. Hope, I hope to see you in the next video. 3. Voice Dictation: Hey, and welcome back to the next video. So in this video we're going to look at voice dictation in Google Docs. It's a very useful tool. Let's jump right in. So among the Google Drive dashboard here, okay, and what I'm going to do is just create a new document. I'm just going to right-click the screen. I'm clicked google Docs blank document. Or if you'd like, you can go to the new up here in the top-left and also go Google Docs. And from our last video, you can also open a new tab type in doc dot nu and rock and roll. Okay, so three ways. That's brilliant, isn't it? Anyway? So let's use the voice dictation tool. So what we have to do here is go to tools. Now you can do this on an empty dark or dark that you already have. And we will go down to Voice Typing, Okay. Click to Speak. Okay, so it's going to set my language versus now English US is here, I'm sure for I'm in Ireland myself, so we use the UK, The British English. So sometimes the spelling is different or look at this English, Ireland. I didn't know we'd have specific ones. Maybe you can understand my accent better. Okay, So I'm going to click to speak and let's see what happens. Oh, you have to allow your microphone two. Hello. And this is well, I'll wasn't finished yet. Click on the icon to see. Okay. Hello. This is Kevin and I am running a course on how to use Google Drive with some very useful tips and tricks to help you get the most out of it, using it every day. And I'm running out of things to say and thank you very much for recording my voice and have a great day, All the best. Goodbye. Okay. So let's hit stop there, right? How did it get on? Okay, so hello, This is Kevin. I'm going to, of course, I use Google Drive at some very useful tips like this has been tasked stick. You know, this is really, really, really useful. Imagine if you were writing an essay or practicing a speech or did I didn't want, sometimes you might need to transcribe something that's already in print. And you might have like a big PDF document that you're given. And you're like, Wow, I wish I could have this in, in, in, in Drive and then a couple of ways to do it. But if you wanted to kinda improvise with something, it's, it's endless. The reasons you could, you could have this or you know, you'd be writing a book and usefulness, throw out ideas. And very useful, very useful to. What I would suggest always is just have a quick read, okay, I'm not going to check it here, but just look back on it. Check for grammatical mistakes. Check if you need to add some full stops, break it up. This is just a very useful tool for you to get your voice onto texts. Okay, so another fantastic Google Drive, Google Doc feature here that you, I hope you find very useful. Okay, so that's it for here, 3D. So let's just see if it gets one more thing. I hope to see you on the next video. So see you soon. Full stop. I got to vote stuff and everything. Okay. See you in the next video. 4. Google Translate with Docs: Hey, and welcome back. So in this video we're going to look at using Google Translate and drive documents are in Drive documents, I should say. Honoring. Okay. Anyway, let's go here. I'm at the Google Drive dashboard drive dot google.com. I'm always going to repeat that. Okay, drive dot google.com. Very useful way to get directly to Google Drive if you need to. Anyway, here I have some documents. This is all test documents. They don't mean anything, so please excuse the titles and the mess, absolute mess. But we're going to use Google Translate to translate the last document I created in the previous video. So that's this one here. It's called hello, hello, This is Kevin. Okay, so let's open this one and see how it goes. Look at this title. This is messy. Test document, okay, That's just renamed that. Okay, So let's use Google Translate. The way to do it is to go up, hover over tools and scroll down to translate document. Okay, so this is a very, very useful function. When we click on this, you will be given the option to create a new document. Now not an option. It's R. You will create a new document for you. But we can give it a name so I can say translated document. And the best part of all of this is I pick the language, okay, so I'm going to go with maybe I'm going to go to Spanish. Okay. Because I was learning a bit of Spanish recently and I'm not the best. I can't speak Spanish, but I've been learning some words and let's see if I can give it a go. So translate. When you click Translate, Google, google creates a new document and translate the text that you had. This is a very useful tool if you wanted to, you know, maybe translate yeah, I mean for work or for your personal reasons or even if you wanted to denote right, and Spanish and translate back to English and see how we got on. Or if you had a pen pal who knows we're in a different language, you know, Okay, Ola, Ola. So I Kevin a story in poverty and dull on Coursera. I won't even try anymore. Okay, So I think it looks like it's done a good job. I would probably do need a Spanish speaker to double-check on this. So if you're watching this and you are a Spanish speaker, feel free to leave a review on the course and just maybe let me know if Google Translate did a good job or something just doesn't make sense here at all. But I hope it did. Again. The whole point here is, it's a very interesting function. It's a very useful function on Google Drive and you can use it quite a lot. So I wonder if I translate this back to English. Let's see what will happen. Okay, I'm ready. Are you trying to play around with this now? Translate document? Let's just say translated back. So I know I'm create a new documents or every time I do this, but it's getting a bit crazy, but let's give it a go anyway. Please ignore my phone. That's so unprofessional. So if I click English and I click translate, Let's see how it goes. Okay, Hi, I'm Kevin. I'm teaching a course on how to use Google Drive at some very helpful tips and tricks to help you get the most out of these. And every day I'm running out of things to say and for her my voice and not do bed. Okay. Maybe it's not the most complicated English in the world, but it did a pretty good job in showing that it could translate to and back from another language. So it probably did pretty well. Very useful to it. Okay, again, this might apply to you. This might not. Who knows, It's another tool in the tool belt or it's another recommendation you could give somebody out there if they have an issue. This is a free tool. It's fantastic, it's very useful. Okay, So thanks a million. I hope to see you in the next video. And child for now. 5. Keyboard Shortcuts in Drive: Hey there and welcome back. So in this video we're going to look at Google Drive shortcuts. So let's jump right in. So here I am at the Google Drive dashboard. Okay, it's starting to fill up, but a lot of files at the moment and maybe getting a little messy. But let's just look at shortcuts for now and maybe we'll try and organize these and clean these up a bit later, okay, in, in, in a video, hopefully very shortly. So there are a lot of very useful shortcuts in, in Google Drive, for example. And we can actually view the list to see what we can do and what we can't do. So I'm on a Mac at the moment. So on a Mac you would hit the Command key and the four and the forward slash. So the command key and the forward slash key. Okay? And on Windows you would use the Control and forward slash key on your keyboard. Ok. So I'm just gonna go that again, command forward slash. On a Mac, it's shares the button with the question mark, and it might do so on the Windows machine as well. So command and forward slash. Now loads of shortcuts here, you might find very useful, um, but I'm just going to use one or two for now that I've really handy, like look at these, for example, the Create ones. When you're on this homepage here, you could use some credit. You could create a dock by hitting Shift T. So that's another way to create a Google doc. There must be more than that we're not aware of, but to so many ways to create these documents, new folders and you presentations, new spreadsheets, everything like that. If you wanted to upload a file shift and you upload a folder, it's all very handy. Now as one or two, I find very useful, for example, the rename. So if I search, yeah, use the search bar here and type in Rename, it'll tell us the shortcut, which is just the N key. Okay, so let's close this for now. And let's just hover over this one. And I'm going to hit the End key. Okay? I know it's very, it's not crazy faster than right-clicking and looking for rename. And I don't know about you, but sometimes I open up this and I pass it out about three times and then I go, Okay, there it is. But if you highlight your document in the same way, I click on this and it kind of shows that it's highlighted here, hit the End key and you can rename the document, renamed. Okay, cool. So what if I wanted to share one of these documents? Well, I'll have to right-click it and go to Share. You know, I know it's not a big deal, but maybe you're dealing with hundreds or thousands of these documents every week or every day. So let's hit Command forward slash to find our shortcuts on Windows that control forward slash. And let's look at share. Okay. So to share selected items, we have this little stop, okay, It's just the period. So let's close this. Let's type on the renamed and hit our foot up. There we go. Very, very cool. I get to shared link with somebody else, like this one here. I can add someone else to edit the document as well. Very useful so I can rename it, hating the End key. I can share it using the full stop key. You know, it, there's loads more where that came from. So if I go Command forward slash, How about if I want to start something, I do know how to use this one, but let's have a look in its structure together and show it. So add and remove selected items to or from the start menu. So to start on the left here is a kind of basically any items that we've started that we might find important, we may want to use them later. So for example, if I go to my drive, this test sheet here, I'm going to highlight it. I'm going to hit the S key. I've now started to documents. I have a notification on the bottom left. It's been started. Let's go to the Start menu. There it is, okay, my test sheet is in the start menu. If I highlighted here and hit S onStart, now it's removed from the start files. Okay, so I can go back to My Drive and look inside here. Okay, Cool, nice and handy. There's loads more. All you have to do is hit Control and the forward slash or on Mac command and forward slash. And have fun, denote, look at some of these and find, if you ever find that there's this thing where you have to right-click and look and you're like, Wow, I hope there's a faster way to do, does have a look here. You'd be very surprised. Very specific shortcut might exist for you. Okay, so that's all we need to know really about how to get started with shortcuts and how to find one if you're looking for one that suits your specific needs. So I hope that's helpful and I'll see you in the next video. Thank you. 6. 'Explore' in Google Docs: Hey, and welcome back to the next video in this course. So in this video we're going to look at using the explore function in Google Docs. So let's jump right in. Okay, So here I am on the Google Drive dashboard and let's just open one of the docs for now. I'm going to look at the translator document, okay, or maybe maybe renamed. Let's open the renamed document twine out. So in the renamed document, we're going to look at the explore function. Okay, so here what we're gonna do is go to Tools. And we're going to click on Explore. And what this does is it opens up kind of a new column. On the right-hand side, a toolbar almost. And you basically can explore the web as well as other files you have in Google Drive. So this is very useful if you had thousands of files and you needed something useful without going to drive and oh, where did I put the file? I'm looking at this folder. I'm looking in that folder. Here. You can search for, let's say, translated doc, you know, okay, so I have web results, image results, and my own Google Drive results. Okay, So look at this. We translated a dock into a couple of videos ago, and it's here. So if I click on it, it'll open the file in a new tab for me. So I have quick access to that and then I can jump back and forth, you know, rather than going back to my drive and trying to find where it is and if you have thousands of files, Good luck, okay. Because sometimes it can be tough to find the specific file, but if you know the name of it, this is a very handy tool right here. Okay, let's look at images. So I want to put a picture of, I don't know, a donkey. I don't have any files in My Drive that matches donkey. Let's click on images. So nice Google images here of donkeys. Okay, So I don't know, Let's grab this one. There's a plus icon there. Oh, I can even highlighted. So I clicked on it. It came up. Big lovely picture of copper donkeys. Let's insert this image here. There you go. Now I have a picture of a donkey in my Docs. I don't know why you might need that. Maybe you will, maybe you won't, maybe not specifically a donkey, but this, you can go into formatting this, okay? And I'm not going to jump into formatting Google Docs too much right now. I hope to make a couple of courses very soon in editing Google Docs and had been, you get the most sort of denote this editing Google Docs is specifically really, anyway, if I go to web and I want to find some useful results, oh, a donkey, you know, learn more on Google. Oh, what's this? Donkey and Wikipedia. Let's open that. It opens it in a new tab for me. So it's all about reducing the clicks and being faster at editing in and really, really getting the most sort of these tools. You know, it's a very useful one. I don't know. You can look for anything you wanted to. You could look for donkey, you could look for a mug. Maybe I want to image of a mug. Oh yeah, look at this. This is a good mug commodity that you can hover over the plus icon and immediately it adds the image without you having to open up the notice a little plus icon there on the top right of each image. I just click on it and adds the image immediately. Another less click, a one-click down, I should say. So there you go. Look lots of cool ways to use the explore function. Again, very useful to search in your existing documents. So if I even typed in and say Open Explorer again, and I go Ola and I go to drive. It, found the word Ola in my translator Doc. Okay. So not only does a search for the title is of the doc, it'll search for words within the documents themselves. So just to keep that in mind too, It's very cool. Just because this word existed here. It resulted in here as well. So that's very useful. Maybe you expected that. I don't know, I didn't really expect that I taught those are really cool function. Right? So enough donkeys and mugs, okay, it just shows where my pastimes are. I enjoy looking at pictures of donkeys and drinking tea, because that's what we do here in Ireland, quite large as drink tea. So anyway, Enough is enough about that. Thank you very much for watching this video and I hope to see you in the next one. And bye for now. 7. Organising Folders with Colour: Hey there, and welcome back to the next video in this course. So we're going to very quickly look at adding color to Google Drive folders. So let's jump right in. So here among the Google Drive dashboard as always, and let's just tidy displays up a bit. Okay, So I have some tests folders. So let's create some new folders. You can right-click and click on New Folder. I'm going to call it another folder. And who knows? I'm going to call another one, even another folder. Okay? This is just to have a few folders for us to kind of mess around. Let's just start dropping documents into folders. Okay. You can go there. You can go there. I don't know. You can go there. You can go there and you can go there and you can go in here. And why not? You can go in there. I'll leave this guy out here for now. So this could be a structure of, you know, that you could easily have a 100 of these folders. Okay, I have and some of my work account where I build websites and I made courses like this. And I have a lot of folders. And it's very common to not be able to find which folder you want. Okay, So I'm just even creating a couple more very random ones right now again. And you can see that you could easily have even 20 folders where it kind of gets a bit on organized. And sometimes when you land on this page, you're thinking offers a folder where it's a folder 01:00 AM I looking for where's my work folder? And these other folders I don't need to worry about. We can color them, okay, so it's a very useful way just to visually differentiate your folders. It's very simple. Right-click, right-click the folder. Go to change color and just pick a color here from the palate. Okay, so let's make this one red. Let's make this one green. And let's make another folder. Right-click change color, and that's metallic blue. Okay, so if I was to reload this page and I just come here for the first time and I Lincoln, I go all right. I know that the right folder after a while, the red folders always going to be the one I need to go to. I'm going to be okay. There's a red folder and I click into it. Okay? Or there's the there's the green folder. And I click into that and I know where my donkey and mugs folders. So again, look, it's not a big, super big, useful, insightful tip, but it is a tip. A lot of people forget about this. It's really, really important to color your folders. So that's really all there is to this video. It's a very short one. I hope you find that useful and I'll see you in the next one. 8. Search in a Folder: Hey, and welcome back. So in this video, we're going to look at searching for a specific file within a specific folder. Okay, so let's get started. So here I am on the Google Drive dashboard. Okay. This is a very simple little tool, a little kind of a function I guess, that you can use when you need to. If I search for yellow sheep right now, sheep, I get two files. Okay. And maybe there's a specific one and need to use and I don't want to use the other one. So I could maybe say right one. I could click on this one and it will show the path on the bottom or click on this one and it will show the other path. Um, but, you know, I know that one of them's as in a specific folder that I need to use. So let's go back to my drive and there's kind of a handy tool you can use here. Let's say, I know the sheep, I want to use the yellow sheep is in test folder. I can right-click test folder and I can go to search within Test folder. Now, the Sheep shows here because it's a picture of yellow sheep, it's going to stick out. But if this was a Google Doc that contained words that I needed or a big spreadsheet that contained a words that are needed are a title that I needed. This function proves very useful. Okay, so. 9. Scraping Text from Image: Hey there and welcome back. So in this video we're going to look at translating text on an image to Google Docs. Okay, so pulling the text off of an image, very useful stuff. Okay, so let's jump right in. So here we are on the Google Drive dashboard. Now, you might notice there's a new file here called coffee dot JPEG. So if I open this up, we have a poster, it's Twin Peaks poster. It says, this is, excuse me, a damn fine cup of coffee. Okay, So what we'll do is let's open this in Google Docs and pull the text from the image. Okay, so we're basically translating image to text useful. So this is a JPEG, it works with PNGs as well. But all you need to do is right-click the image. But it needs to be under Google Drive for us the ball when it's uploaded, right-click the image and open with Google Docs. Okay, so it's opening, it's doing its thing. It set itself up and look what this does, right? It opens Google Doc with the image insiders, but let's scroll down. It's after taking the text from the image for us to, okay, so this is, excuse me, an ellipsis. I think it is three dots and then find cup of coffee. And here it is. This is including the comma. It Got it, Perfect. Okay, So Fairplay. Now you might be saying Kevin, There's only a couple of words here. Could you not just write it out anyway and instead of using this little thing? But what if this was a scanned page of a book? What if you had to scan five pages of a textbook? Let's say you're studying and you didn't want to have to type it all out. And you scan them in and you get a PDF, open it in Google Docs like this, it could be hundreds of words and it would pull the text. And as just like her voice dictation, It's important to go through what it's typed out for us just to make sure that it's correct. But it is much easier than writing out pages and pages and pages if you know what I mean. So this is a very useful tool and then once you can do is delete the image. So when you delete the image, you're basically left with the text and you can do whatever you want as the text then, you know, now. And if we try and say just text if you wanted like we did before, you could translate this document into Bulgaria, Catlin, it's go catalog. Okay. And then open a new document. Just the adjoining a load of things we learn together. Look at this. It doesn't I definitely those be Catlin. But who knows that could be fairly accurate. So that's perfect price. And basically, you will have two files on your Google Drive, one of the dark and one with the image and the translators of the text from it. So brilliant. Thanks. I hope you enjoyed the video and I'll see you in the next one. 10. Save to Drive Extension: Hey there and welcome back. So this video is about saving files to drive using a Chrome extension. Very useful. Okay, so let's jump right in. So here I am on the dashboard, okay, for Google Drive, I've got some tabs open. Let me pop these close. We're going to look at a Chrome extension. Now for this, you'd have to be using Google Chrome, okay. You might be using Firefox Safari, understandably fine. I use them all the time when I'm developing websites for testing and stuff. But if you use Chrome primarily this one is for you. Okay? So what you can do is just open a new tab and go to the Chrome Web Store. Okay? And it's the first one here, Google Chrome Web Store. This is a web store where you can get loads of extension so that already really helpful. They do lots of different things, games and it'll awesome bits and bobs. You can have fun here if you want and go the crazy. Pause this video, come back to this video later. But for now, we're just going to look at the drive extension. Okay? So this one here, save to Google Drive, it's made by Google and it's got a good rating for quite a lot of reviews. Okay, so we're going to click on this, and we're going to click Add to Chrome. It's going to say, Hey, this is what the permissions are needed. You just click Add extension and it'll appear on the top right inside of your screen. Okay? So you can just click on that and work away. So it's there, but we don't see it anymore, but it's in Chrome now. Now Chrome has this plug-in, this extension that can do cool things for us. So if I wanted to, let's say, go to, let's say, you know what something Irish. People are gonna say potatoes on Afrikaans. But let's think of something a bit more. I'm going blank of blank. I just go I'm gonna go back to t. I don't know. Maybe it's not a victim but we love t. Okay. We love drinking tea, Tin coffee, but tt is, it's, it's, we love it anyway. So if I go to images and I find that image, I like, like let's say, okay, you know, we drink of milk. We like to have a kinda like this, you know. Okay, Let's click it. Oh, look at this one. So to save this image, right, we're going to right-click this image and we're going to open in a new tab, or I would just want a tab with this image on it. Okay, look at this, looks lovely. Now, right-click this image and click Save Image to Google Drive. When I do that, it saving the image and it is now in my Google Drive. So I'm gonna close this window, go back to My Drive file and look, it's right there. Okay. I could go to a news article. I don't know. Let's look at it. The British won the BBC. Okay, let's click on this one. Rice, I have a group here now. Okay. Sure, sure. What is going on here? Look messy messes after. Oh, I'm have to click on something else. All right, look on this article and this is a random article. If I right-click this, Save Image to Google Drive, it saves the image. Google Drive. I close. I go to my drive and look, there's the image very useful for gathering images rather than downloading and uploading and downloading, uploading. This is a very useful too, okay, so I hope that helps. And I'll see you in the next video and goodbye for now. 11. Conclusion: Hey there, thanks a million for taking my course on Google Drive, tips and tricks. I hope you found that very useful. I have another course on this platform for learning all about Google Drive from start to finish. So if you started with this course and some things were a little kind of confusing, feel free to check out my other course on getting started with Google Drive. It's about an hour, an hour and a bit, maybe I think. And it'll definitely give you a good in-depth cover of the tool if you came from that course to view this one, Thanks a million. I hope you found that useful. If you enjoyed it, I would really appreciate if you leave a review and if you feel there was things I could improve on in this course, I would also love your feedback. So feel free to leave me some feedback there also. I have plenty of other courses here, all to do a Google tools. I hope to release more and more courses in the coming weeks and months. So I hope to see you there as well. And wherever you are in the world, all the best. I hope you found this useful and have a great day, week, month, year. Okay, So thank you all the best and see you later. Goodbye for now.