Hi everyone, Kevin here. Today I want to show you how you can both get and also use Google Drive. First off, what is Google Drive and why would you ever want to use it? Google Drive is a cloud storage provider. If you’ve ever used Apple’s iCloud or Microsoft’s OneDrive, this is Google’s version of it. But still, what does it mean to be a cloud storage provider. Well, typically when you work on, let’s say, a document on your computer, you’ll save it on your computer. So, you have a local copy. With Google Drive, you can save it on Drive and that’s basically Google’s computer, so you’re saving it elsewhere. Now, Google doesn’t call their computers computers. They’re called servers and they keep them in data centers all over the world, but you might be wondering why would I ever want to do that? What are the benefits? Well, there are many benefits to storing files in Google Drive. First off, your files are backed up, so let’s say something were to happen to your computer at home. Well, when you store it in Drive, there are many copies on many different servers all over the world. Another benefit, you can access your files wherever you are. Let’s say you’re traveling, maybe you’re in Europe, maybe you’re in Africa, wherever you happen to be, if you could get onto the Internet, you can get to your files. Also, another benefit is Google’s really good at search. That’s what they’re known for. Now with Google Drive, you can search for anything. It could be text within a photo, it could be just a description of the photo you took, it could be four specific files. Their search will get that file extremely fast. Lastly, and one of the biggest benefits of working on files that you have stored in the cloud is that you can work with others on that file. In the past, if you wanted to work with others, you’d have to e-mail to them. Then they’d e-mail it back and then you’d probably get different versions. With Google Drive, you simply share a link and then you can all work on the same file together. So, there are lots of benefits to working in the cloud. Why don’t we jump on the PC now and see how we can start taking advantage of Google Drive. You can access Google Drive across all of your different devices. You can get it on the web, on your PC, and on mobile and I’ll briefly show you how you can get it across all of these different devices. By far one of the most popular ways to access Google Drive is on the web. To access Drive on the web, you can simply type in drive.google.com, and that will drop you directly in Google Drive. Alternatively, when you’re on any Google product on the web, up in the top right-hand corner, you have what’s called the waffle menu. See it kind of looks like a waffle. When you click on that, this shows you all of your different Google Apps. There’s one over here called Drive. It kind of has a triangle icon. You can simply click on that. If you want quicker access in the future, you can also click on the icon and drag it to a more prominent position. There, now it’s even easier to get back to Google Drive. You can also install Google Drive on your PC. The benefit of this is you can access all of your Google Drive files from a folder on your PC. You can also set up your PC to synchronize files and folders with Google Drive automatically. To get the backup and sync tool, simply go to the top right-hand corner and click on the settings gear. Within the settings gear, click on get Drive for desktop. On the next page, scroll down and you’ll see a download option for the backup and sync tool. Later on in this tutorial, we’ll walk through how backup and sync works. Lastly, you can also get Google Drive on your phone, if you use an iPhone, head to the App Store. If you’re on an Android phone, head to the PlayStore. Within the App Store, I’ll click on search and within the search field simply search for Google Drive. Once you finish searching for Google Drive, here you’ll see a result for Google Drive. If you don’t have it yet, you can click on install. In my case I already have it, so I’ll simply click on open. Here we are now in Google Drive on the web, and this is likely the interface that you will end up using most often, and by the way, congratulations, you now have your very own cloud storage account. In the introduction, it might have sounded a little bit intimidating, but it’s actually really easy to set up. Now within Google Drive, likely the first thing that you’ll want to do is to put one of your files into the cloud, so you can start taking advantage of all of those benefits that I called out, and by far the easiest way to get a file into the cloud is to simply select a file from your computer, and then you could simply drag and drop it into Google Drive. You have a Word document, and I’ll let go of it and here you see it uploads now into the cloud. Along with uploading individual files, maybe you have an entire folder that you’d like to put into Google Drive, well, you can upload it the exact same way. Here I have a folder from my PC, and once again, I’ll simply drag and drop it onto Google Drive, and here it’ll upload the entire folder into Drive. Getting content in is very easy. Up in the top left-hand corner, I also have this big and prominent new button. When I click on this, here too, I can upload an individual file and I can also upload a folder, so just another way to get content up. I don’t just have to start working from existing content on my PC. Down below, I could also start new blank documents, sheets, slides, and there are many other types of Google content that I could start creating. Now let’s say I don’t want to create a blank document; I could also hover over this arrow, and I could start from a template. Up on top of this menu, there’s the option to create a new folder. Just like any other File Manager, you can use folders to organize all of your content. I’m going to go ahead and create a folder. This opens up a prompt to name my folder. I’m going to call this financials. Once I’m all done, I’ll click on create. Here now I see my new folder. To organize content, just like any other File Manager, I can click on one of my files and press and hold and I can drop it in folders to start organizing content. Along with the new menu, I can also simply access it by right clicking. When I right click, this opens up the same exact menu, so once again, Google makes it extremely easy to get your content into Google Drive. I now have many of my different files showing up within Google Drive. The benefit is these files are now backed up and I can access these from anywhere. One of the other massive benefits of Google Drive is I can very easily get back to any of my files, and the first way to do that is using the search field up here. When I search, I could search for content within files, and it’s not just limited to documents. I could search within PDFs and also within images. Here for example, I have a PDF with the text FY21Q1. When I search, here I see both a document and a PDF, so it could search within PDFs. Back on the search results, let’s say that I wasn’t able to find what I’m looking for. Over on the right-hand side of the search field, I can expose additional search options and here I can set different filters to help me find the file that I’m looking for. Search is all well and good, but sometimes you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for, and that’s where Quick Access comes in. This surfaces all of the documents and all of the content that’s most relevant to you. So, let’s say that maybe someone just shared a document with you, or maybe you open a document a lot. Google looks at all of these different signals of how you interact with your documents, and then it recommends the most relevant documents to you, and here I see this PDF file. I just opened it and I probably want to go back to it. Here I see it’s in the first position of Quick Access, so once again, these are benefits with search, Quick Access, that you wouldn’t get with just documents on your PC. Down below, I see the core of the Google Drive experience. Here I see all of my different files and I see all of my different folders, and just like we looked at before, I could organize, drag-and-drop the files wherever I want to organize this view how I want it. Along with being able to organize the files, I can also adjust this view to help me find what I’m looking for. Here for instance, right now it’s organized by the name. I can also organize it by last modified if I’d rather see it in a different sort order. I could also change the way all of these files are visualized. Up in the top right-hand corner, I can toggle between the list view, which I currently have, and the grid view, which is a more visual way of getting back to your files. Within Drive, if I select one of my files, I’ll see additional controls appear across the top. Let’s briefly walk through what you can do with these. The first one is get link. This allows you to generate a link that you can then share with others so they can also access the file. Down below, you can set permissions on the file. Right next to that, there’s also another way you could share a file and you can share with specific individuals. Now you could toggle back and forth between getting a link and then also sharing with people or groups. Here too, when you click on the settings gear, you could set your permissions on the file when you share it. Once I share a file with someone, here I’ll see the shared icon appear next to the title, indicating that this file has been shared. Back on top and next to the sharing icons, I also have the option to preview a file. Not only can I preview a file, but I have some additional controls. I can comment on a file, I could print it, or I could download the file back to my PC. Moving along, I can also remove a file if I want to delete it and then I have a context menu with additional actions that I can take on a file. The last icon up here is the details icon. When I click on there, I can see all the details related to the file and most importantly I could see all of the activity. Right now, I just uploaded this file, but once I start sharing it and working with others, additional activity will show up in here. Once again, Google Drive provides many different ways to get to the most popular actions. Here when I have the file selected, I can go up here, but I can also simply right click on the file, and this will show a menu with additional actions. Now some of the more interesting ones in this list, I can add it to start, and when I add it to start, it’ll show up within the starred category. In a moment, we’ll take a look at how that works, and for now I’ll simply star the file. Back within the menu, I can also manage versions. Let’s say that I’m working with others on, let’s say, a document, or a presentation, I can go back to previous versions if let’s say some changes happened that I didn’t want. Just like with files, I can also select a folder and then right click on the folder and that will expose a similar context menu. Here too, I could star folders and interestingly, I could also change the color to help me find this folder more easily. For folders as well, I can even go ahead and share an entire file, so let’s say I’m working with a team and we all want to share files with one another, I can set up a folder and then I could share the folder with others, and we could all drop our files there. Now that we’ve looked at some of the core file management capabilities, let’s shift our attention over on the left-hand side where we have these different views. By default, I’m in the My Drive view, and the My Drive view shows me all of my content, so here I see my main root folder or the main My Drive view, and underneath that, I see all of the subfolders that I have. Now down below, I have an option called computers. This will only show up if you set up the get Drive for desktop app, otherwise you won’t have the computers option. This allows you to see any of the files that you’ve synced onto Drive from your computer. The next option is shared with me and just like the name implies, I can see any folders or any files that others have shared with me on this list. Now one of the nice things is you might have files in here that have been shared with you, but you want to be able to see that file within your My Drive view. What’s nice here is I can simply right click on an option and within here, I can add a shortcut to Drive. This opens up a prompt and I can define where I want the shortcut to show up. I’ll add it to My Drive and then click on add shortcut. When I go back to the My Drive view, here I see the shortcut to this shared folder. So, in a sense it’s almost like having my own folder. This is especially helpful if let’s say you’re working on a group project and all of you are contributing to one folder, you can have everyone add a shortcut to that folder within their My Drive view. That way it’s extremely easy to access. Under shared with me, there’s the recent view and this shows me all of the recent files that I’ve interacted with. So, whether it’s because I opened a file, maybe I uploaded a file, or maybe I modified a file. Anytime I interact with a file, it’ll show up on this recent list. Now you’d be surprised, but typically when you’re working on files, you’ll go back again and again to the files that you’ve worked on recently. This is an extremely valuable view. Next, we have the starred view and any file or folder that I star shows up here, so this is in a sense like pinning a document. If it’s a, say, a document or a file that you go back to often, you could star it, that way you have easy access to it. The last view I have here is my trash and when I click on this, I could see all of my different folders and files that I’ve recently deleted, and after 30 days, they’ll be automatically deleted, but here too, I could also empty the trash proactively. At the very bottom, I can also look at my storage, and when I click into storage, I get this helpful view showing me what files are using up most of my storage. Now one thing that’s interesting, you’ll notice that PowerPoint files, Word documents, or graphics, they all consume some of my storage space. However, all of the Google file formats, whether it’s Docs, Sheets, or Slides, you’ll notice that they use up 0 bytes. I’ve always thought it would be interesting if I simply created presentations with all of my photos, that wouldn’t use up any Google Drive space. Now that we’ve looked at how you can use Google Drive on the web, I also want to show you how you can use Google Drive on your desktop with the backup and sync app. Once you install the backup and sync app, you’ll see a few extra things on your desktop. Here I have a new folder called Google Drive. When I click on this, this will show me all of the different files that I have in Google Drive, and I can access all of them directly from my desktop using File Explorer. I also have another folder called Marketing Flyers, and I’ve set this up to sync with Google Drive. You’ll see a green check mark here and this indicates that this folder is also synced in Google Drive. Along with the folders on my desktop. I also have a new icon in my system tray for the backup and sync app. When I click on this, I can see all of the files that have synced with Google Drive. When I hover over, I could very quickly share those files, just like I could on the web. Up above, I have some quick shortcuts to view all of my Google Drive files in File Explorer. I can also view them on the web or within Google Photos. When I click on the ellipses, let’s go down to preferences to see what we can do there. Within preferences, I can define what folders that I want to sync with Google Drive. Here earlier, I showed you my Marketing Flyers folder and there’s this green check mark here. Here I’ve indicated that I want to sync this folder with Google Drive. Over on the left-hand side, I can also click on Google Drive and here I have it set up so whatever files I have in Google Drive also get synced with my computer, so before I walk through a few different ways I could get files into Google Drive, by dragging and dropping, or simply creating on the web, instead I can also have Google Drive do all of that for me and whatever files I have on my computer will be automatically synced with Google Drive, so I really don’t have to do anything to back up my content. Lastly, I want to show you how you can use Google Drive on your phone. Here I have Google Drive open, and it’s mainly focused on getting back to and viewing files. Here at the top, I have access to Drive search, and just like on the web, I can very quickly and easily find whatever file I’m looking for. Here I have the Quick Access where I see some of the files that I’ve recently interacted with. Down below, I can view all of my starred files right here, so just another way to get back to the files that I care about. I can also click on shared with me and here I get a quick view of all of the files that have been shared with me. Lastly, if I click on files, this is the My Drive view where I can see all of my files directly within the app, so this is another nice way to get back to your files regardless of where you are just using your phone. All right, well that was a quick look at how you can start using Google Drive. If this video helped you, please give it a thumbs up. To see more videos like this in the future, please hit that subscribe button. If you want to see me cover any other topics in the future, leave a comment down below. All right, that’s all I had for you today. I hope you enjoyed, and I hope to see you next time. Bye.