Steve Dotto here.
I am thrilled you are joining us today.
Today, weíre going to take a look at my five favorite Dropbox features.
Now the reason I decided that I had to do this particular video was a couple of weeks
ago, I did a comparison between Dropbox and Google Drive to determine which was better
and I chose the winner being Google Drive.
But I said at the end of that despite the fact that I think Google Drive is better,
Iím still going to use Dropbox and that caused a lot of emails to come into my Inbox with
people saying Steve, Google Drive won.
Why donít you switch over to Google Drive?
I think it kind of speaks to my philosophy around productivity software.
Itís that when you have a tool that really works for you there has to be a profound reason
to change, not just a few extra features.
Knowing how a tool works intimately and having it as part of your workflow is more valuable
than a few extra features.
Does that make sense?
I also like being a very complicated person.
I donít like anybody being able to understand me too much.
It adds an air of mystery about me.
Is that working as well?
Yes, even though I think Dropbox is inferior, I do choose to use it.
And inferior is actually a very strong term.
They are so close as far as performance.
Dropbox is such an elegant tool that I donít really feel I suffer at all by continuing
to use it.
But having said that, I thought I would share with you now the five features now that I
just really, really, really like in Dropbox.
Some of them I use every day.
Some of them I use every day without actually knowing I use them every day.
So letís dive into them, shall we?
The first and number one thing that I use in Dropbox all the time that I think is an
absolute essential and has become second nature to me is the idea of quickly sharing files.
Now if I open my Dropbox folder here, one thing I get asked for an awful lot are publicity
photos.
If Iím doing a speaking engagement or Iím working with somebody on some different project,
they ask me for publicity photos.
So Iíve got a whole series of publicity photos here.
Some of them are large.
Some of them are small.
Rather than emailing them as an attachment, all I do is I go and I choose the folder that
I want to shareóletís say itís going to be this photo hereóand then what I do is
I right-click on that photo and I say, ìShare Dropbox linkî which then copies a URL onto
my clipboard which then I can embed in an email.
Letís me open a new browser window.
I will embed then this character stringósee this, right hereóin an email.
If I send that to somebody and they click on it, what happens is theyíre then brought
into my Dropbox folder and they get to download that particular photo.
Isnít that slick?
This works for large files, small files, for videos.
It works for everything.
This ability to second nature just right-click on any kind of document you have stored in
your Dropbox folder, say ìShare Dropbox linkî and then be able to send that to somebody
by email, have them open it and be able to download the file right away regardless of
how large and small it is, that is a tremendous convenience.
So thatís the first and that has just become second nature to me.
I just share it like that all the time.
The second thing that I really appreciate in Dropbox is a little more complicated to
explain.
What it is is because I live on multiple computers, it allows me to store the preferences files
for my most used apps in Dropbox so that regardless of which computer Iím on, I use the same
preferences.
Does that make sense?
I will show you an example.
I love this tool called TextExpander.
TextExpander is a little keyboard macro tool thatís only available on the Mac.
There are similar products in Windows and actually weíve got a terrific video where
I show you how to use TextExpander if youíre interested.
Windows users can use a similar product called Breevy.
It works almost the exact same way.
There are a couple of other products as well in the Windows world but TextExpander dominates
in the Mac space.
I just love this particular productivity app.
Now what I do thoughólet me open TextExpander hereóis because Iím using TextExpander half
the time Iím on my notebook and half the time on my desktop which you see right here,
I go into my TextExpander preferences here and here within the preferences, I ask it
to synchronize my preferences through Dropbox.
So it creates a preferences file in Dropbox.
Now when Iíve got the same selection set on my notebook as is on my desktop, now Iíve
got the exact same keyboard shortcuts on all of my computers.
Now it makes sense, doesnít it?
This is an awesome way of using one app on multiple computers but having the same set
of preferences on all of them.
Now you could do this for web browsers like Firefox.
Chrome, which I use, automatically does this as far as syncing preferences but youíll
find a lot of different places where you can use this syncing, doing it through Dropbox
with the preferences file.
It is an exceptional way to use Dropbox.
Now number three on my list of awesome Dropbox features is the ability to do something called
selective sync.
What is selective sync, Steve?
This is especially useful if you have a computer that has limited hard drive space, if you
have the free Dropbox accounts so you have limited space on Dropbox and you donít have
gigabytes and gigabytes of space on Dropbox.
What it does is it allows me to go into my Dropbox Menu and I click here on the gear
icon, go into PreferencesóDo you see that?
Iíve gone to the Menu, into the gear icon, into Preferencesóand in Preferences you have
to go to Advanced.
Itís a little bit of a journey to get into it but there you have something called Selective
Sync and you can set this for each of your computers.
Within this, you can choose which of your folders within Dropbox you want to sync on
each computer.
Now the syncing gives you backups.
It gives you backups so if youíve got unlimited hard drive space, unlimited Dropbox space,
itís probably a great idea to sync everything unless youíre finding that itís slowing
down things too much by having everything in sync but I doubt that that will happen
in this day and age.
Far more important is if you have limitedósay youíve got a MacBook Air or a small notebook
computer that has a solid state drive so maybe you only have 128 GB of space on your drive.
60 of that is used up already for the operating system, the applications and that sort of
stuff so youíve got a limited amount of space available to you.
You donít have unlimited storage.
In that particular case on that notebook, you might go through here and say we donít
need to back up any of these files.
I donít need these files.
I can access them through Dropbox on the web but I donít need them stored locally for
offline access.
Because what happens when we sync files at Dropbox as we have the file on our computer,
we create in Dropbox and then through the sync feature it creates another copy on the
other computer.
This way here, we can selectively choose exactly which folders and which files we want to have
living on each computer.
Itís valuable if you have limited hard drive space and valuable if you have the free Dropbox
and you donít have a whole bunch of space in Dropbox to be able to sync things.
The selective sync is my third favorite Dropbox feature.
My fourth favorite Dropbox feature is the ability to show previous editions of documents.
If youíre in Dropbox and say youíre working collaboratively on a document, youíve got
a shared document that youíre working back and forth on, or even if itís a document
that youíre working yourself on and itís going through multiple revisions, then you
say really what did I have?
I saved it but what I really want is to see what it looked like three versions ago or
two or three saves before.
Now if you donít have revision control in whatever app youíre in, you have revision
control within Dropbox.
What you do is you go into your Dropbox folder here or into your Dropbox file.
Let me find a file that Iíll have multiple versions of.
Well, hereís my template that I use for my radio show graphics.
Iíve probably got a couple of saved versions here.
So I can click here.
Iíve right-clicked my mouse on the file within my Dropbox folder.
When I right-click my mouse, I can say Show previous versions.
Then it launches Dropbox on the web and it shows me the previous versions of that document
so that I can go back and I can open the previous version of that document and I can use it
or see exactly what we had at that particular time.
Itís not always going to be useful.
Itís certainly something that youíre going to be using every day but when you do need
it, it is a real life-saver.
The last thing is kind of a tip for really quickly using Dropbox.
I have a variety of different people who help me out, my virtual team, who put different
files in different Dropbox folders for me when theyíre ready and I also move files
into Dropbox occasionally for sharing amongst my different computers and things like that.
Now if I need to see, if I need to quickly find one the of the latest documents that
was uploaded, right here Iíve got the latest few document s that were uploaded to Dropbox
but itís a list of only three.
What I can do is I can go into my Dropbox on the web and by clicking under Events, it
shows me the last things in a chronological order that happen in Dropbox.
There you can see 11 minutes ago, I changed my TextExpander settings.
There was a transcript that was uploaded seven hours ago.
I stored these files and these are photos that I uploaded from my camera yesterday.
So you can see I can work my way through so anything thatís happened in the last few
days, I can very quickly find here without having to navigate to the individual folders,
which if you take a look at my Dropbox account, Iíve got a lot of folders now in my Dropbox
account because of all of the different projects that Iím on.
So I really like this ability here to be able to go in and be able to chronologically see
all of the events that have happened within my Dropbox account over a period of time.
Dropbox isnít perfect and Google Drive is ultimately probably going to significantly
impact the number of people that use Dropbox as we move ahead but for the time being, as
I said, Iím going to stick and continue to use Dropbox personally.
Itís an exceptionally well thought out service and when you get to know an app as intimately
as I know Dropbox, then the productivity gain as a result of that really makes it worth
kind of sticking around and staying with the ones that you know.
I hope that you found this video to be useful.
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Iím Steve Dotto.
See you next week.