- All right, if you're using Google Drive
and you have lots of great files but you can't find them,
we're going to go over lots of different built in methods
that Google Drive has to allow you to organize those files
so that you can find them later.
(bright music)
So right now we're looking at what I would consider
to be the homepage of Google Drive,
and that's called My Drive.
We're not starting at the top here,
there's something called priority,
but only the business users have that,
and I would suggest starting at My Drive anyway.
We'll touch on this later.
We're going to talk about My Drive,
and then how to organize it
with some of these other features in mind.
The most basic level of organizing is using folders.
So you can see that my preference is to not have any files
at the very bottom, but just have folders,
and then as you drill down into these different sections,
then you'll see the files.
So let's just go into Prolific Oaktree.
This is where I store everything for the different videos
that I make or the different blog posts.
And you notice it's still just folders.
So I have to go down two levels to find any of the files.
But then once I do that, all of these files pertain
to this one video that I made.
And they're all for the channel Prolific Oaktree.
You have to find some balance between
using several different layers of folders,
and just using very descriptive file names.
So in theory, you could not use any folders at all
if you had consistent, descriptive, file naming convention,
which I kind of use here.
But if you didn't use folders you would probably
want the words Prolific Oaktree in this file,
and docs basic,
and then the name of what's actually in the file.
Then you'd be able to find it when you searched.
But since these are already in these folders,
I typically don't have to do that.
Let's go back up one, let's find this docs basic folder.
If I left click on it and go over to the right hand side,
it'll show you all the details of that particular folder.
So almost all the activity in here has just been me,
so I'm the owner of it.
This is when I last modified this folder,
and then I just opened it a minute ago.
What you can do is add a description
because you won't see this in this file structure,
but it will help you if you're searching for it.
So let's just say that I know I have MP4 videos in here
and it's on docs.
That's redundant because it's in the file name,
but it still might help you for some reason.
And let's say I wanna label this as old.
Maybe when I did this there was an older
interface to Google Docs,
which I actually think there was slightly.
So if I search for everything old,
this will come up and I know that eventually
I might wanna redo it.
And when you're just selecting these folders,
if you wanted to do that for several of them,
you can hold down the shift key,
go down, left click,
and then you would select a range,
or you could hold down the control key
to add some more that aren't in a range.
And then if you right clicked at this point,
you'd be modifying things on all of the folders
that are selected.
Not all of your options are going to be available here
because some things might only be relevant
for one folder at a time.
We'll move off of that, look again at a right click,
and you have more options here
'cause you only have one.
There are different views that you can use.
So if you come up into the upper right hand corner,
if you click this, you'll see right now it's on list view,
and it will switch over to grid view.
And in grid view, you'll be able to see more items,
but each of them will have less detail shown.
So if we switch back to list view,
you'll be able to see the owner and the last modified.
You would see the file size here too if there were files,
but at this point it's all folders.
Let's go into that folder, and you see file size,
you'll notice it's not on all of the files
because if it's a docs, sheets, or slides file,
Drive gives you that for free.
It doesn't take up any of your storage space,
but other types of files do.
Go back to the Prolific Oaktree.
So let's talk about some other ways
to organize your files here.
If you wanted to differentiate between
let's say docs folders, and maybe these Excel folders.
Let's select two of these docs, right click.
You can change the color.
So let's pick a color that looks like Google Docs,
and we'll select some of these Excel folders
and give them a color that looks like Excel.
You do this to all your folders, it could help out.
And this could especially help out
if you use colors in some of your other apps.
So if you were using Google Keep,
you could use some of the same colors.
Or maybe your labels in Gmail
could have matching colors as well.
Let's go back up to My Drive.
There are some files that I use all the time.
Frankly, I don't even know where they are
in the folder structure.
But at some point I've come into them.
I've right clicked, and I've said add to start.
You can do that for folders or files.
But if you go into starred,
these are the ones I access a lot.
And if I right click on them right now,
the only option is to remove from starred.
So I've added these to starred.
Fast access.
Would definitely suggest doing that with the ones
that you use a lot.
One more trick that you can do,
you can left click on a file to select it,
then you can do shift Z.
And you'll get this dialogue that comes up,
but if you select another folder to put this in,
let's just put it at the top of other and click add,
it makes a symbolic link to this file
and so you can get to it from two different folders.
So it's tellin' you there it's been added.
Let's go to other, we'll take a look at it.
Here's another look at that same file.
It's not a copy of the file,
the file is actually in two different folders.
And you can tell that if you go over to the right,
and you can see its location is in two different places.
So let's just click the X on other.
I don't prefer to organize it that way.
It's not that it's wrong, it's just that I don't like to.
So we'll undo that.
One last thing on how to organize files is of course,
how could you get anything done without
putting an emoji in a file name?
So I right clicked and did rename.
I had emoji on my clipboard, I paste it in there,
and there it is.
Pretty sure I'm gonna remove that one too.
But if you're an emoji person, have at it,
you can do that in the file names as well.
So I'm going to undo that.
But the option is there.
If you're tempted to make backup copies of your files,
I wouldn't suggest doing that unless you have to.
So this example, basic document, it has revisions.
So if I open this up,
and I wanna go back to a previous version,
all you have to do is go to file,
version history,
and you can see the version history.
And you go back this way,
so I don't need four copies of this file.
They're all saved within the one file.
I could even name them if I wanted to.
I could say fall train trip 2018, if that's when I did this.
It might strike a memory I need to go back to then.
But it automatically names them with timestamps.
So let's go back.
You don't need to make backup copies of your files
unless someone else wants to work on an older version.
Files again like we talked about with folders,
you can add a description down in the lower
right hand corner if you wanted to.
And all of this same information is being displayed,
the meta information for the file.
And if you left click on activity,
you can see what happened to it.
This would be more relevant
if you were working in a team environment.
So you wanted to see who's been using the file.
You're using Google Docs by yourself,
I basically never look at the activity tab.
All right now that we've talked about My Drive
and how to organize the files and the folders,
there are another, a couple of concepts
going on on the left hand side here,
before we dive into what you get with the business account.
There's computers.
So when I installed Google backup and sync,
it asked me if I wanted to back up my existing files
that were on my laptop.
Or if I expand this, this is my PC, right?
Kind of obvious.
But if you did this on multiple pieces of hardware,
it would have different names.
And these are the folders that I chose to sync.
So let's drill down into one of these.
We'll just look at my pictures,
and if you're syncing your PC
just for the purpose of backing it up,
just leave these here.
You don't have to do anything with them.
They're saved in a secure location,
and they're available here if you need them.
if you want them to be part of your workflow,
and Google Drive, what you can do is right click.
You could add to My Drive.
And when I go back to My Drive,
you'll see the folder here called Saved Pictures.
So it's still on my PC, I didn't move it,
I just added a link to it.
And when I drill down, this is what's on my computer.
So I'm going to go back up, I don't really want that there.
So I'm going to right click it and just click remove.
And when I go back to my PC, it will still be there.
So the section called shared with me are files and folders
that other Google Drive users
have given you permission to use.
So these are all kind of collaborations
that I've done with other people for different reasons,
but they are not included in My Drive.
This is similar to the computers, unless you right click
and choose move to My Drive.
That doesn't make a copy of the file either,
so it will still be owned by that other person.
You'll still just be a guest on that file.
And I would only suggest doing that
if you wanna put it into your workflow,
but it works just fine to leave them all here.
You can still find them when you search for them
so that's what I've chosen to do.
You can also rename these to fit into your naming convention
and that won't change the name for the other person.
So feel free to do that too if you want.
And then recent is somewhat self explanatory,
that can be used if you don't remember
what you're working on.
If you wanna find something you worked on yesterday,
you're not quite sure what it was called,
you can just left click on recent.
And the starred we went over.
Trash is kinda like the recycling bin on the computer
that you might be used to.
And then after a file has been in the trash for 30 days,
Google Drive automatically deletes it from your drive.
And that pretty much sums up what you can do to organize
your files with the personal version of Google Drive,
and next we'll take a look at the business version.
Okay so if you're using Google Drive as a business,
or if you're just trying to see what you would get
if you did use it as a business,
we're looking at a site here that compares
the different workspace additions.
So there's different tiers,
but I subscribed to the business standard.
And then I added another user
so you can see how we interact.
(indistinct)
Because when you scroll down,
you get this option here that says
shared drives for your team.
And we'll come back up to the top,
we'll look at Google Drive,
and I'll just show you what that means.
So we can just start from My Drive,
and above it and below it are some items
that come in here when you subscribe to Google Workspace.
Priority comes in at the first level,
and shared drives come in at the second level where I'm at.
We'll start at priority and if I left click here,
what's going on at the top is that it's using AI
to bring up the files that it thinks
is the most relevant to me.
So it's tax time I was working to figure out
how much my internet bill I could deduct.
Maybe I wanna come back to that, I don't know.
You may find priority useful.
And we'll just say, okay here to dismiss
that little description of it.
And we'll come down to the second thing
that's going on in priority.
And this is quite possibly a very useful option.
It's called workspaces.
And what's happening here is these are specific to you.
So if you're working in a team,
you're the only person that's going to see
this layer of organization.
And what you can do is you can create workspaces.
So you would just give it a name
and it would pop up down here.
I've already created two of them.
And this is a layer of organization
that has nothing to do with the folders.
So it doesn't move the files,
it's not like creating an additional folder.
It's just another way to organize them.
So let's say you use one particular set of files
when you're in a planning phase,
and one set of files when you're in a wrap up phase,
and these files could be in lots of different folders
depending on what you're working on.
So they're filed away somewhere else
in a way that makes sense in your folder structure,
but you also want to see them in different phases.
So if you wanna see these four files,
you wanna keep them where they are,
you just make a workspace.
Left click on this,
you can remove it from the workspace,
or you can add it to another workspace.
So you can have it in more than one place at a time.
I've already done this so this is grayed out.
It's already in planning and wrap up.
If you look article checklist is here and here.
You can expand it so you can just see the workspace.
You can add 25 files to it.
You can't add folders at this point,
so you just stick to files.
I'll left click on done.
You could have a lot of these and you could hide the ones
that you're not working on.
So you can hide workspace.
So let's say I was doing some planning and wrap up,
but I wasn't working on recording,
so I just hid that one away.
So that's a super useful feature.
And the other one that you get,
so this is the one that you get on the second level
of workspace, it's called shared drives.
What you do here is you add a drive to share
with a different set of people.
So if you look over at the right,
first shared drive is with two people.
And the other one is just with one.
So you would put all the files and project planning
that you're sharing with those two people.
And if you had a lot of other files
that you were only sharing with one person,
you would put it in here.
So the way these folders work is they give
all of the permissions to each file,
instead of you having to do it individually
if you're working in Drive.
So if you put a file into project planning,
it's automatically shared with those other two people.
And if any of those other two people add a file
you'll see it.
So if I right click on project planning,
you can see here, or you can add members,
or you can manage the members.
You can communicate with them through sharing an email,
or you can look at the settings.
So if I look at the settings on this drive,
you can control whether or not it goes outside
of your organization,
and you can control whether or not other people
can share the contents with members
that aren't members of that shared drive.
There's other access controls here as well.
We'll click done on that.
And then one left click on manage members.
This is another member that's at my organization,
and you can control that person's level of access.
So you can allow them everything,
so they can even manage settings.
You could allow them to access and edit the content,
and you can even make it so they can't delete files.
Maybe they could just come in and make comments
on the files, or just be able to look at them.
So lots of control on that.
We'll click done.
And then you can just go into this dialogue and add members.
And as you do them you can give them
the level of access that you want.
You can also send them a message
so they get an email, they know what's happening.
So picture someone else logging into Google Drive.
They're going to see the exact same shared drive.
I made another one here
just so you could see the difference.
This one just has one member.
And another thing that you can do is change the theme
if you want.
So it gives you a nice little gallery here.
Let's make this one seashells.
Click select, it changes that.
Let's go back up to My Drive
and act like we're trying to find something
and we have no idea where it is,
but we kinda know what it's about.
Let's use the search function.
And because it's Google,
there's a lot of functionality buried into the search
that you can use,
and you can find your files relatively easily.
One of the things that you can do is just tell it
what kind of file you're looking for ahead of time,
or even just a folder.
So you can narrow your search to just images.
And then it would look for all the JPEG,
and P&G, and GIF files.
So if I wanted to find a screenshot,
maybe I would click on images first.
So it already just pulls up all the images,
and then maybe I could type screenshot.
And it will limit it to images
that have the word screenshot in their name.
And it's smart enough, not all of these
even have the word screenshot,
but it's guessing that that's what they are.
We'll do some more tricks in search.
Take that out of there.
You can use operators in search just like you can in Google.
So if it has to have the word screen,
can't have the word shot, we'll say,
and has to have the exact words,
image,
blurb, and then nothing will come up here.
All of those operators will work.
And this is working.
So there's nothing with the word screen,
without the word shot,
and with this exact phrase.
So most of these advanced search functions
can also just be done by coming down
and left clicking on advanced search once you know.
And then you can limit what you're finding.
So you can limit it by type here.
By owner.
And by default drive is searching everywhere,
but you can just say, hey, just do the starred,
or just look in the trash.
And you can even search by if there's followup required.
So this will be when we talk about how to comment
in doc sheets, and slides, files,
this can search for files with action items in them.
If you're trying to find things
that you think you need to do.
So when we talked about having long descriptive file names,
that's really helpful for when you're searching,
because there's a higher likelihood of being able to find
the file because you just put in everything
that you think may have to do with it.
If those words are in the file name,
you're gonna find the file.
All right, next up is how to share your files
once you have them in Google Drive.
Check out this next video, I'll see you over there.