Steve Dotto here.
You know sometimes I wonder how ever we got along without Dropbox.
I mean I know we did get along without Dropbox.
I know I did manage to share large files and do projects but good heavens, it must have
been difficult.
I think I have just kind of blocked it out of my mind.
Now I want to show you today three essential ways of sharing files on Dropbox because I
think people get a little bit confused with some of the different ways that you can use
Dropbox to share files.
For those of you who haven’t yet engaged with Dropbox, we have a video that gives you
an overview of how Dropbox works but essentially, it is a Cloud-based storage system which you
start with a small amount of free storage, which is quite a large amount of free storage.
You can add to that storage by getting your friends to sign up or you can just pay a small
monthly fee and then you can get a lot of storage.
What can you do with that storage?
Well, you can back up your files.
You can store documents and make sure that you can access then on all of your different
devices.
That’s the key to Dropbox is the fact that we can access it from anywhere.
So any of the documents and files that we put on Dropbox, we can access from our computer,
from our notebook, from our desk–our work computer.
We can do all of that through the web, through the web interface but we could also access
those files with our mobility devices, with our Android or iPhones or our tablets.
We can also share files back and forth.
So I’m going to show you how the sharing work, because I think that’s one of the
really most important and compelling aspect within Dropbox.
So I’ve got Dropbox open here in the web browser.
So this is how you will access it over the internet and we also have it installed as
an application on our desktop computer and that’s what this little icon here is.
This is my Dropbox folder.
Now I should tell you all of my Dropbox files are stored locally on a hard drive and so
there’s kind of one base area where all of your files are and then that folder, where
you have all of your Dropbox files, is then uploaded to the internet.
So if I open my Dropbox folder, I’m actually now in my own finder or in my own file manager
on my computer, browsing through my own document and here are where all of my Dropbox files
live.
Now as well as accessing all of my files myself on Dropbox, I can use the fact that all of
my files are stores in the Cloud and I could share those files with others and this overcomes
one of the huge limitations of attachments on email which is large file size.
So it allows me to basically upload any of my documents and then share them with others.
Now there’s three different ways of sharing files within Dropbox and if I go here in my
public folder, the public folder is where you’re going to put most of the files that
you like to share an awful lot or any stock documents that you might want to be able to
give people access to on an ongoing basis, maybe a pricelist, that sort of stuff.
In you public folder, if you right click on any of the different documents within it and
let’s say that I’ve got this little poster that we’ve got for an upcoming theater event,
there you find a little Dropbox menu that goes ‘Copy public link.’
This allows us to then take this Dropbox message, I copy the public link, and that’s now in
my clipboard.
So if I create a new email—let me just create a quick little email for you.
I’ll just go ‘New email’ here, and there it is—if I now paste within that email,
that is the link to that document.
So anybody who I send this email to, they simply click on this link and that document
will download to their computer.
It’s almost identical to doing attachments except the document is loaded, is stored on
the Cloud as opposed to my computer and we don’t use up all of that extra little bit
of bandwidth sending a whole attachment through.
So if it’s a large file, if it’s a graphic for instance, when you send it to somebody
this way, they don’t have to wait for their email to download it.
They can choose the time and the place that they want to actually download that file and
then download it.
And it also overcomes size limitations.
Quite often your email software will only send certain-sized attachments.
It overcomes that.
Now that is the way that we share files within our public folder but often, we don’t want
to move files back and forth.
They’re in project folders.
For example, I’ve got my presentations here and I give a lot of talks all around and so
I’ve given a talk to the bank for a real estate associations.
I want to share my keynote presentation or a PDF document with them.
So how do I do that?
Well, I can also do the exact same thing.
I could go to Dropbox and I can share the link with them here and this will create a
link that they can then download into their computer.
But in this case here, I actually want to share both documents with them.
I want to share a folder.
So this is where sharing a link becomes that much more valuable because if I share this
link here, you see at the folder level rather than at the document level, I can share the
whole folder with the people I want to send it to so they can then download that document
themselves.
Now in this case, instead of just copying that link to my clipboard, it actually opened
up the web browser and allows me to send email directly from my web application here to share
this link with others, and I can also copy this link to this page so that I could put
it into my own email and use my own email client if I choose.
Now if you were really paying attention, you’d notice something pretty interesting when I
went ‘Share this link.’
Let’s go back to this exact same place, ‘Share the link.’
There’s also ‘Share this folder’ and I know you’re thinking what’s the difference
between sharing the links, Steve, and sharing the folder?
Excellent question.
Sharing the link means they can download the files that are in the link.
It’s perfect if you give a talk and want people to download the presentations and that’s
basically it.
Anything you want to share one way.
Sharing the folder means that you can have two-way communication.
So that that folder now becomes part of their Dropbox mix as well and they can upload files
to the folder and they can make changes to the folder.
And I’ll give you an example of where that works really well.
I do a weekly radio show and here’s where I keep all of my radio files.
With this, I quite often record those interviews here in my home office and then I upload the
audio from those interviews into this folder.
My producer then takes those files, edits them, and packages then into the show and
then when my show is complete, and see can right here, he then re-uploads completed shows
so that I have access to the final file as well.
So when you are in a collaborative world, that’s when you want to share a folder.
Now you basically got the three ways: you’ve got the sharing a simple link of a simple
graphic or of a simple document that you just want to share; then you’ve got the sharing
the link where you share the a whole folder and allow people to download all of the contents
to a folder; and then you have the actual sharing of a folder where people can then
make changes to the folder.
Now this doesn’t just work, as I have mentioned, this isn’t just on your desktop.
No, it also works on your mobility devices and so I’ve got my iPad here.
Let me pop open my Dropbox application here within the iPad and if I go there–let’s
go back to my Dropbox folder.
There it is.
–There’s my Dropbox folder and as you can see it’s the exact same as it is on
my desktop.
If I want now to be able to share or be able to access any of the files here, I can do
it through this app.
Now for the iPad users, especially, Dropbox is very important because in the early days
still, it’s very difficult to load files and documents onto the iPad.
They’ve kind of closed down the system quite a bit.
So Dropbox was a way for us to get documents into the iPad that we could work with ourselves.
But the other thing about the iPad is it’s different because it is difficult to download
documents to, it’s also difficult to add attachments if you want to have documents
that you want to send back and forth by email and that’s when the real limitations of
iOS and the iPad.
Dropbox provides us with a great work around if you stop and think about it for a second.
If you have those common files like, pricelists and things like that, you put them in your
shared Dropbox folder.
Then when you want to actually share them with somebody, when you want to send them
as an attachment, here’s what you do.
I’m going to go to my public folder and I got to imagine that this is the document
that I want to share so I want to send this as an attachment.
Now what I do is I just go into the management tool here, the sharing tool and I can choose
to add this to an email, a text message, a Facebook message, post it to Facebook, tweet
it, or copy it to my clip board.
So this here will actually launch my email software and it will put the link in so that
people can download it.
It’s exact same as if I did it by copying the link on my computer, embedding it in the
email but now it’s done on my iPad, which is often a closed system.
Did you notice all those other options?
I could take that same link and I could tweet it.
I could post it on Twitter so people could download the document from Twitter or from
Facebook.
It gives us, within the Dropbox app, lots of different flexibility as far as sharing
documents.
As I’ve said before, I can’t remember what it was like before Dropbox as far as
sharing files.
It must have been dark and dreadfully dreary days for all of us who like to share files
on the internet.
I hope that you found this video useful.
We have lots of other videos at our site.
Please give us a like.
Give us some kudos if you think it’s valuable.
I’m Steve Dotto.
Thanks for spending time with me today.
[END OF AUDIO] Steve Dotto0Three Essential Dropbox Tips0October
21, 2012