Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Beginner’s Guide to Microsoft OneDrive for Mac”.
This is the beginner’s guide to Microsoft, onedrive for Mac, and why should you even care about onedrive, especially as a Mac user? Well, one reason is that it gives you another way to store your documents and your files. So, as a Mac user, you do have iCloud and if you want to learn more about iCloud, please watch my video tutorial on iCloud it’ll. Give you everything you need to know to start using iCloud, and it’s really good. But the free storage that you get an iCloud is quite limited.
It’S 5 gigabytes, which is not bad at all, but if you run out of storage, you’re gon na either have to pay Apple for additional storage or find another additional weight to store your files. So many people end up using onedrive and iCloud and some end up using also Dropbox and I’m an example of that. I use all three of those products, and one of the reasons I like onedrive and also Dropbox and iCloud, is that they help me organize my files. You can see my desktop here is littered with documents and things like that, and some people like to store these right on the hard drive inside of folders and things like that and in theory I like to do that too, but somehow my desktop gets very cluttered. So one option for me is to store these documents in the cloud, especially if their documents that I want to be able to access on any computer in the world and even any device at all that has a web browser and I’ll be able to access those Files and folders and documents and I’ll be able to even edit them if I want to – and things like that.
Ok at this point, I’m ready to sign up and start using this, and you can see that there is an option to sign up for free. Another option is to buy office 365, but let’s take a look at the plans that are available. The good news is, we do have a free basic account that gives you the 5 gigabytes of storage. If that’s not enough for you, you can upgrade for a dollar ninety-nine a month and get 50 gigs, and it just goes up from there, and I would guess that many of you that are watching this video, you might already have an office 365 account that you’ve Purchased for yourself and your family, or you might have one through your business and if that’s the case, then there’s no additional cost you’ve already signed up for you just might not be using it.
So let’s fix that. Let’S learn how to use it. So I’m gon na click here on the free account I’ll click sign up, and here I need to put in an email address that will be associated with my onedrive account, and this is actually a Microsoft account we’re talking about here. So some of you already have this: if you have an Xbox account, if you had an old hotmail account – or let’s say you have an Outlook account, then you most likely have a Microsoft account. That’S already set up with onedrive, but if you don’t have any of those just put in an email address, then you’ll have to choose a password, and there are a few other questions that you might have to answer. In order to set up your account and then you can get started using onedrive, give me a minute to get signed into my account and then I’ll show you what to do from there all right. I’Ve signed into my account now when you set up your onedrive account for the very first time it might just take you directly into onedrive for me, because I had a pre-existing account and I signed into my Microsoft account. It took me here to my Microsoft account homepage, and it’s got all this information about the different services that I have access to to the different devices that are associated with my account, etc.
But if I’m just interested in onedrive, I can just go to onedrive comm and it opens up and because I’ve signed in it recognizes Who I am, and it takes me to my onedrive home page now. Just so you know, if you do use other Microsoft products online, you can get access to them quickly from onedrive using this app symbol here in the upper left. You can just click there and switch to Microsoft tasks. You can switch to Microsoft, calendar and there’s Word Excel and PowerPoint online, as well as OneNote, some really great tools, and, if you’re interested in learning about these, I already have some video tutorials.
You can watch to learn more about these. For example, I have a OneNote online tutorial and I have PowerPoint Excel in Word tutorials, but those are for the desktop app, not necessarily for the online Microsoft Office apps. If there’s interest, though, if you’d like me to make tutorials for these online versions of these products, just let me know in the comments below and I’d be happy to explore that idea. I also have a tutorial on sway and several other of these tools and you can get to them directly from onedrive by using this app symbol and then selecting a particular tool.
I’M gon na close out of that, though, and go back so here in my onedrive account. You can see that I already have some things. I have some folders one for pictures, one for documents and then I have some individual files here and I really probably should file these away and sometimes you can click and drag and then drop these files inside the folder that you want them to go to. You can see it worked there. It seems to work best when you click and drag on the actual name, and then you drop it on the actual name of the folder. That’S when it seems to work the best for me anyway.
Another way to move files and images is to click the checkmark and then choose move to, and then you can select where you want it to move. So that’s another way to file things properly and to put them where you want them to be now. What, if you want to create your own folders, all you have to do is right, click in a blank space and choose new folder and then give it a name. So I’ll call this English one. Let’S say I’m an English teacher and I want to create a folder and then store documents in it. I’Ve just set up a folder for that. I can even double click on it to get inside that folder and then create a new subfolder. I could call this chapter: one tap enter or click create and it creates that subfolder and I could continue to do this – creating folders and subfolders for me to store my documents online in the cloud and you’ll notice here that I have basically a breadcrumb trail. I think that’s the official name for it. It pretty much shows me how I got to where I am so here I am in English 1 and I got there through files.
If I want to jump back to files, I just click on it. It takes me back to files now, in addition to creating folders and subfolders. You can also right-click on a blank space and choose new Word document, Excel workbook, PowerPoint, presentation, etc, and it will create that document right here in onedrive. So, for example, if I click new word doc, it opens up the Microsoft online word program and then I can type out my doc and it saves it, and I can name it and it’s saving this constantly online and not just online, but specifically to this exact Folder you can see there, it is so that’s how you can create new documents and folders in your onedrive online storage. But what about documents that are already on your computer they’re, taking up space on your computer like here on my desktop, there’s way too much there? There’S a couple of ways I can get those documents into my online onedrive storage. One way is to just click and drag and drop those files onto my onedrive home page or I could do the same within a folder.
I could have opened this pictures folder and then dragged the picture of the waterfall in that would have made more sense and probably saved me another step. But now that that’s done, I can click back on the files in the breadcrumb trail and you can see. There’S the waterfall picture that I uploaded I can ex out of it to get back to my list of files. Now one thing to be aware of is that you can change the look and feel of your files by clicking here and changing it to a list view you can change it to a tiles view or a photos view whatever you prefer now.
In addition to clicking and dragging and dropping files into your onedrive space, you can also just use this upload button. So, for example, here in documents, I could double click to open documents. I could then click the upload and I can upload files or folders and I’ll just click files. It’S going to open up in this case to my desktop, because that’s where I’ve been working and let’s say I want to upload this video of nature scenes. I click open and it’s uploading that document so that’s another way to add documents into onedrive. So this is one way that people use onedrive.
They use it strictly in the cloud they upload their documents and to save storage on their computer hard drives. They then delete the documents off their computer hard drives that way. Once the files and documents are safely stored in their online onedrive, they don’t take up any space on their computer because the original is deleted off the computer.
Some people love using onedrive that way, but there is a downside to do that. If the files only exist in your online onedrive, let’s say you’re not connected to the internet, then you don’t have access to your files. You can’t download them again. You can’t open them because the internet is not available in that case and for that reason many people choose to install a desktop version of onedrive on their computers and that desktop app works to constantly sync all of your online onedrive files and folders to your computer. That way, you always have access to them.
You can always look at them. You can work on them and they sync when they’re connected to the internet, but if you’re not connected to the Internet, that’s ok! You can keep working anyway. The downside to doing this sync method is that onedrive doesn’t save you any storage space. In that case, the files end up existing both on your computer, taking up storage and in onedrive and in fact, on every computer that you choose to sync your onedrive to, and so there are some downsides and some positive aspects to it as well.
Let’S look at how to set up the onedrive app on a Mac computer. The way you do that is down here in the lower left corner. You click get the onedrive, apps and onedrive detected that I’m on a Mac computer and so it says, install onedrive for Mac.
I click download and it’s downloading a package from the internet that will help me to install onedrive on my computer. Ok, it’s finished downloading and I can now just click on it here. I’M using Google Chrome, and so it lists for me down here all of the Downloads.
If you use a different browser, it might not show up like that, but it probably downloaded into your downloads. Folder, so you could just go there to select, it click continue. It’S going to take up 140 megabytes of my computer. I could change the install location. In my opinion, the only reason to do this to change the default. Install location is if you have two hard drives. If you want to install this, maybe on the second hard drive, then click on that, but otherwise just click install and it will start installing one drive on your computer.
Alright, it’s done. I click close and it’s giving me a chance to just move the Installer to the trash. I am gon na do that because I don’t need it now so now what I’ve downloaded and installed onedrive now? What what do? I do? Well, it’s in my apps.
So if I go to my Applications, folder I can find onedrive. It looks like these two clouds, even easier than that is to just click on this magnifying glass and do a spotlight search for onedrive and I’ll. Just tap enter on the keyboard and it opens up onedrive on Mac computers. The onedrive app appears here at the top of the screen right here.
Okay, it looks like onedrive is officially installed, and I just need to now sign into my account and for you, even if you’ve just now signed up for the online onedrive account like. I just showed you how to do even if it’s brand-new for you, you can now sign into that new account and it should start syncing to your computer. So give me a minute to sign into my onedrive account and I’ll resume the video all right.
I’Ve signed into my account – and it’s gon na – tell me a little bit about this new app that I’ve now installed on my computer. One of the nice features that I get here is I can choose to sync the entire onedrive to this computer, or I can just sync specific folders in this case I’m gon na sync everything, but that is a nice feature to be able to pick and choose What gets synced to my computer if you’re concerned about taking up too much storage on your computer, you might want to uncheck some of these, but I’ll just leave them. Checked click Next and open my onedrive folder all right! I’M gon na go ahead and close this folder. Actually at this point, I just want you to see up here at the top.
The onedrive symbol has changed. The icon now is now black and not grey, and that’s because it’s connected it’s syncing to the Internet, and you can see that quickly. All of these documents have been synced to my account.
All of these documents that are here in the online onedrive storage are now also on my computer to actually see that folder, where these are stored at any time. I can just click that symbol go down to open folder and it shows me my onedrive folder and now, if I want to add anything into onedrive it as easy as opening this folder selecting files, images folders whatever it might be and dragging them into this folder And just dropping them in there, you can also double click to open a folder or a subfolder and then drop the file into your onedrive, and so that way, you’re kind of organizing things. The way you really want them to be now just to demonstrate that this is syncing from my computer to my online storage in onedrive. Let’S say I delete this document called list of suppliers and I delete it here in my onedrive on my computer, the onedrive folder that is set up and synced through this symbol here. I believe that that’s here in documents there it is, I select it and I delete it and let’s see if that syncs and you’ll notice after a couple of seconds, it did sync, it took that document out of my online storage. So that really is what you need to know to get started using Microsoft, onedrive for Mac, if you’re interested in learning more about onedrive for Mac. Just tell me that, in the description below by leaving a comment and I’ll consider making more onedrive for Mac tutorials in the meantime, though, thanks for watching, I hope you found this tutorial to be helpful. If you did, please click the like button below and consider connecting with me on my social media accounts like Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter, and definitely do subscribe to my youtube channel for more videos about technology for teachers and students and when you do subscribe. Please click the bell next to the subscribe button that way you’ll be notified whenever I post another video and watch for another video from me at least every Monday. If you’d like to support my youtube channel, consider becoming a supporter of mine through my patreon account and you’ll see a link to that in the description below .