Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Advanced Google Drive : Tips Tricks and Tools”.
This tutorial is going to focus on some of the more advanced and, in some cases, a little bit obscure features and things that you can do with Google Drive. I have a couple of other Google Drive tutorials the beginner’s guide to using Google Drive for Windows and then also one for Mac, and I would encourage you to watch those videos and see what you can learn from them. But in this tutorial we’re going to take a look at some different things that may be a little bit more advanced. So give me just a couple seconds to sign into my account and we’ll get started now that I’m signed into my Google account. I’M just going to go up here to the Google Apps symbol, click and go down to drive to open up Google Drive and the first thing I’d like to show you is in Google Docs.
So I’m going to click here in the upper left corner where it says new and I’ll choose Google Docs and it brings up a blank Google Doc, and this is meant to look somewhat like word, although not quite as powerful. So now that I’m in this document, I want you to see that you can add on some amazing tools into your Google Docs account up here at the top of the screen where it says add-ons. If you click on that, you can click get add-ons, and this accesses a whole bunch of tools that were created for the most part by people other than Google and organizations other than Google. So it’s it’s a way to integrate.
Other tools into your Google Drive I’ll share some of the best ones, at least some of my favorites with you. So here’s one EasyBib and you just put your mouse on it and then choose add free and that installs it it’s kind of like an app. That is installed into your Google Drive account and specifically, Google Docs is going to be using that, and so now, let’s say, as I’m typing up a paper or working on a document of any kind, I can click on, add ons and there it says EasyBib, bibliography Creator and I can go to manage bibliography. Basically, I have added additional functionality to my Google Docs account and it’s always going to be there here in add-ons and so using this EasyBib option.
I can search for a title, find it click select and it adds automatically through this button here, a reference to my bibliography and I can choose what kind of bibliography style to use and I’ll click Add bibliography to Doc. So this is wonderful for college students for high school students as a way to easily create a bibliography. Now, that’s just one example.
If you click on add-ons get add-ons you’ll see that there’s so much more that you can access. One of my favorites is called lucidchart, but I can’t see it here for some reason, but if I go up to the top, where it says search add-ons, I can type in lucid and there it brings up lucid chart diagrams a free tool. I click free.
It wants to link it to my lucid chart account and if I accept it makes it so that I can add, lucid chart diagrams like Venn diagrams, cause-and-effect charts and things like that or organization charts, mind maps, those kinds of things I can add them easily into My Google Docs now I do need to sign up for the account, so I’d have to click get started and it takes you to this page and then to lucid chart, and you would have to sign up for that account. But it is a free account once you’ve done that you can see right from inside. Of my Google Doc I can click create to create a diagram, and it lets me choose from the options that are available. Let’S say a Venn diagram. I would work on that at lucid charts website and then eventually I could very easily just select it and click insert to put it into my document. So that’s, in my opinion, one of the best of the add-ons a couple others that I would recommend include this.
One google translate, and it makes it very, very easy to translate a document for other languages and you can just accept that. Go up to add-ons translate start choose the language, select the text that you would like to translate and then click translate. Now it looks like I should have picked English to Japanese instead of French, too Eponine, but the results look similar so anyway. That’S how you use Google Translate add-on to more that I’d like to recommend, but there’s so many that we could talk about our thesaurus.
So if I go to get add-ons and search for thesaurus, there’s a thesaurus app that is free and then finally URL shortener. If you do a search for that, it should find this URL shortener utility that you can add and once you accept it will make it. So that, if you put in a link and it’s a long hyperlink you’ll be able to very easily go up and choose URL shortener and shorten the selected URL, so you won’t have to jump out to goo GL or to or to any other website that shortens Urls, I’m going to close out of that now and this time I’d like to jump into a Google slide presentation, Google slides, so it’s very similar to PowerPoint. After picking a theme, I would like to insert an image now that I’ve got an image in there.
What I wanted to point out, that’s a little bit more advanced, is that inside of Google slides, you can click on an image that you have inserted and there are some options that you can use to edit the image right there in Google. So I can go up here to crop and I could very easily crop this image so that it’s smaller in addition to crop you can see that there’s also some other things that you can do if you right click on the image, there’s an image options, button And you can click on that and you’ll be able to recolor the image if you’d like you can set the transparency adjustments, you can set brightness and contrast, and so we could really ruin this logo if we wanted to. But of course we don’t so I’m going to delete that out, while I’m in this Google slideshow. I do want to point out that the add-ons are not available like they are in Google Docs, okay, so in Google slides I don’t see an add-ons option. If I go back, though, and create a new sheet, you will see that Google sheets does have an add-ons button and you can click to see what can be added into Google sheets. So the last advanced Google Drive tip that I’d like to share with you is how to put the things that you create in Google Drive onto your own website, for example a Weebly website, and this is just one example of many. If you’d like to learn more about Weebly, I do have another tutorial on Weebly and how it works, but this is basically a website creator and there are many others similar to it that are out there.
Although this is one of my favorites and I would really like to put my end of your survey on that Weebly site, I’d like to put my presentation from Google slides a Google sheet and a Google Doc, I’d like to put them all right on my Weebly Page so that when people visit they can see it right there, they don’t have to click a link or anything. It just is visible right from the beginning. Let’S look at how to do that. First, let’s look at the Google Form here on my Google Form. I can simply go up to the upper right where it says send form and I can click and notice.
In addition, two options for sharing through a link or through Facebook there’s a button to embed click that and then click to highlight the HTML embed code and then just copy it ctrl C or command C on a Mac or you can right-click, of course, to copy Click done and then over on Weebly. I can simply go into my website editor and click and drag the embed code widget onto the screen, click to set custom, HTML and then paste in that code once you’ve done that just click outside the box and it should make it happen. It should make effective the code that you just put in and you can see there is my Google Form right there on my Weebly website. Now, let’s try it with a Google slides presentation here on Google slides.
If you click share, you’re not going to find that embed option, even if you click get shareable link, even if you click advanced, I don’t see embed anywhere listed there. So how do i embed this on my Weebly site? The trick? Is you go up here to file and choose publish to the web, and you can see that you can get link, but there’s also an option to embed notice that you have choices for how big the slideshow should be and how to auto advance the slides once You’Ve looked through those options, just click publish, ok and it does give you an embed code copy that embed code go to Weebly or a similar website, and I just click and drag to put in the embed code. Widget again, click to set custom HTML. I paste in the code click outside the box and now there is my Google slides presentation: let’s try it with Google sheets.
This is similar to Google presentations. You just click file, publish to the web embed, you decide if it’s the entire document you want to share, or just one of the sheets, I’m going to go with entire document. Click, publish, ok, there’s the code copy, it drag an embed code widget onto the screen, and this is going to get a little repetitive, but I just want you to see how easy this is using. Google Drive, along with Weebly, to publish the things that you create.
The last example is my Google Doc this bibliography that I started earlier again I’ll go to file publish to the web. Embed click, publish ok copy the code back in Weebly, put the embed code widget onto the screen, go down; click to set custom, HTML paste and then click outside the box to make it effective. Now these last two, the sheet and the doc look kind of small, but they are at least embedded. Let’S look at the finished product now that I’ve got everything embedded, I’m just going to go up to the top, and this is specific to Weebly but other website.
Builders are similar and I’m just going to click, publish and then I can click this link to see my public website and what the embedded items look like. I can drag down the page, there’s my survey and notice that it works just right there from the website. You don’t have to click a you can just fill out the form right here.
Click continue and you know, go through that process. Here is the presentation that you can click play to start the presentation, and then there is my end of your survey and my document now. I do regret that these last two are showing up as very small embedded items.
I wish that they were wider. I wish that I could see the whole document, but at least they’re embedded, so these are just a few of the advanced tips and tricks and features in Google Drive. I hope you’ll check it out and it should work similarly, whether you’re on a Windows, computer or a Mac. These are web-based options that I’ve been showing, so it shouldn’t really matter if you’re on Windows or Mac. Thanks for watching – and I hope, you’ll check out my other videos and please subscribe to the YouTube channel technology for teachers and students – .