Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Beginner’s Guide to Google Drive for Mac Tutorial”.
This video is going to focus on Google Drive and how you can use it to accomplish three things number one to backup your file, so that if you lose your computer or your computer, hard drive crashes or whatever you have. Your file still number two. As a way to create in the cloud and number three as a way to share and collaborate, the documents and things that you create and then as a bonus, I’m also going to talk about how you can use. Google Drive to kind of organize your files and synchronize them for you a little bit. So, let’s start here on the Google home page, if you don’t have a Google account, this is the place to go to get one, and many of you probably already do have a Google account, maybe you’ve signed up for a YouTube account or a gmail account or A Google Calendar account if you have any kind of Google service, that you have an account for you’ve already got an account that you can use with Google Drive, but assuming that you have no Google account at all.
What you can do is just go to google.com click, the Sign In button in the upper right corner and when you do that, it’s going to take you to a screen that looks like this, and it says one account all of Google sign in with your Google Account so if you do have a gmail account or a Google Calendar or whatever go ahead and sign in using that email and password that you’ve used with those other Google services. If you don’t already have a Google account, you’ll click create an account to get started and you’ll see that there’s just a few questions for you to answer and then you can click Next steps to go through the rest of the process of signing up for a Google account once you’re all set with a Google account you’ll just go ahead and sign in now that I’m signed into Google notice that it recognizes me up here. You probably can’t see it, but there’s a picture of me there and it says my name now to access Google Drive anytime, I’m on a Google product. I can just look for this symbol here.
This is the Google Apps symbol and I can click on that and there’s Google Drive so I’m going to click on Drive and it loads up. My Google Drive account with a list of documents that I’ve created in the past, including presentations spreadsheets, Word, docs pictures other things that I may have uploaded to my Google Drive or created there. Now I mentioned the three reasons to use Google Drive. The first reason is that it’s a great way to backup your documents, and you can just do that right here on the Google Drive website. Just by clicking this button here you can upload individual files or folders into your account and then you’ll be able to access them. Wherever you are, you could log into Google and get those documents and put them on your computer. Download them change them whatever you need to do so, that’s a good way to do it I’ll show you a easier way to backup your files a little bit later. The second reason to use Google Drive is that you can use it to create things notice that if you click here on create, there’s lots of different documents that you can create a word style document, a PowerPoint type presentation, a spreadsheet that is similar to Excel. You can also create Google Forms, and I have another presentation that you can watch on Google Forms and and how to do those and why they’re useful you can make drawings online and then also I’ve added in a lucid chart, diagram app and you can use this To create lucid, chart diagrams right from Google Drive, you can also connect more apps and you can see, there’s there’s a whole bunch of different apps and things that you can add to your Google account to create things directly from your Google account. So that’s kind of nice.
Now in this article I’m not going to show you step-by-step how to create each of these kinds of documents. Much of this is self-explanatory. I do have some other tutorial videos on individual products here, but I’m just going to go to presentation as an example of what you can create in Google Drive and after clicking their own presentation notice. It brings up a list of different themes that I can choose and I can just pick one of these and it loads it up and applies it to the presentation, and you can tell here they’re very much trying to copy the look and feel of PowerPoint, especially The old PowerPoint, the 2003 style PowerPoint we’ve got menus across the top. This should feel pretty familiar to people that have used PowerPoint a lot. You can right click to create a new slide.
You can also use this plus sign to create a new slide and they’ve got different kinds of slides. You can add notice that you can insert text boxes, images, hyperlinks and videos as well as WordArt line shapes all these different things that you can add into your presentation on Google Drive. Let’S look at video real quick. If you click on insert video, it lets, you search YouTube for a YouTube video and you can then very easily select the video that you want to be added to your Google presentation, and so that’s one of the real nice benefits of using Google Drive.
It’S a cloud-based tool for creating on the web and it makes it really easy to pull in YouTube videos or other online videos. Now, if your video is an on YouTube notice, you can insert video – and you can add it by putting in the URL of the video here and trying to pull the video in that way as well now, early on with Google presentations, they didn’t have the ability To do animations, but now, if you select text, you can go up to insert animation and you can apply an animation to the text so that it’ll fade in or zoom in or fly in when it’s clicked or when the screen is clicked or you can have It appear after a previous animation or with a previous animation. So I like that that you now have some ability to do some animating of text. Let’S take a second to look at inserting pictures I’ll click here on, insert and image and notice that it lets you search. The life magazine photo archives, so there’s some really good photos in there.
Some historical photos and some other high quality photos. You can also search Google and notice that it’s searching for results labeled for commercial reuse with modification, so that’s a really good option and there’s also some stock photos that you can search through. So this is nice.
Now, if you select one of these images and choose select or double click on it, it will add it to your presentation and then notice what else you can do once the picture is in your slide. You can go in and insert an animation for a picture as well just like with text. So these are some good things that Google has recently added within the last couple years to the Google Drive when you’re finished building your presentation, you can click here present and you can present your Google presentation directly from Google Drive, so you don’t even have to have Any software installed on the computer on which you’re presenting, so that was just a really quick intro to Google presentations if you’re not used to using Google or Google Drive at all. I just wanted you to see the beginnings of how to use one of these.
Google Drive tools now, there’s a lot of other things that I could show here. You can title your presentation by clicking you can star it, you can put it into certain folders, there’s a whole bunch of other tools, but let’s move on, I want to go back to my Google Drive. So I’m going to click here and notice that there’s my presentation that I just started working on. It automatically saves as you go, and let me just tell you that you really should look into each of these items that you can create.
I’M not going to take the time now, but there’s lots of good stuff that you can do with all of these different types of documents in Google Drive. Okay. So so far, we’ve talked about how you can use Google Drive as a way to backup your files by uploading them and also how to use it as a way to create documents and other files, and things like that using this create button. But let’s talk now about the third reason to use Google Drive, and that is it’s a great way to share and collaborate with other people.
Now, there’s a couple of ways that you can do this: you can do it from within the document itself, if you’re currently working on a document or have it activated, you can go in and click this share button in the upper right corner and it’s going to Make me name this first and then it gives me a link here that I can copy and paste and post on a website put it in an email, and they also have some easy ways to share it. You can just share it right through Gmail. You can put it on Google Plus all these other different things: Facebook, Twitter, but notice that by default, this video is private. Now I could change that.
If I wanted to, I could click Change and I can make it public on the web. Anyone could stumble upon this presentation, at least in theory, and find it and watch it and access it or I could go here and anyone with the link could access it so that it makes it a little bit more private. But I could post the link on my website and anyone that clicks that link would be able to see the presentation or I could just share it with specific people. If that’s what you choose, you click Save and notice that you’ll be able to invite specific people down here at the bottom, and you can do this with really any of the options that you choose above you can add specific people to be able to do specific Things so I could put in someone’s email address here and I could choose, can edit or I could make it so they can only comment. They can’t make changes, but they can add comments. I can make it so they can simply view now once you’ve done, that if you’ve invited people to help you edit this document or presentation once you’ve done, that you can simultaneously work on a document or presentation or spreadsheet, with somebody else and even a drawing as Well, and so it’s kind of fun you can have multiple people working on the same document, either real-time or not, real-time, it doesn’t matter so.
Google Drive is fantastic for sharing and collaborating on documents, and just so you know you can do the same thing with Google Spreadsheets and Google Documents, as well as these Google presentations. So that’s one place that you can share and collaborate I’m going to go back to the Google Drive and one thing that does bug me a little bit about Google Drive is every time you do that it does open up a new tab. So you do end up with lots of different tabs, and so you can just go and click back on a tab you’ve used before, if you prefer, but anyway. Another way that you can share documents is just right here from your list of documents that you’ve created in the past. You can select one of those documents and you get a bunch of tools that appear across the top that weren’t there before one of the tools is a share tool and it brings up those same options that I saw inside the document itself. There’S a button here for moving it to a folder.
I can remove it completely or delete it and you can preview it and you can see there’s a lot of other options as well. One of the more important ones that you should know about is the ability to download a copy of the document to your computer and also to make a copy. I do this quite often I’ll make a document I’ll make. It really well really good and then I’ll make a copy of it and then modify the copy so that, if I want to make two presentations that are very similar to documents that are very similar but are different, that’s a way to do it. Now, if you do download a document, you can just click and you can choose the specific kind of file that you want to download, and this will create a real PowerPoint presentation on your computer, a dot pptx. That PowerPoint would recognize as a native PowerPoint presentation, and I can just click download to download that presentation to my computer.
Okay, so you know for years. That’S how I used Google Drive, I simply went to google.com I logged in to my Google Drive. I uploaded. I downloaded I created documents, I shared the with others and collaborated with others, but there’s something more. You can do with Google Drive, and that is you can install it on your computer so that it’s always kind of working for you on your computer and helping you to synchronize files from your computer to the cloud and to all of your other devices that have Google Drive installed or set up so the way you do that is by looking here at the left, where it says, install drive for your computer and usually this is where you’ll see this button. Although, to be honest with you, I have seen other people using their own Google accounts and they don’t have that installed drive for your computer in the same location where I have it so just know that this is usually where I see it, but it’s possible, but It might be somewhere else in your account, but you would need to find that install drive for your computer and then click it, and you can see I’m on a Mac and so it says, install drive for Mac. It downloads it to my computer, and this is downloading an installer file once it’s done. I can just open that up now, I’m in Google Chrome, so I can just simply click this and it loads. You may need to go to your finder and look for this Downloads folder to find it, but anyway, once you do locate it you’ll see something like this and you can just click and drag to drop. Google Drive into your Applications folder and that will install Google Drive onto your your hard drive onto your computer, and now all I have to do is activate it so to activate it. You know I could just do a spotlight search for it and then open it up, but I know where it is it’s in my application, so I’m going to click there on the applications. There’S my Google Drive and I can click to activate it. It says Google drives from the Internet. Are you sure you want to open it? This is just your Mac being paranoid and trying to warn you about a potential virus or whatever. There is no virus associated with this, I’m going to click open and notice. What it does it puts. The Google Drive symbol here at the top of my Mac. So let’s take a look at it. I can click and notice that it says sync complete. It has now synchronized all of those documents, files and folders and drawings, and whatever that’s on my Google Drive and it’s downloaded them to my computer and I can access those very easily now just by clicking here and clicking open, Google Drive folder, they all appear and What this means is notice that I have Google Drive added to my favorites now and so now anything that I click and drag and drop into that Google Drive will automatically be uploaded to the cloud in my Google Drive account online and that’s really nice.
It’S a way to very easily back up my files. I can also save directly to this Google Drive, let’s say from PowerPoint on my computer or from keynote or whatever I’m using. I could save directly to my Google Drive and it’ll upload it to my Google Drive in the cloud. So hopefully that helps you get started using Google Drive.
I, like Google Drive quite a bit. I’Ve used it for many years. There’S things about it that I absolutely love and there’s some other things about it. That concern me a little bit if you’re, not certain that you want to use Google Drive, but you want to do something similar to it.
I do have videos on two other services that are really excellent for cloud computing and cloud storage. One is Dropbox com that one is mostly for organizing your files, synchronizing them storing them in the cloud backing them up. It’S not so much for creating documents online and then Microsoft has a product called onedrive and onedrive does pretty much everything that Google Drive. Does you can use it to backup your files? You can use it to share and collaborate online and you can also use it to create and what you create there is.
They have a PowerPoint online tool, a Microsoft Word online tool and a excel online tool, and so many people prefer Microsoft. Onedrive to Google Drive because of that, and because of some privacy issues that they may have with Google, but I really enjoy all three of these products and I use them all if you’re interested. I hope you’ll check out the videos that I’ve made for those other services and please subscribe to my youtube channel to get all my videos on technology in the classroom. .