Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Beginner’s Guide to OneDrive for Windows – UPDATED Tutorial”.
This is the beginner’s guide to Microsoft, onedrive for Windows and what is onedrive. It is your place in the cloud in which you can save your documents, your pictures, really whatever it is that you want to have access to wherever you go, you put it in onedrive and you’ll be able to access it. So, for example, if I look at my desktop, I can see that I’ve got several images that I’ve been working with. Maybe I’m using them to create something, and I have several documents here as well and first of all, they’re kind of cluttering up my desktop and secondly, when I’m on another computer or if I’m just on my cell phone or on an iPad. I would love to be able to access these and at least read them and look at them, but it would also be nice to be able to edit them and work on them, but the problem is they’re stuck here on this computer.
So that’s one of the things that onedrive does is it helps us solve that problem? I can take these documents. These images put them in onedrive access them. Wherever I am on whatever device I have and then I’m using whether it’s my device or a public device, it doesn’t really matter I’ll, be able to sign into my onedrive account and get those documents, and the website where you can go to learn more about onedrive Is right here, onedrive live.com and I’m just going to browse down the page a little bit. It talks about some of the good features and the reasons why you might want to use Microsoft onedrive, and this is what I already talked about – access files from any device.
You also have offline access, so if onedrive has synced your documents and folders etc with a particular device, you can access them, even if you’re not connected to the Internet. So that’s a nice feature and this is an underrated feature. It helps keep your files safe. I know way too many people that have had all of their most important documents on a particular device and then it breaks the hard drive goes bad or maybe it’s stolen and all of those files.
All of those documents that are so important are gone. So that’s another nice feature of onedrive. It helps solve that problem and the last main reason to consider using Microsoft. Onedrive is this that it does make it pretty easy to share and collaborate with colleagues with friends and family. So, if you’re interested in signing up for onedrive and getting that storage space in the cloud to help, you sync and coordinate your documents and share them. Like I said before, this is where you go: onedrive live.com and there’s a nice button there saying by office 365 and that’s not a bad option at all. You can also sign up for free, but let’s take a quick look at the plans that are available. The good news is, there is a free basic plan that gives you 5 gigabytes of storage for free.
If that’s not enough storage for you, you can upgrade to a dollar ninety-nine a month and get 50 gigabytes and for office 365 users. It goes way up from there. The cost goes up, but also the storage goes dramatically higher. Now, a lot of you watching this video probably have an office 365 account either that you’ve signed up for yourself or through your school.
If you’re a student or a teacher or maybe a business, has purchased office 365 for you to use. So in those cases you may have a business account. You may have a personal account, and some of you may never have used this before, and yet you have this amazing resource available to you. But for the sake of this video, I’m gon na assume that you’re brand new to onedrive no one’s buying it for you and that you want to start with a free account, so I’ll click signup. It takes me here where I need to put in an email address and then I’ll need to put in a password, and then there may be additional questions for you to answer to set up your account. Give me a minute to sign up for or sign in to my account and then I’ll resume the video.
Ok. When you first set up your account, you might be taken right in to Microsoft, onedrive or like me. It may take you here to your Microsoft account this Microsoft account is showing me all of the great features that Microsoft has available for me through my account, and I can look through this and use it for sure, but if I’m mostly interested in onedrive all I Have to do is go to the address bar and type in onedrive com or onedrive dot live.com either way, and it takes me in to my actual onedrive account, and here you can see that I’ve set up a couple of folders to set up a new folder. All you have to do is right, click and choose new folder and give it a title. I’Ll call this Spanish one and if I wanted to, I could double click to get inside that folder and then I could right click in the blank space and create a subfolder.
Let’S say I’m a Spanish teacher. I could put in materials for chapter one right: click set up another folder for materials for chapter two, and I could just continue to add folders and subfolders to my heart’s content. You can also click and drag folders to drop them inside each other. If that makes sense in this case, I think it does make some sense so I’ll click here on Spanish one and drag it and drop it inside documents.
You can also right-click to create a new word document, Excel workbook, PowerPoint presentation. You can see that there’s. Also one note you can do an Excel survey or a plain text document, and you can do this all in the cloud which is pretty amazing without actually having purchased Microsoft Office.
You can create these documents in the cloud using your onedrive account if you’re interested in doing some of these, I have other video tutorials that cover many of these features, for example the OneNote notebook in the cloud I have a tutorial for that. I have a tutorial for Excel surveys and I have PowerPoint Excel and word tutorials, but those are for the desktop apps, not necessarily for office online cloud apps. If you’re interested in me creating some Microsoft Office online tutorials for these versions of Excel PowerPoint and Word leave a comment for me below this video and I will definitely look at creating tutorials for these online versions of Word Excel and PowerPoint.
Just as a quick example, I’m gon na click here on Word document and you can see it loads up word online. It’S not exactly the same as the desktop app, but I can certainly type in it, and I can compose a real word document here in the cloud that I can then click file save as and I can download a copy of this as a real Word document To my computer, I’m going to X out of that document, but I do want you to see that that right within onedrive you can create new documents. Now you can also upload you can upload documents that are on your computer and upload them into your onedrive account.
I can upload a whole folder of documents or I can upload individual files, so I’ll click on files in this case – and it opens up this window that I can use to select a particular document. Maybe this excel spreadsheet and if I wanted to, I could also select more than one document. It doesn’t have to be one at a time, but in this case I guess I would really just like this image and this Excel spreadsheet. So I’ll click open – and it’s uploading – these two documents, these two items into my account, they’re done there they are, and now I can sign into any computer in the world.
I can sign in on my iPad on my tablet, my smartphone, whatever it might be sign in and I’ll be able to click to open the spreadsheet and look at it same with this Word document and this image. So that’s a great way to use onedrive and you can also download these documents and files. So, for example, here I am on my laptop I’ve – uploaded these documents and files. But let’s say I am on vacation, I’m visiting family and I would like to access some of these and put them on my family members, computers.
I can just go to onedrive on the internet, find the document and I can right-click on it and choose download. Now there are other ways to download it too, for example, select it and click this download button. So that’s handy. If you want to download more than one item at a time you can simply click download and it will put a copy on their computer.
So that’s one of the nice things about onedrive. It makes it so you always have access to the documents, files and folders that you need. So that’s a great way to use onedrive and some people – that’s all they do.
They just use onedrive on the internet like this. The nice thing about doing it this way just purely online, is that it saves storage space for you on this device, because now that these documents are in the cloud, I really could delete them off my computer. I don’t have to keep them necessarily on the desktop of my computer.
I could just store them in the cloud in onedrive until I need them so that could save storage space. On my, however, a lot of people choose to not just use onedrive online. They want to sync the files to their computers so that they have offline access to all their files and folders that are most important and that are in onedrive. So let’s look at how to set that up. I think most of you will really like this, even though it does take up more storage on all of your computers that you set this up on. So here in the lower left corner, it says: get the onedrive apps if you click that it takes you to a screen where you can install apps so that you can have onedrive actually run on your computer now in Windows 10.
It’S probably already set up for me. It’S not. It says it is, but I uninstalled it as part of my preparation for this video.
So let’s reinstall, if you don’t, have Windows, 10, you’re gon na, have to download it anyway. So I’ll click here to download. Ok, it’s finished downloading, so I’ll just click here on the onedrive app it opens up and it says it’s preparing for first use and you’ll notice down here in the lower right corner. Briefly, there was an icon of some clouds, that’s the onedrive icon and there it is again, but this time it’s got a line through it now, in order for me to see that I had to click on this arrow, so you might have to do the same Thing as well now, the reason there’s a line crossing it out is because I’m not signed in to my onedrive account. Let’S fix that, so I click on it.
It opens up this panel and I can click to sign in to my onedrive. Give me a minute to put in my email address and password and I’ll resume the video all right, so I’m ready to click sign-in, I’ve put in the same email address and password that I set up online when I went to onedrive live.com, so I’ll click sign-in To my pre-existing account, if you just set up your account just now, that’s ok, you can do the same thing. I’M doing put in that brand new email and password and you’ll be ready to go all right. That says this is your onedrive folder.
It tells you where that will be, and if you want to change its location, you can, I think the only reason to possibly do this is. If you have two hard drives on your computer and you want to pick one over the other to store your onedrive documents, so I clicked next to select the default location, all right, they’re trying once again to get me to pay to upgrade I’ll say not now And it’s showing me that I can just click and drag and drop things into my onedrive folder. Once it’s set up. It’S got some other tutorial tips for me, but I’m gon na click through those notice that there is a onedrive app for iPhone for Android and for Windows, Phone and other options too I’ll just skip through that and I’ll open. My onedrive folder. So I clicked on it and it opened for me a folder, and this one is not a cloud-based folder.
This is a folder on my computer and I can see all of those same documents – everything that’s in my online onedrive here. All of this is being synced. Now to my actual computer, you can see My Documents folder there’s my Spanish one, folder that I set up with the subfolders chapter, one chapter, but these now exist on my computer as well as in the cloud now, while they’re sinking, you’ll notice in the status column. If there’s a green checkmark, that means that they’re fully synced that the same document is on my computer, as is in the cloud if it shows just a cloud symbol. That means that this document or folder in this case is still trying to finish syncing and then also this symbol here shows that it is still syncing as well. Now, if you look in the lower right corner of Windows, you should see the onedrive symbol.
It looks like clouds, but for me, because it’s syncing right now, there’s some arrows and a spinning circle. So it’s trying to sync those if you don’t see that it could be hidden in this arrow, so you can just click the arrow button to look for it. There, okay, so the nice thing about having a onedrive folder on your computer is that now anytime, I want to sync something to the Internet to store in my cloud storage in onedrive. All I have to do is click on this symbol.
I can click open folder. Here’S my folder and I can just drag whatever I want into that folder. So, let’s put all of these pictures into my onedrive folder called pictures, so I opened it up. Let’S click and drag on these and pull them into this folder drop them in you notice that it cut them off the desktop and it’s pasting them into my pictures, folder, and they are instantly in the folder on my computer, but then gradually they’re getting synced. To my onedrive space in the cloud I’ll add this one as well – and this is cleaning up my desktop very nicely but again in this case, because I have onedrive set up on this computer.
It’S not really saving me storage space, it’s just organizing it nicely. For me, and it’s syncing it to the clouds so that I can access these on any computer, but every computer on which I set up onedrive these documents will take up space on every one of those computers. So that is something to consider.
So now I can go back to onedrive, I can go into documents and I can upload these documents into that folder and pretty quickly. My desktop looks beautiful and my onedrive is getting synced. These documents are gon na get lost. I have them available to me pretty much on any computer in the world as long as there’s internet access.
If I open up a browser again and go to onedrive, I’m still signed in because I just recently was here, and you can see that some of those documents that I’ve started sinking have already succeeded in uploading. They’Ve arrived in my onedrive account, so this has been the beginner’s guide to Microsoft, onedrive for Windows. I hope that 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.
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