Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Google Drive Hacks”.
In this tutorial, I’m gon na show you some Google Drive hacks and what I mean by that is some little tips and tricks that you can use to kind of force. Google Drive to do things the way that you want those things done. So let’s get started and the first Google Drive hack is called force copy and you can see here at the top. I have a sample document, it’s a resume, but it’s pretty much a template resume. It’S something that I would like.
Let’S say my students or my employees or coworkers, I would like each of them to fill this out themselves, so I probably wouldn’t share this with them right. I could share it so that they can view it, and some of you probably know that when you view someone else’s document, there is typically an option to click here on file and make a copy. So that is a possibility, but it’s really not ideal and the reason it’s not ideal is because some of your students will have trouble doing that. They’Ll have trouble going to file make a copy. I know it’s easy, but trust me when I’ve had students do this. Usually, some of them are not able to do it. So what else can we do? Well, we could share it so that they can edit the document directly. The problem with this is then I’ll have 30 students or 200 students or a thousand students all editing.
The same document, that’s not what I want. What I want to do is I want them to make a copy, but without the hassle and the concern about, are they going to be able to find the file make a copy option or not? So all I have to do to set this up properly so that they all get a copy of this document. Is I just click somewhere in the document, and then I go up here to the URL for the document and I look for the word edit and there. It is I’m gon na click and drag to highlight edit and everything that comes after and then I’m just gon na type over that the word copy.
Now, if I highlight that URL copy it and then go to a new tab and paste that in and I’ll tap Enter or return on the keyboard, it takes me to a screen where the only option is to make a copy. So this really is a great way to share a template that you’ve made or a note sheet that you’ve made a graphic organizer that you’ve made a worksheet whatever it might be. You can make that document and then change edit to copy copy the URL and then just paste that URL, where you want it to be, you could paste it into an LMS like canvas or blackboard. You could paste it onto your school website.
You could email it to people, but anyone that clicks that link their only option will be to make a copy of the document. Now, let’s see if that works with spreadsheets Google Spreadsheets. So here I have a monthly budget spreadsheet I’ll change edit copy and look. It does work, what about Google slides presentations? I look for edit highlight it, change it to copy and it works now.
I’M gon na click back because I really don’t want to copy those, but that’s your first Google Drive hack, replacing edit with copy in order to force a copy. Now, if you want to try something a little more complicated instead of replacing edit with simply copy ad copy question mark copy and then capital C comments equals true and I’m going to shrink that down a little bit to make it easier to see. So why would you ever use this ending instead of just copy? The reason why is if you or someone else has inserted comments so now, if I replace edit with this ending, let’s see what happens paste hit enter students can make a copy, but the nice thing about this is that the comments come with the copy and there It is the second Google Drive hack, is called present mode and this one is specific to Google slides.
So I’m gon na jump over here to this yearbook. Google slides presentation that I’m working on and let’s say that I’m actually finished with it, and I want the students or anyone who sees this to not see it in editing mode. I just want them to see it in presentation mode.
So without these slides here at the left, without these tools across the top they’re, just looking at the presentation itself to do that, I just click on the presentation somewhere and then go up here, find edit light it and everything after it and then replace it. With present I tap enter, and this is what they see, and so now I could copy and paste this URL on to my website into my LMS into an email. Whoever gets this link when they click it it’ll take them directly to the presentation in presentation mode or present mode. So I’m gon na add that here to my notes, present mode now, I wish I could do something like that with my Google Docs. This looks good, but it would be nice if I could put this into presentation mode to get rid of some of these tools and options, and things like that that might be distracting to some viewers. Well, you can, but the trick here instead of replacing edit with present, you replace it with preview.
So let’s try that here in my resume, I click on the document. The word edit appears, I highlight it, and everything that comes after I type in preview hit enter a return, and this is what the students would see it strips out. Everything that’s unnecessary and just shows me the document notice that it is not an editable document.
This is for viewing a document only let’s see if it works with spreadsheets as well. I click on a spreadsheet and look for edit and I paste in the word preview and it does. It works. The third Google Drive hack that I’m gon na share with you is called template preview and it’s kind of a combination of a couple of these others that I’ve already shown you you just replace edit with template, slash preview. So, let’s try it out I’ll copy that go to my document. You can see I’m still in preview mode, so I’ll click back to get into editing mode need to make sure I click on the document somewhere and there’s the word edit, replace it with template. Slash preview hit, Enter or return, and so the nice thing about template preview is the students or the audience, gets to see the document in preview mode, but they also have an option to click a button to get a copy of it.
Basically, so it really is the forced copy option and the preview option combined, so the student or the viewer can just click that button. It gives them a copy of that document that they can fully edit and it puts it inside their Google Drive. I don’t really want to do that so I’ll X, out of it and click back and of course you could do the same thing with a Google sheet and with a Google slides presentation. The final Google Drive hack that I want to share with you is export as PDF, and for this you would replace edit with export question.
Mark format equals PDF. Let’S try this one, I’m gon na copy that and then here in my document I click I get the word edit appearing there, replace it with my export format, PDF txt and I just hit Enter or return and now look what happened. It downloaded a copy of this document in PDF form, so the nice thing about this is you can create a document and then very quickly get a link that students can click to get a copy of it yeah. But it’s a copy in PDF format: they’re not going to be able to easily change it. They’Re not gon na be able to easily edit things or alter the document in any way. Let’S try that with Google sheets it worked it downloaded it here there. It is in PDF format and with Google slides. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work so even though it didn’t work for me in Google slides. The reason I find this to be useful is because sometimes you don’t want your students just having a copy that they can edit online. In Google Drive, but rather you just want them to have a copy downloaded to their computer either of a spreadsheet or a Google Doc and export question mark format equals PDF is the way to do that.
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