Welcome to Google Drive the simple yet powerful way to manage all your files,
and folders, and collaborate with others.
Let's get started by learning how to access your Drive account.
To access Google Drive, you'll first need to login to your Google account.
Now you may already be familiar with other Google products,
such as Gmail or Google Calendar.
Once you've logged into your Google account,
you will see this icon in the top right-hand corner of your screen.
And this is perhaps the easiest way to access Drive.
By selecting this icon,
you will see a full list of Google applications that are available to you.
And here you see Drive is one of the options available.
Once we're in our Drive account,
you will see a search bar at the top of your screen.
This will allow you to easily and
very quickly discover the files that you were looking for.
You can either start to type in keywords directly into the search bar, or
start to filter by a particular file type.
If you select the arrow in the right corner of the search bar,
you will be able to search by more advanced options.
Such as who is the owner of the file, and when was that file last modified?
Below the search bar, we have a few additional options and
areas that we want to get familiar with.
The first one is changing the view of our files.
Here you see I'm viewing my folders in a traditional list view.
But what if I'd like to view this in a grid format?
By selecting this option, I can toggle between a List view and a Grid view.
Next to it, I have a details icon, by clicking this, a new area is expanded.
And depending on what I have selected on the left-hand side of the screen,
I can view additional details about that file or folder.
I can even click the Activity link here and see other pieces of information.
Such as when this file was last edited and who edited it as part of that process.
Next we have a help icon, this will show you some of the more popular help files
as you work with Google Drive, and you can also search for particular topics.
And, lastly, we have the gear icon which will allow us to edit particular settings.
The last thing we want to be familiar with is the left-hand side of the screen,
and this is referred to as the Control Panel.
At the top we have access to My Drive, and you can expand
this to see other folders or sub folders which may be available to you.
Below that we have Shared with me, these are files or
folders that others have shared with me via my Google Drive account.
Next we can filter our files by recency, this is showing all of my files,
and the last ones in which I've opened or edited within Drive.
You also have direct access to your Google Photos.
This is something that is built directly within Google Drive.
So you can access your images, and other pictures from your Drive account.
Next we have Starred,
this allows us to filter certain files which we have highlighted.
Perhaps files that we'd like to access more easily than others, and
we can filter by that the Starred option here.
Let's take a closer look at how we can star certain items within Google Drive.
Staring an item can be very helpful if you want to highlight certain files or
folders that you work with frequently.
In this example let's say that I'd like to come back to this file here.
To start this particular file I need to right click and select Add star.
Alternatively, I can also go up to my menu, select the More actions icon.
And select Add or Remove star in this case,
if I desire to remove this particular icon.
You will notice when item is starred you will have the icon located to the right of
the description.
Now when I select Starred from the menu on the left,
I get a nice summary of all of the files or folders that have been starred.
And then we have Trash, if we wanna review items that we have schedule to be trashed.
And we can decide to empty this trash at anytime that we've like.
The very last thing at the bottom of the Control panel is the Upgrade storage.
In here it gives us a quick summary of how much storage we are using.
As you can see here I'm currently using 2 GB of a total of 30 GB.
So the three main areas we wanna be familiar with
are the Search bar at the top of the screen.
The Tool bar which allows us to toggle between a few different views along with
some additional helpful options.
And, lastly, the Control Panel allowing us to view and
filter certain files and folders within our Drive account.