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My professional activities depend on Google Drive. I use it every day and I go in and out of it from morning to night. Since I spend a lot of time working in this cloud storage service, I found some “tricks” to make my experience more efficient.
Before we get to these helpful tips, be aware that they don’t apply to individual Google Drive apps (Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Forms). These tips focus on Drive itself and how to get the most out of the platform. So if you’re looking for specific advice on any of the included tools, keep looking. However, if you want to improve your daily work on Drive, you’ve come to the right place.
With that being said, let’s get to the tips.
1. Organize your folders
It goes without saying, but it is essential to organize your files. If you save everything to the root directory of Google Drive, you’ll end up in a real mess. Even if you create folders to store documents in, if those folders aren’t organized at all, you’ll spend more time looking for files than working with them.
For example, suppose you work with specific clients or projects. You could create a folder for Client A, Client B, Client C, and Client D, or for Project 1, Project 2, Project 3, and Project 4. If you work with both clients and projects, you can create a folder called CLIENTS and another called PROJECTS, then create subfolders called Client A, Client B, Client C, Client D, etc.
This is how I set up my Google Drive hierarchy:
Customer > Year > Month.
So I could have Client A > 2022 > July. In the July folder, I add all my content/documents/etc. for this month. This layout makes it incredibly easy to know where everything is in Drive without having to think about it.
2. Color-code your folders
To simplify the folder hierarchy, I color code each client folder, so I just need to search for the color instead of the name. To color code a folder, right-click the folder in Google Drive and select Arrange then choose the desired color from the palette.
Changed the color of my ZDNET folder in Google Drive.
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3. Use the activity sidebar
Since I use Google Drive a lot, sometimes I need to quickly access a document I recently worked with in a folder. Let’s say I wrote an article for ZDNET and I need to quickly check something in the document. If I open Google Drive and select the ZDNET folder, the activity pane toggles and only shows recent activity associated with that folder.
Recent activity in a specific folder.
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I can click on any of these documents to quickly open it and do what I need to do.
4. Use the Favorites feature to quickly access important files and folders.
I have some documents that I need to refer to regularly, but they’re scattered throughout my Google Drive folder hierarchy. I don’t want to have to search for these documents (because it’s a waste of time). Instead, I can mark these documents with a star: I will just have to go to the stars folder (favorites) to find them.
To mark a document in this way, simply right-click on the name of the document, then on Arrange and on Add to favorites.
The star icon can make finding a document much easier.
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To access your starred content, simply click on the Starred entry in the left navigation of Google Drive to view all of the documents you’ve added to that folder.
The starred entry in the left sidebar of Google Drive.
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5. Use the advanced search tool
Finally, never hesitate to use the advanced search tool. Google Drive’s basic search function is quite powerful on its own, but you have to know exactly how to use it. Of course, you can still use the standard search bar, but you need to know what you’re doing. For example, you can search for a PDF file whose name (or content) contains “google drive” using a phrase like this:
type:pdf
You can also search for all PDF files created before 2022, which can be done with:
before:2023-01-12 type:pdf
There is also an easier way to perform a detailed search. Instead of learning text search formulas, click the button advanced search (the icon on the right edge of the search bar) and, when the pop-up window appears, start narrowing your search by selecting a file type, an owner, words contained in the file, a name for the file, location, date modified, approvals, sharing with, and follow-ups.
Google Drive’s advanced search tool makes it easy to search using very specific criteria.
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There you have it, dear Google Drive users, five very simple to implement tips that will go a long way in making your Google Drive experience exponentially easier.
Source: “ZDNet.com”