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Steve Dotto here. I am thrilled you are joining us today. Today, weíre going to take a look
at my five favorite Dropbox features. Now the reason I decided that I had to do this
particular video was a couple of weeks ago, I did a comparison between Dropbox and Google
Drive to determine which was better and I chose the winner being Google Drive. But I
said at the end of that despite the fact that I think Google Drive is better, Iím still
going to use Dropbox and that caused a lot of emails to come into my Inbox with people
saying Steve, Google Drive won. Why donít you switch over to Google Drive?
I think it kind of speaks to my philosophy around productivity software. Itís that when
you have a tool that really works for you there has to be a profound reason to change,
not just a few extra features. Knowing how a tool works intimately and having it as part
of your workflow is more valuable than a few extra features. Does that make sense?
I also like being a very complicated person. I donít like anybody being able to understand
me too much. It adds an air of mystery about me. Is that working as well? Yes, even though
I think Dropbox is inferior, I do choose to use it. And inferior is actually a very strong
term. They are so close as far as performance. Dropbox is such an elegant tool that I donít
really feel I suffer at all by continuing to use it. But having said that, I thought
I would share with you now the five features now that I just really, really, really like
in Dropbox. Some of them I use every day. Some of them I use every day without actually
knowing I use them every day. So letís dive into them, shall we?
The first and number one thing that I use in Dropbox all the time that I think is an
absolute essential and has become second nature to me is the idea of quickly sharing files.
Now if I open my Dropbox folder here, one thing I get asked for an awful lot are publicity
photos. If Iím doing a speaking engagement or Iím working with somebody on some different
project, they ask me for publicity photos. So Iíve got a whole series of publicity photos
here. Some of them are large. Some of them are small. Rather than emailing them as an
attachment, all I do is I go and I choose the folder that I want to shareóletís say
itís going to be this photo hereóand then what I do is I right-click on that photo and
I say, ìShare Dropbox linkî which then copies a URL onto my clipboard which then I can embed
in an email. Letís me open a new browser window. I will
embed then this character stringósee this, right hereóin an email. If I send that to
somebody and they click on it, what happens is theyíre then brought into my Dropbox folder
and they get to download that particular photo. Isnít that slick? This works for large files,
small files, for videos. It works for everything. This ability to second nature just right-click
on any kind of document you have stored in your Dropbox folder, say ìShare Dropbox linkî
and then be able to send that to somebody by email, have them open it and be able to
download the file right away regardless of how large and small it is, that is a tremendous
convenience. So thatís the first and that has just become second nature to me. I just
share it like that all the time. The second thing that I really appreciate
in Dropbox is a little more complicated to explain. What it is is because I live on multiple
computers, it allows me to store the preferences files for my most used apps in Dropbox so
that regardless of which computer Iím on, I use the same preferences. Does that make
sense? I will show you an example. I love this tool called TextExpander. TextExpander
is a little keyboard macro tool thatís only available on the Mac. There are similar products
in Windows and actually weíve got a terrific video where I show you how to use TextExpander
if youíre interested. Windows users can use a similar product called Breevy. It works
almost the exact same way. There are a couple of other products as well in the Windows world
but TextExpander dominates in the Mac space. I just love this particular productivity app.
Now what I do thoughólet me open TextExpander hereóis because Iím using TextExpander half
the time Iím on my notebook and half the time on my desktop which you see right here,
I go into my TextExpander preferences here and here within the preferences, I ask it
to synchronize my preferences through Dropbox. So it creates a preferences file in Dropbox.
Now when Iíve got the same selection set on my notebook as is on my desktop, now Iíve
got the exact same keyboard shortcuts on all of my computers. Now it makes sense, doesnít
it? This is an awesome way of using one app on multiple computers but having the same
set of preferences on all of them. Now you could do this for web browsers like
Firefox. Chrome, which I use, automatically does this as far as syncing preferences but
youíll find a lot of different places where you can use this syncing, doing it through
Dropbox with the preferences file. It is an exceptional way to use Dropbox.
Now number three on my list of awesome Dropbox features is the ability to do something called
selective sync. What is selective sync, Steve? This is especially useful if you have a computer
that has limited hard drive space, if you have the free Dropbox accounts so you have
limited space on Dropbox and you donít have gigabytes and gigabytes of space on Dropbox.
What it does is it allows me to go into my Dropbox Menu and I click here on the gear
icon, go into PreferencesóDo you see that? Iíve gone to the Menu, into the gear icon,
into Preferencesóand in Preferences you have to go to Advanced. Itís a little bit of a
journey to get into it but there you have something called Selective Sync and you can
set this for each of your computers. Within this, you can choose which of your
folders within Dropbox you want to sync on each computer. Now the syncing gives you backups.
It gives you backups so if youíve got unlimited hard drive space, unlimited Dropbox space,
itís probably a great idea to sync everything unless youíre finding that itís slowing
down things too much by having everything in sync but I doubt that that will happen
in this day and age. Far more important is if you have limitedósay
youíve got a MacBook Air or a small notebook computer that has a solid state drive so maybe
you only have 128 GB of space on your drive. 60 of that is used up already for the operating
system, the applications and that sort of stuff so youíve got a limited amount of space
available to you. You donít have unlimited storage. In that particular case on that notebook,
you might go through here and say we donít need to back up any of these files. I donít
need these files. I can access them through Dropbox on the web but I donít need them
stored locally for offline access. Because what happens when we sync files at
Dropbox as we have the file on our computer, we create in Dropbox and then through the
sync feature it creates another copy on the other computer. This way here, we can selectively
choose exactly which folders and which files we want to have living on each computer. Itís
valuable if you have limited hard drive space and valuable if you have the free Dropbox
and you donít have a whole bunch of space in Dropbox to be able to sync things. The
selective sync is my third favorite Dropbox feature.
My fourth favorite Dropbox feature is the ability to show previous editions of documents.
If youíre in Dropbox and say youíre working collaboratively on a document, youíve got
a shared document that youíre working back and forth on, or even if itís a document
that youíre working yourself on and itís going through multiple revisions, then you
say really what did I have? I saved it but what I really want is to see what it looked
like three versions ago or two or three saves before. Now if you donít have revision control
in whatever app youíre in, you have revision control within Dropbox.
What you do is you go into your Dropbox folder here or into your Dropbox file. Let me find
a file that Iíll have multiple versions of. Well, hereís my template that I use for my
radio show graphics. Iíve probably got a couple of saved versions here. So I can click
here. Iíve right-clicked my mouse on the file within my Dropbox folder. When I right-click
my mouse, I can say Show previous versions. Then it launches Dropbox on the web and it
shows me the previous versions of that document so that I can go back and I can open the previous
version of that document and I can use it or see exactly what we had at that particular
time. Itís not always going to be useful. Itís certainly something that youíre going
to be using every day but when you do need it, it is a real life-saver.
The last thing is kind of a tip for really quickly using Dropbox. I have a variety of
different people who help me out, my virtual team, who put different files in different
Dropbox folders for me when theyíre ready and I also move files into Dropbox occasionally
for sharing amongst my different computers and things like that. Now if I need to see,
if I need to quickly find one the of the latest documents that was uploaded, right here Iíve
got the latest few document s that were uploaded to Dropbox but itís a list of only three.
What I can do is I can go into my Dropbox on the web and by clicking under Events, it
shows me the last things in a chronological order that happen in Dropbox. There you can
see 11 minutes ago, I changed my TextExpander settings. There was a transcript that was
uploaded seven hours ago. I stored these files and these are photos that I uploaded from
my camera yesterday. So you can see I can work my way through so
anything thatís happened in the last few days, I can very quickly find here without
having to navigate to the individual folders, which if you take a look at my Dropbox account,
Iíve got a lot of folders now in my Dropbox account because of all of the different projects
that Iím on. So I really like this ability here to be able to go in and be able to chronologically
see all of the events that have happened within my Dropbox account over a period of time.
Dropbox isnít perfect and Google Drive is ultimately probably going to significantly
impact the number of people that use Dropbox as we move ahead but for the time being, as
I said, Iím going to stick and continue to use Dropbox personally. Itís an exceptionally
well thought out service and when you get to know an app as intimately as I know Dropbox,
then the productivity gain as a result of that really makes it worth kind of sticking
around and staying with the ones that you know.
I hope that you found this video to be useful. If you have, by all means please subscribe
here to our channel here. It means that you get first access to all of the videos that
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We certainly appreciate that as well. Iím Steve Dotto. See you next week.