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Steve Dotto here. I’m glad you’re joining me today. Now today is the final installment
in what has become a trilogy of videos on best online storage solution. It all started
when I did a comparison between Google Drive and Dropbox. Although Google Drive ended up
being a superior product to Dropbox, as far as I was concerned it just had more features
and it ultimately was probably better value, I still chose to say that I used Dropbox.
So I followed it up with a video of my five favorite reasons that I use Dropbox and the
reasons that I stayed with Dropbox and then I realized that I am doing a disservice to
the Google Drive community because I do think Google Drive is probably a better long term
solution. So this is the final chapter in this story. We’re going to take a look at
the best features of Google Drive and why if you do choose Google Drive, it is an outstanding
tool. Now of course online storage is online storage.
When you save a file, it’s stored on a web and synced on our computer. They all work
pretty much the same way regardless of which tool you use. What makes Google Drive special?
What are some the outstanding features within Google Drive? Number one and the first most
important feature is Google Drive is not just online storage. Google Drive, when you use
and when you have Google Drive and choose it, you get not just their storage—by the
way they give you storage than anybody else—but we also have all of Google’s online apps
available to us, the ability to create word processing, spreadsheets, documents, presentations,
forms, which is outstanding—I’ve got a great video on using Google forms which is
one of the real secret benefits of Google drive—so it’s far more than just storing
your files online. It’s also your apps for managing all of those files. That is reason
number one that Google Drive is good value. Added to that, you get 15 gigabytes of storage
right out of the gate. And not only do you get 15 gigabytes of storage but any documents
that you create in your Google Docs in Google Drive, any word processors or spreadsheets
or graphics that you create don’t count against your quote, which means you have 15
gigabytes of outside stuff, be it photos, be it images, be it videos, be it other text
documents, PDFs. You have 15 gigabytes and all of those tools to bring to Google Drive
so that’s a big point in the favor of Google Drive.
The second great feature in Google Drive is it’s from Google, meaning that it integrates
with all of our other Google services. Specifically the case that I’m thinking about right now,
it integrates with Gmail. Now this is cool. Google is the king of search. We know that
they do search better than everybody else. Nowadays we have so much stored between our
Google Drive or our Gmail that we often have to search within those different silos of
content. Google, because they are the kings of search, have developed a way for us to
search within both silos at the same time. So if I’m in Gmail—let me go to my Gmail—and
I’m going to search for YouTube because I’m doing some stuff on YouTube, what happens
is in the search I get unified search. I get all of my search results here that’s within
my email accounts but look down here. This search area here is coming out of my Google
Drive account because I have enabled in the Google Labs a feature called, I think, Apps
Search. Let me just go ahead and take a look and show you because this is so cool. There
it is. It’s called Apps Search and if you read that, it says, “Extended search with
Google Docs and sites results.” So Apps Search will find the most relevant docs and
sites and show them below your Gmail search results. So it’s looking in our sites and
it’s looking in our docs if we integrate this. So when we’re searching in Gmail,
we are getting relevant searches from other silos of information on our system or in our
account that might be relevant. So unified search is huge. It doesn’t sound
like the sexiest thing in the world but it’s something that you’ll end up using every
day and every time you find that you start searching in Gmail but what you were really
looking for is a document, you’re going to save yourself an incredible amount of time
every single time that happens. So that is a terrific extra feature.
Next up, number three and number three allows me to stay in the online web browser space
and show you a Chrome extension, an extension that goes into my Chrome browser. Now the
more you stay in the Google universe, the better you are when we’re talking about
this kind of stuff so I use the Chrome browser with Gmail and with Drive. That’s a terrific
combination of tools. Now I added this extension her. Let me find it here. There it is. It’s
on the web store. It’s called Save to Google Drive. One of the features that I like best
in Evernote is the ability to, whenever I’m in any web browser, click whatever content
I’m looking at into my Evernote account. It’s a tremendous feature within Evernote.
By using this, you have something very similar within Chrome. When you’re out, say I’m
at this site and I see oh, that’s an image that I want to use or that I want to save
or I want to save this page, I then have this new extension installed called Save to Google
Drive. If I just click here, it’s going to take this entire page and save it as a
graphic into my Google Drive where if I right-click on anything within it, I can choose to save
the image or save the link to Google Drive so that I have the same kind of quick save
functionality out of my browser into Google Drive as I do within Evernote, a nice additional
feature and it’s a quick Chrome add-on. So integration with your browser is another
great feature within Google Drive. That brings us to the fourth feature that
I wanted to talk to you about today. The fourth feature really hearkens back to my original
demo when I first compared Google Drive to Dropbox. One of the things that I like most
about Dropbox is the ability to be able right-click on anything within my Dropbox folder and quickly
share that with somebody else. At that time, you could do that in Windows but you couldn’t
do that on the Mac within Google Drive. But of course these are dynamic apps.
So if I now open up my Google Drive folder here within my browser and I choose any document
within that, say I want to choose this video that I have, and I want to share that with
somebody, I can now right-click my mouse and look, I’ve got the Google Drive share option
available to me right here. So all I do is click on Share and now I’m in the same sort
of sharing environment as I would have been within Dropbox. I can choose who I want to
share it with and be able to invite them to be able to either collaborate or view the
document. I’ve got the same sharing capabilities, the ability to quickly share as I do within
Dropbox. That was one of the biggest checkpoints against Google drive when I first did the
review. Now we can indeed share by right-clicking within the Drive folder on our computer, both
Mac and Windows. That brings us to our fifth key. The fifth
key I already mentioned it at the very beginning when I was talking about how good the value
was as far as storage because any documents that are Google Docs type document, word processors,
spreadsheets that we create in the Google Drive environment don’t count against us
as far our storage quota goes. If you want to just check out, while we’re on storage
let’s just talk about how storage works, if you want to increase the amount of storage
you have within Google Drive, you just go to the Drive Storage Menu here. I have 15
gigabytes available to me. As I said, that’s for just outside content. Anything that’s
in Google Drive does not count against my quota although my attachments and stuff from
email does count against my quota. So the Drive documents don’t but Gmail does.
15 GB free and then to get another 100 GB of storage, which is a tremendous amount,
is $5 a month. This is right in line with everybody else. The nice thing is you don’t
have to buy more than you need because you get a better price per GB. Sometimes, the
plans will scale down. They follow this same exact pricing all the way up. It’s basically
$5 per 100 GB all the way up as you climb the ladder. That’s what you do if you need
to add extra storage. The final thing that I wanted to talk about
today as far as Google Drive is concerned is something called revision history. If we
go back into my Drive here, as you edit documents sometimes you need to go back and you want
an earlier version of the document of you’ve made changes to the document. Keeping a history
of your documents as you go along is something that you don’t need very often but when
you do need it, you really need it. I can recall one of my daughters once working
on a document. It’s online so it’s always saving without you hitting save. She actually
erased everything on the page and then the document saved and she freaked out, saying,
“I’ve lost everything. I can’t get the data. I worked so *** this and now it’s
all gone and I have to start all over again.” There were tears. I said wait a minute, they
have something called revision history. Let me show you how revision history works because
it allows you go back and view previous versions of the document very, very easily.
Let’s find one of the documents, one of the columns that I wrote. There it is, Good
Life. So this is a document that I would have edited many times as I was putting it together.
It was an article for a magazine. If I go under the File menu here and choose ‘See
revision history’ every time that that document and saved again, any time that I made any
changes to it, it’s listed out there. So you see that mainly I did it between the 3rd
and the 5th of November a year ago. But I went into it several times. I edited it and
made changes and all of those changes if we click on it at any point here within it, we’ll
see what changes were made at that point. All of the different changes appear when we
take a look at that particular revision. Revision history allows you to go back, find mistakes
and correct problems. The bottom line, all of these cloud storage
devices are outstanding and every time I post one of these videos, people talk about boxing
and other storage tools that are available. They’re all good but for me, I do still
like Dropbox. I think it’s an outstanding tool but Google Drive has Google behind it
and Google is going to win most of the time right now in the online space. The integration
between it and Gmail and all of the other apps in Chrome really make it a really intelligent
choice. Even if you don’t use this, your online storage solution, you should master
it and use it for storage that’s appropriate within the Google universe because nothing
is going to do a better job. It’s great value for the free money that you’re spending
and learning the little tricks and techniques within Google Drive is going to be time well
spent. I hope you found watching this video today
to be time well spent. If you have, please subscribe to our videos. We produce new videos
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to the videos that we worked so ***. I’m Steve Dotto. We’ll see you very soon.