Google Drive – Tips and Tricks You Wish You Knew Before

Setting up Google Accounts for Businesses is what we at Boost2Business always recommend to our customers. Backing up and storing data on an external drive (or cloud) is the safest way of preventing any data loss and sharing data easily with your coworkers and external collaborators.
Whether you are a regular Gmail User or you have an Enterprise Account, here are a few master tricks on how to utilize the Google Drive feature.

Browse Offline in Google Drive

Start your Google Drive settings by opening the front page of Drive.
In order to enable Google Drive to work offline, click on the Settings in the top right corner and on the General tab tick the box marked Sync Google Docs, Sheets, Slides & Drawings files to this computer so that you can edit offline. Google Drive begins caching recent Docs, Sheets, Slides and Drawings to your computer. On the plus side, if your Internet is down,  you can finally get that report done without any distractions in the local café.

Search inside PDFs and Images Stored on the Google Drive

Google Drive will scan through the text in PDFs and images and find that brochure or flyer for you easily.

You can even extract text to a certain extent if you open up the image with Google Docs. Right-click on a PDF or image, then choose Open with and Google Docs.

Use Google Drive Advanced Search Features

Search by document types, specific keywords, dates, location, owners, etc…
Needless to say, Google knows a bit of something about fast searching, so we suggest you utilize this options.

Manage Files’ Versions

Google Drive stores older versions of your files just in case you update something by mistake or someone overwrites your version. For a native Drive file (Google Docs,Google Sheets), open it and choose File then See revision history; for any other type of file, right-click on it in the document list and pick Manage versions. The pop-up menu to the side of each version lets you download, delete, and permanently keep files past the standard 30-day window.

Sort The Biggest Files In your Google Drive

Use this link to sort your files by file size, or click the link on the left that tells you how much space you’re using, then click the small Drive entry. This is especially useful if you want to make some space on your Drive.
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Sync to and from the Desktop

Install the Google Drive desktop client for Mac or Windows and you get access to all of your files on your local computer too (you can pick and choose which folders get synced). Not only does it make it super simple to upload folders and files (simply copy them into the Drive folder), it also gives you offline access to any of your files you might need on the go—and changes are automatically synced back to the cloud when you get back online.