Google: How To Leverage the Power of Internet Searching

About Google Drive

Google Drive is a free service that lets you store all your files including documents, photos, videos and Google Docs online and access them anywhere.

Use Google Drive (formerly Google Docs) to store documents online and be able to access them from any computer, anywhere, and anytime. This is a great tool for group projects, classroom activities, and other collaborative work. You can create spreadsheets, presentations, and comments in Google Docs, or upload a document from PowerPoint, Excel, or Word. Google Drive is free and available to anyone who has a Google Account.

What you can do with Google Drive

Google Drive allows you to centrally store your files in the cloud. You can also install the desktop and mobile application to access your files from your computer or Android or iOS mobile device. Google Drive's built-in sync capability ensures that your files, folders, and Google Docs are the same on all your devices.

Google Docs is built into Google Drive. The Google Docs collaboration suite includes five different applications: Documents, Presentations, Spreadsheets, Forms, and Drawing.

With Google Drive, you can create and share word processing documents, spreadsheets, and presentations online, and collaborate with others on group projects. Students and teachers can create documents using these state-of-the-art tools, then communicate and collaborate with each other in real time right inside a web browser window.

Some of the things you can do with Google Drive:

Documents:

• Create new documents or upload and convert Word documents, OpenOffice, RTF, HTML, text (.txt) and other types of files.
• Easily format and spell-check your documents.
• Invite others by email to edit or view your documents.
• Edit documents online with whomever you choose.
• View your documents' revision history and roll back to any version.
• Publish documents online to the world, as web pages or post documents to your blog.
• Download documents to your desktop as Word, OpenOffice, RTF, PDF, or HTML.
• Email your documents as attachments.

Check out the Google documents Getting Started Guide.

Spreadsheets:

• Create new spreadsheets.
• Import and convert .xls, .csv, .txt and .ods formatted data.
• Export .xls, .csv, .txt and .ods formatted data and PDF and HTML files.
• Use formatting and formula editing so you can calculate results and make your data look the way you want it.
• Chat in real time with others who are editing your spreadsheet.
• Embed a spreadsheet, or individual sheets of your spreadsheet, in your blog or website.

Check out the Google spreadsheets Getting Started Guide.

Presentations:

• Create new presentations, then share and edit presentations with your friends and coworkers.
• Import and convert existing presentations in .ppt and .pps file types.
• Download your presentations as a PDF, a PPT, or a TXT file.
• Easily edit your presentations.
• Insert images and videos, and format your slides to fit your preferences.
• Allow real-time viewing of presentations, online, from separate remote locations.
• Publish and embed your presentations in a website, allowing access to a wide audience.

Google Drive Change Notification:

Currently Google offers a feature that will notify users when collaborators make changes to or edit shared documents only for spreadsheets. To receive an email notification of changes to spreadsheets that you either have created or that have been shared with you, in your spreadsheet, click Tools>Notification Rules or Share>Set Notification Rules.

What you can do with Google Docs

What can Google Docs do for you?! You can create and share your ideas, projects, assignments, and spreadsheets from anywhere you have a computer and Internet connection.

Create:

• documents
• spreadsheets
• presentations
• drawings

With your free Google account, your saved documents can be accessed and shared with others. Your documents cannot be found through general web searches unless you decide to use the publishing feature.

Get Published!

When you have created a document or spreadsheet that you want to publish on the Web, Google Docs has an easy process for you.

Web page

• from the Edit page, expand the Share button from the top right corner
• a new window will appear giving you options to Publish Document or Post to a Blog
• click Publish Document and you will be provided with a URL
• you can share that URL with others, preview the web page, stop publishing, and much more

Blog

• follow the same steps as publishing to a Web page but choose the Post to a Blog option and follow the instructions
• Blogger is the default site but you can change it in the option
• be sure to add tags to your document so that it will be included in your post categories

  

Collaborate

The next time you are working on a class project or assignment, get it together with Google Docs. It is so easy to do!

• send an invitation by email to people involved in your project or others with whom you want to share a file
• each person can sign in and begin to either edit or view your document or spreadsheet
• several people can simultaneously access, view, and make changes to the document
• this is so cool! There is an on-screen chat window for spreadsheets and document revisions showing the history of changes and by whom, when and what.

Learn more about Google Docs

Google Blog