Top Tips For Google Drive, Docs And Sheets

Google recently released new Android and iOS phone and tablet apps for Docs and Sheets which let you create documents without first having to go to Drive (drive.google.com). Get them from the App Store for an iPhone or iPad, or the Google Play Store for Android devices.
Press the button in the top-left corner and select Settings from the menu. Files can be stored on the
device for offline access and the ‘Cache size’ setting lets you choose how much space they are allowed to use. If your phone or tablet is short of memory, set the cache to the minimum setting of 25MB. Make sure that Encryption is enabled on Android because this scrambles the files so they can’t be accessed by anyone other than you.

There is an option to only upload and download files over Wi-Fi, which you may want to enable, depending on the data allowance on your mobile contract. Tick the box to reduce data usage or clear it if you have a high

You can view the contents of files stored on Google Drive without having to open them. Tick the box to the left of the filename and select the Details tab on the right. If you can’t see it, click the circled ‘i’ icon.

Drive lets you preview files without having to open them and browse the whole contents of the file in this way. Tick the box to the left of any file and click the Preview button (the eye icon). Using the left and right arrow keys will move you forward and back through the files.
Click the View all button in the bottom-left corner to show all your files as thumbnails and click one to
jump to that file. Scrolling the mouse wheel zooms in and out of images, and scrolls up and down documents.

It is easy for Drive to become a long and disorganised list of files, so it’s a good idea to organise them into folders. Click Create and select Folder to create a folder, then just drag files from the list and drop them on the folder on the left to move them.

Slides is a great tool for making slideshows and a recent update means you can now edit images on a slide.
Click Create, Presentation to create one, then select Insert, Image. Any photo can be inserted by dragging it from an Explorer window and dropping it on the browser.

Click the Crop button and drag the corners or sides to crop the image. Click the arrow on the right of the crop tool to see a selection of shapes, arrows, callouts and equations. These apply masks to your image, so selecting a rectangle with rounded corners or a star shape will make the selected image the same shape.

If you use Docs or Sheets on an iPad or iPhone, you might not want everyone in your house to have access to your files, so you should lock them. Tap the menu button in the top-left, tap the cog icon, turn Passcode Lock on, then enter the four-digit PIN code to lock your files. Tick Always Lock. Quit the Docs or Sheets app and from now on you’ll need to enter the PIN code to open Docs or Sheets. Setting the PIN code on one app sets it for Docs, Sheets and Drive.

Various available add-ons add useful features to Sheets and Docs that can simplify tasks. For example, there is a ‘Table of Contents’ add-on for Docs that is very useful if you are writing a long document. Other tools include a thesaurus, diagrams, Avery Label Merge for merging spreadsheet data into Avery Address Labels, and more. In Docs or Sheets, click Add-ons, then ‘Get add-ons’. You’ll only see this menu in new spreadsheets, not old ones.

The Android app My Tracks records your walks, runs and bike rides. They are automatically stored on Drive as KMZ files in the My Tracks folder. Click a file to see your activity plotted on a map. You can share the files with friends and make them public, too. Tick a KMZ file in the My Tracks folder, click More, Share, and Share again.

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You can then share the link with services including Twitter and Facebook, or click Change next to ‘Who has access’ and make it public.