DON’S FREEWARE CORNER - JULY 2015
GOOGLE DOCS AND GOOGLE DRIVE: PART 2
©2015 Donald R. Snow
This page was last updated 2015-07-10.
These Freeware Corner notes are published in
TAGGology, our Utah Valley Technology and Genealogy
Group (UVTAGG) monthly newsletter, and are posted
on http://uvtagg.org/classes/dons/dons-classes.html
where there may be corrections or updates.
GOOGLE DOCS
Last month’s Freeware Corner note was on Google
Docs, the free office programs in Google. As
mentioned, there are many helpful and free Google Docs
tutorials online, such as -- http://www.gcflearnfree.org/googledocuments
. You use your free Google account to access
Google Docs or Google Drive to form new documents,
edit those you already have, share files, or upload
files to store them. Your Google documents
(text, slides, and sheets) are stored in Google Drive
which is a free website “in the cloud”
like Dropbox. Google gives you 15 gigabytes of
free space to store your files and you can buy more,
if you need it, but 15 gigs stores a lot of
files. It is important to note the difference
between storing files in the cloud and backing up
files there -- Google Drive stores your files, but you
have to upload them and they remain there, available
to you on any Internet-connected computer.
Backing up files is done by a program to store your
latest version of a file online somewhere, but it only
remains there while the file itself is on your
computer and for a short time afterwards, so you can
recover it, if your computer crashes, for
example. Both are useful services to use.
GOOGLE DOCS AND GOOGLE DRIVE
To get to Google Drive go to https://www.google.com/
and sign in with your Google account. Click on
the 3x3-dot “apps” icon (upper right
corner) and select Drive, Docs (texts), Slides
(presentations), or Sheets (spreadsheets). If
you go to Google Drive you will see all the files and
folders you have there, documents and files you have
uploaded yourself. Clicking on any document
opens the correct program and gets it ready for you to
edit. Clicking on My Drive (upper left) shows
you buttons to form new folders, start new documents,
or upload files. New documents and files will be
placed in the folder you are in when clicking on the
New button, but they can be moved by
dragging-and-dropping. You can rename a file by
right-clicking it and selecting “Rename”
or by opening it and using Save As. Since you
only see an abbreviated portion of the title under the
picture of the file in the Grid View, naming your
files with crucial information at the start will make
them easier to recognize there. There is also a
List View icon (upper right corner) where you see a
list with the entire file or document names. To
see all the files in the folder click the
“lined” icon at the upper-left. The
last document you had open will be the first one in
the list, last edited is first listed. Two copies of
Google Docs can be open in separate tabs in your
browser, or even in different browsers, so you can go
back and forth between documents without losing your
place and all edits done in one show in the other,
just like two people seeing the same document on two
different computers and either one editing it.
This is handy for writing and editing. You need
to keep in mind that Google Docs is an online service
so you need Internet access to use it.
GOOGLE DOCUMENTS
These can be text files or slides for a presentation
or sheets for a spreadsheet. When you upload a
file such as a doc, docx, or rtf file, it becomes
editable in Google Docs. Google claims that now
you can edit Microsoft Word, Powerpoint, and Excel
files in Google Docs and save them in their original
form, but I haven’t found that this works very
well. More comments on this below. You can
change a document’s format properties such as
margins, text font, size, mode, and viewing size on
the screen, by clicking on File > Page
Setup. To start a new document click on the Plus
“+” icon at the lower right corner or else
right-click and select New in the Context Menu (the
“Right-Click menu”). Google Docs
saves files you are working on automatically, so you
never have to worry about whether you have saved the
latest version. The pencil icon (upper right
corner) has editing and viewing modes. The
Viewing mode shows what it will look like in the final
form, including active Internet links. To delete
sentences or tables, etc., right click on them and
select Delete. Last month’s Freeware
Corner notes had more information on writing and
editing text documents.
SHARING FILES
To share a file with someone open it and click the
Share button (upper right corner). It will ask
for their name and email address, whether you want
them to be able to edit or just read the document, and
what you want to say in your email to them. It
sends them your email note with an invitation to view
and/or edit the document, whatever you have
selected. When you share and allow editing with
one or more people, they each have access to see and
edit the document, so you can all work on the same
document at the same time and each sees all the
changes as they occur.
GOOGLE SLIDES
Google Slides (“presentation”) is the
“Powerpoint” feature in Google Docs.
You can generate a new slideshow or upload a Microsoft
Powerpoint and edit it in Google Docs. As I
mentioned above, the new feature that claims you can
edit and save Microsoft Word, Powerpoint, or Excel
files, doesn’t seem to work very well for me;
it’s very slow and they don’t always keep
the same formatting, nor do they save properly.
Perhaps a better use of Google Slides would be to make
simple presentation files without many fancy
features. They would then be available to show
on any computer connected to the Internet, so you
wouldn’t need Powerpoint, nor even LibreOffice
which is free and will show Powerpoints. The
Google slides are fairly easy to make since most of
the tool icons are on the bar at the top and by
right-clicking on a slide you get additional
background, theme, and transition effects for the
slides. It has a simple way of including speaker
notes so when you play the slideshow you see a window
with the speaker comments separate from the main slide
screen. The Speaker Notes window also has a
timer on it so you can see how long you have been
talking and it can show thumbnails of the previous and
next slides so you can see what’s coming
up. Since it’s fairly easy to use, it
seems to have its place, but not for complicated
Powerpoints.
GOOGLE SHEETS
Google Sheets is the spreadsheet program in Google
Docs and, like Google Slides, it claims to handle
Microsoft Excel files, but my experience is that it is
very slow and doesn’t work very well.
Again, perhaps a better use for Google Sheets is when
you don’t need too many fancy features in your
spreadsheet and perhaps you want others to be able to
read and edit it, as well. In our family we use
Google Sheets for several things. These include
a contact list for the addresses, phones, and emails
of everyone. All the adults have permission to
update this, so it makes it easy to keep track of
everyone’s information. We also use Google
Docs when planning family reunions to see who is
planning on being there, when they are arriving and
leaving, what the food assignments are, etc. We
also have a Google sheet set up that lists all our
past family reunions, where they were, when, and who
the planners were for each of them. We have a
couple of sheets set up that give the history of
running jokes in the family. None of these
requires many fancy spreadsheet features and they are
available to everyone in the family to read and those
old enough to update.
CONCLUSIONS
Google Docs has some helpful uses in genealogy and is
worth learning. It uses many of the standard
commands from Windows like other word processors or
presentation and spreadsheet programs. Google
Drive and Google Docs make your files available to you
on any computer connected to the Internet and by
inviting others, they can be shared and edited by
others.
[Note: I have written these two articles about
Google Docs in Google Docs to see how it went. I
usually use Evernote to write articles, but this seems
to work fine too. I find it easier to write all
the text with minimal formatting and then at the end
go through and change the font on section titles,
etc.]