35 Google Drive Tips You Can't Afford to Miss

Google Drive syncs across devices, so you can start a project on the PC and pick it up on the phone, tablet, or your home laptop. And it works with any kind of document, not just native Docs, Sheets, and Slides. Install Google's Backup and Sync program on the desktop to automatically back up files from your computer, camera, or SD cards to Google Drive.

This is the aspect of Google Drive likely to use up your 15GB of free storage, however, since it caters to other types of files. If you run out, you may need to pay for extra storage through Google One. But options start at $1.99 a month (or $19.99 per year) for 100GB. Even 2TB is only $10 a month or $99.99 per year.

The name of the game with Google Docs is "collaboration." It doesn't matter if you're all on laptops, tablets, or smartphones, more than one person at a time can work on a document—up to 50 simultaneously.

To keep tabs on what your friends, family, and/or colleagues have done, view a revision history via File > Version History > See Version History. (Or click All Changes Saved in Drive at the top, if it's showing.) A list on the right side will show you who updated the doc and when; click a name to see what they did. Give different names to different versions to make them easier to track—click the button at the upper right to view just the named versions.

To be part of the collaboration, the document has to be shared. The limit is 200 people, but if more than 50 collaborators try to edit a document, the late-comers can only view the changes.

The owner(s) of the document can set who has edit privileges. But to avoid a hassle, make a document public. Click the "Share" button on the top right, go to Advanced, then click "Change" under "Who has access." Choose public on the web or anyone with the link; some G Suite customers might only be able to make their documents available to everyone in their organization.

Public documents are made available to search engines... and Google happens to own one of those, too.

You typically access files stored on Google Drive when your browser is connected to the internet. But for those times when Wi-Fi is not available, Google Drive supports offline access.

First, install the Google Docs Offline Chrome extension (this only works in Google's browser), then go to Google Drive settings. Check the box next to "Create, open and edit your recent Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides files on this device while offline." That activates the service, but you'll have to select which files you want offline. Navigate to drive.google.com, right-click on the doc(s) you want (press Shift/Ctrl or Command for multiple files), and toggle "Available offline" to on.

If you use Gmail and Google Drive, you're in luck: you never need to attach a document ever again. That means you'll never run into that 25MB attachment limit—instead, send up to 10 Gigabytes worth of files.

The files have to be uploaded to Google Drive storage first. Insert the files into a Gmail message with a click of the Google Drive icon () at the bottom of the compose email screen. If the files are on your hard drive, drag and drop them from the Upload tab.

You can add just about any file to Google Drive for storage, but how do you work with them after they're uploaded? Converting a file to Google Docs, Sheets, or Slides format is pretty easy. Upload the file, and right-click to select "Open with." A sub-menu of choices will appear with options that let you change, for example, a Word doc into a Google Doc. It'll create a copy, leaving the original file intact.

You can also use the Office Editing for Docs, Sheets & Slides Chrome extension to edit any Office docs you drag into the browser. You can then save them back to their original format, or keep them in the Google Drive format to save space.

Open up a brand new blank Google Doc file for word processing on the desktop, and if your computer has a microphone, you have the option to do Voice Typing. Find it in the Tools menu, or hit Ctrl+Shift+S. It puts a microphone icon next to the document—click on it to speak, and what you say appears in the doc. The microphone icon turns red, and will get a target outline when it hears you.

Google's done a lot to perfect voice recognition and dictation over the last few years and this works pretty great. Not only for writing down what you say (including basic punctuation—say "period" when you end a sentence, for example) but also for making corrections and formatting changes via voice, and navigating around the document without touching a mouse. The list of supported languages goes far beyond just US English, as well. It will, however, censor your cursing with asterisks—you'll need to retype that crap later.

Looking for a specific file or doc in Google Drive? Google's got the search stuff down, so it's usually easy. If you need to do an advanced search, open the options to do so with the down arrow in the search box. From there, search on the file type, the owner, if it's starred or trashed, when it was last modified, who it's shared with, and more.

Better yet, use Natural Language Processing when you search Drive. That means you can skip the esoteric search operators and try something like "find my sales meeting minutes from last July."