DEV Community

Cover image for Google Drive Beginners Guide: Tips and Tutorials
Dome Poh
Dome Poh

Posted on

Google Drive Beginners Guide: Tips and Tutorials

What is Google Drive?

Google Drive is a popular cloud storage service that is powerful and easy to use. However, if you're new to cloud storage and haven't used competitors like Dropbox or Box, learning how to use Google Drive can be overwhelming. This guide will help make it easy. If you don't already have it on your phone, also click the download buttons below to download the app for Android or iOS.

How Google Drive works?

To get started with Google Drive, first the end user must create or sign in to a Google account. The end user then types drive.google.com into his or her browser. Then, he or she clicks My Drive and sees all of his or her Drive folders. Then, the user can either upload files from his or her computer or create files in Google Drive. Alternatively, the end user can download an app to his or her device. Once the device is connected to the internet, the user can access his or her Drive from within the app. Files that the user adds to one Google Drive folder are available through the Google Drive web app or the Google Drive folder on each device.

What are Docs, Slides and Sheets?

Google Drive's suite of office applications comprises Google Docs, Google Slides and Google Sheets. The suite can be compared to Microsoft Office's word processor, presentation and spreadsheet programs. However, Google Docs lacks some features that those Microsoft Office programs have. The suite is simple, collaborative, and free. Each application enables users to create and edit documents, presentations and spreadsheets that they can store in Google Drive. Users can access the apps on the web using browsers including Google Chrome, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Edge, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari and Opera. There are also mobile apps for Google Android and Apple iOS. Each application also enables users to save, edit and share files in Microsoft Office formats.

Types of supported files

As an online storage service, the primary concern for most cloud storage solutions is space, but the type of files supported may be significant to your users. Thankfully, Google Drive supports a lot of file types, including.jpg,.png,.gif, MPEG,.mov, and.avi - Learn more here.

There are no file size limits on Google Drive. However, there may be limits on what can be stored depending on the type of file.

Documents: Up to 1.02 million characters. If you convert a text document to Google Docs format, it can be up to 50 MB.

Spreadsheets: Up to five million cells for spreadsheets that are created in or converted to Google Sheets.

Presentations: Up to 100MB for presentations converted to Google Slides.

All other files: Up to 5TB.

This is all we have to get started using Google Drive. Follow this gdrivetips.com to learn more about google drive tips and tutorials.

Top comments (0)