Google Drive is a productivity suite that is being used by millions of users worldwide. Now if you are using Google Drive more than once a week, here are some of the best Google Drive tricks you should learn to master the Google’s productivity suite. Some of the tricks that we will be learning today include, creating a table of contents in Google Docs, using Google Drive’s offline feature, learn to add links between documents and look for older versions of the files, etc. Create Table of Contents in Google Docs Having a table of contents in online presentation or documents helps in easy navigation. It comes in handy if you are creating an e-book or documents consisting of more than few pages. Alternatively, if you are doing a presentation using Google Docs, you may want to have the table contents for easy navigation. Creating table of contents in Google docs is as easy as clicking a button. Here is how to do it. Open any document in Google docs. Make sure you highlight all the main headings and subheading and set them as Heading 1, Heading 2 or Heading 3. Example: If you have a title and three main points in your document then highlight the title and set it as Heading 1 and then highlight other main points and set them as heading 2 or heading 3 respectively. Once you have set all the headings, it is time to show them in the table of contents. When in Google Docs, open the document for which you want to create a table of contents. We will show the table of contents on a separate page. So add a new page to the first page of the document. Next, click on Insert and select Table of contents. That’s it. Table of contents is added to your document. Clicking on the links will go to the selected content section. Add-ons: The Google Docs also supports add-ons. There are two add-ons that you might find helpful while creating a table of contents. 1. Table of Content – If you don’t like the inbuilt table of contents function in Google Doc, then the add-on named Table of Content can do the task for you. Open Google Docs, click on Add-ons and search for Table of Contents and install it. An advantage of this add-on over the inbuilt table of the content function is that it shows the table of content in the Sidebar, making it easier to access the contents. A very handy add-on if you are doing a presentation on Google Docs. 2. Paragraph Styles – Another add-on that you may find handy while using Table of contents is Paragraph Styles . It allows you to manage the formatting of your headings, create your own custom style and also create a table of contents with page numbers in Google Docs. Voice Typing – Dictate Documents to Google Drive If you haven’t tried the Voice Typing feature in Google Drive, you should give it a try. We all use the standard method of typing using our keyboard. However, for a change, you can try the Voice Typing feature in Google Docs. To enable the Voice Typing, open Google Docs, click on Tools and select Voice Typing. Alternatively, press Ctrl Shift S to enable the Voice Typing. A small dialogue box will appear at the right-hand side of your screen. Here you can select the language in which you want to speak which is by default set to English. Click on the Mic icon to begin Voice Typing. If asked to allow the browser to use your Microphone, allow it. To stop Voice Typing click on the Mic icon again. You can also add punctuation in Voice Typing such as Period Comma, Exclamation point, Question Mark, New line, New paragraph, etc. You can use the Voice Typing Help to learn how to edit, format and resume your document through voice commands. Scan Images and Documents If you aren’t aware of this feature, then let me tell you that you can use your Android phone as a portable scanner to scan images and documents on the go. To use your Android phone as a scanner, you should have the Google Drive app for Android installed. Open the App and tap on the Icon you can see in the bottom right corner of the app screen. A pop-up menu will appear with options such as Upload, Folder, Scan. Tap on Scan to start scanning. It will open your camera app. Place the document or image that you want to scan and let it scan the document automatically. All your scanned documents will be uploaded to the Google Drive as PDF file. Interlink Google Docs / Add Links to Document Texts The ability to interlink documents is a nice and handy feature to those who want to provide a reference to their previous documents such as research articles. Though manual linking is not a groundbreaking feature, but the ability to add links to text within the documents will save you from the hassle of finding old documents, and copy/pasting their URLs manually. Here you can link to various files in the Google Drive. To do this, highlight the text in your document to which you want to add a link to the previous Google Drive document. Next, click on Insert and select Link (Ctrl K). In the link field, type a search term to find the matching documents in Google Drive. Select the file if found, and click on Apply. Google Drive Search Function Google Drive offers advanced search feature, and you may not be aware of all of them. Here are most useful Google Drive search features. Search Text in Images and PDFs Another handy feature in Google Drive is that you can search images and documents by entering any search term that is present in the document. If you have an image that has some text in it, you can type the search term in the Google Drive search bar, and Google Drive will scan all the documents and images to find the document or image with matching search terms inside them. For example, have a look at the below image. It was taken with a very low-resolution smartphone camera. When I upload this image to Google Drive and search for the term System Date, Google Drive will scan the image to find the matching word and if found it will show it in the search result. Well, as expected, it did show this image in the search result for the term System Date. Google Now Search Another search-related feature that you can use in Android phone is Google Now. You can ask the Google Now to search for a file in the Google Drive. Launch Google Now personal voice assistant and ask the Google Now to find a specific file in your Google Drive account. For example, say “Search Drive for XYZ” and Google Now will scan the Google Drive for the matching terms. Google Drive Advanced Search Function Google Drive search also allows you to filter your search terms according to a specific person, date, type, name, search terms, email address and owner, etc. It comes in handy if you only want to search files for a specific date or from a specific person belonging to a specific email address. To do this, go to Google Drive main interface and at the end of Google Drive search bar click on the Drop-down arrow button. Here you can select the file type such as PDF, filter using date modified, owner, email address, search terms, title, location, etc. Once done, click on Search button to begin the search. Sync Google Drive Accounts Desktop Client for PC You can install the Google Drive desktop client on your PC and Mac. With this, you can get access to your files on your local computer as well. What’s more? You can specifically select which folders can sync and which cannot. This is a handy feature for those who upload documents to Google Drive frequently. All you have to do is drag and drop the file to Google Drive folder on your PC. It also gives you offline access to the files in Google Drive if you need them on the go. Changes will be applied when you connect to the internet next time. Enable Google Drive Offline For the Google Drive offline feature to work with Google Drive Desktop client, it is necessary that you enable it first. The Google Drive offline feature allows you to access your recent files and folders, view and edit them even when you are not connected to the internet on your PC. If you make any changes to the files and folder, the changes will be applied to the Google Drive account next time you connect to the internet. To enable Google Drive Offline feature, go to your Google Drive account, click the Gear icon (Settings) from the top-right side of the Google Drive interface and select Settings. Go to Offline section and check the box to enable Google Drive Offline mode. Sync Multiple Google Drive Accounts If you have two or more Google Drive account, then it is a tedious task to switch between the accounts every time you want to sync your files from the computer to Google Drive. However, there are two possible solutions to this problem. The first one is sharing your other Google Drive accounts with your main Google Drive account. That is, sharing folders from other Google Drive account with your main account. The second solution is Odrive. Sharing Google Drive Folders – To do this, open your other Google Drive accounts (not your main Google Drive account) and share the root/main folder with your main Google Drive account. To do this, right-click on the Folder that you want to share and click on Share. Next, enter the email address of your main Google Drive account and click on Done. Now login to your main Google Drive account. Click on Shared with me and here you will see the folder that you have shared with yourself from your other Google Drive accounts. Select the shared folder and click “Add to My Drive” button. That’s it. Now your other folders will sync with your main Google Drive account on your PC. Odrive – Odrive is your best bet at the movement. Odrive is a desktop client that allows you to access and sync all your Google Drive accounts at one place. Apart from Google Drive, you can also sync other cloud storage accounts including, Dropbox, OneDrive, Box, etc. Find Older Version of Files When you make changes to a file in Google Docs, the Google Drive will save the older version of the files as well. Just in case you need it, you can view the file and make necessary changes. So, if you want to find an older version of any of the Google Doc file, then open it in Google Docs, click on File and select See History Revision. If you have uploaded a file from your computer to Google Drive, then right-click on the file and select Manage Versions to see the older version if any. Find and Delete Files to Free Space To every Google Drive user, Google offers 15 GB of free cloud storage space. However, if you deal with big files, this space will fill up in no time. However, not every file present in your Google Drive is an important one. At times we upload files for temporary use and forget to delete them. In such cases, you can delete the large and unnecessary files from your Google Drive to free up some space. An easy way to find out the largest files in your Google Drive is to visit the Quota page. Alternatively, you can also visit it from Drive >> from the right-hand side, you can see how many GBs of storage has been used from 15GB. Hover your cursor over it and then click on Drive icon from the pop-up box to visit the used Quota page. In the Quota page, all the files will be shown sorted according to their Size (largest files first). Check all the files and delete the one that you think is not required anymore. Clean Trash/Bin in Google Drive After deleting the files from Google Drive, they will be moved to Trash or Bin folder. It is similar to Recycle Bin in Windows PCs. However, to clear up space, it is necessary that you also delete files and folder from the Bin folder as well. To empty Bin, go to Google Drive interface and under New, click on Bin tab. Under Bin tab, all the deleted files will be listed. You can empty the Bin at once by clicking on Bin at the top and selecting Empty Bin, or you can manually right-click on the files and click Delete forever.
