Google Drive has become a big competitor to Microsoft Office 365 in both cloud storage and office software. One of the reasons for its popularity is that you can learn the basics very quickly.
While the basics may be easy to learn, many of the best features go unnoticed. In fact, there are dozens of features hidden within the Sheets, Docs and Google Drive menus.
Whether you want to be more productive, want to learn how to search for files faster, or want tips for managing your cloud backups, Google Drive is going to be more powerful with some advanced Google Drive tips – we’ve selected the best ones.
Use the advanced search tools
One of the biggest problems you’ll run into with more frequent use of Google Drive is searching for files again. Fortunately, Google Drive has several advanced search features that you can use to pinpoint your files.
Click the search bar and click More Search Tools. You now have an extensive list of tools for fine-tuning your search. For example, you can choose the file type – from photos and presentations to .zip files and folders. You can also search for owner, which is useful for finding general content.
This is just the beginning. You can also filter the results by the time the files were last modified and also filter by the text found in the file itself. For example, if you wrote an article about a specific recipe, but remember only one ingredient that you wrote in the article, you can find the recipe by simply entering the ingredient itself.
Log access and restore backups in Google Docs and Sheets
Google Docs and Google Sheets will automatically save when you continue working on your document. What many people do not know, however, is that you can click on the text All changes saved to Drive to view and restore previous versions.
Google Drive will automatically log all changes from the beginning if you first created a file on Google Drive itself. And with just one button, you can restore old versions. Or just scroll through previous versions and click each one to highlight all changes.
This can be useful when you are discarding old text that you will need again in the future, or if you need to check past edits for missing details. You can also click any previous version and rename it to make it easier to find and change in the future.
Restrict Permissions to Specific Cells in Google Sheets
Sharing Google Sheets and Docs files to collaborate with others is easy. Just click File> Share> Get Share Link. However, once you set permissions for everyone who has this link to be able to edit your document, they can, by default, make changes to absolutely anything.
In Google Sheets, and hopefully in the future in Google Docs, you can manually lock certain sections so that no one other than the original owner can edit them. This can be very useful when you are working on a document in a large group, but you need certain ranges to be protected from accidental deletion.
First, click and drag the area you want to protect, right-click and select Protect Range. From there, a new panel will open on the right side of the screen. Give the range a description so you can understand what the range is, and then click Set Permissions.
You can now make the range editable only by the owner, which is useful for pinned columns and rows. Or, you can set permissions for specific people via email, which is useful if you want to block specific pages or lines for different tasks.
Create new content quickly with quick links
If you want to quickly create a document without visiting Google Drive and browsing the user interface, you can save time by entering the following address into your browser’s address bar. Before doing this, make sure you are signed in to the correct Google account.
- Doc.new – new Google Docs project
- Sheets.new – new Google Sheets project
- Presentation.new – new Google Presentation
- Sites.new is a new Google Sites project
After using these links once, they will reappear as suggestions the next time you enter them into your browser’s address bar. So creating a new document is as easy as typing D into your browser’s address bar.
Just remember that you will need to move the document to the folder later if you want to organize your files a little better.
Convert Word to PDF or PDF to Word Document
Once you’re done with your Google Docs document, you can convert it to PDF very easily. Just click File> Download> PDF. There are also many options for other file formats here, including plain text (.txt), EPUB publishing (.epub), and Microsoft Word file (.docx).
You can also do it the other way around by downloading the .PDF file to your drive and then clicking it to open the preview and clicking Open with Google Docs. The result you get in Google Docs will depend on how the .PDF file was created, but sometimes you can edit the text in the PDF as well as edit other elements.
Sometimes the import may appear as a blank page. This usually happens if the image has been converted to PDF. When you’re done editing, simply click File . Easily create drawings or diagrams
It is probably best to use a third-party tool if you need detailed graphics, but if you need to act quickly, clicking Insert You are provided with tools for drawing, creating basic shapes, adding text, and importing other images. There are even tools for repositioning and resizing shapes and aligning shapes for symmetry. When you’re done, you can click Save & Close and it will be imported into your document. This feature is available across the entire suite of Google Drive apps. – 
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