10 Features of Google Drive You’re Probably Not Using

Google drive, One of the best file storage and synchronization service created and managed by Google. Google drive is one of the most popular cloud storage service out there. The main basic advantage of using it is that it is integrated with other applications of Google. Apart from this, Google also allow third party applications to integrate with the Drive. We can directly save our work in Drive and retrieve whenever require.

In this post, I am going to list some features of Google Drive probably you don’t know or you are not using it.

1. Save Gmail attachment to Drive 

You can save your Gmail attachment in Google Drive and also, you can insert documents to your Gmail  from Google drive. To save attached document just click on Drive Icon. The icon appears once your hover your mouse over the attachment. To insert files using Google drive. Click on drive icon on new message compose page.

2. Share documents with friends and family

Sharing your files and folders to your friends an family are just few clicks away. Google drive provides 15GB of free space to upload your document. Share photos album and videos in few clicks. Just select the document and click on More… and then Share, copy the link and send it over email or IM.

3.  Create your documents

You can create your Presentations, Spreadsheets, Drawing and many more thing which you can’t even imagine. Just click on create and choose your option. You can connect thousands of third-party applications to get more out of Google Drive. Click on Create and choose Connect more apps, Choose your Application and then connect.

4. Manage File revisions

You can create and manage multiple revision history of your files in Google drive to avoid auto deletion of a file version. You can edit your files and upload it to Google drive as a new revision. To upload a new revision of a file:

1. Select a file.

2. Click More. Click manage Revisions. (You can also right click on the file to get Manage Revision Option)

3. Click Upload new revision.

Here, In the above screen shot you can see two revision of a file. You can preview or download any revision of the file by clicking on the entry.

5. Use Forms to Collect Data

You can create Forms to collect data in Google Drive.Whenever some input has been provided to form it automatically get stored in a spreadsheet in Google Drive. You can create a Form by Clicking on Create, select Form.

Click here for step by step process to create a Google Form Contact us page for your blog.

6. Share your Google Drive photos on Google+

You can directly share your Google Drive Photos to Google+. Follow the below steps.

1. Click on Photos icon.

2. Click on Your Google+ Photos.

3. Click on Google Drive tab, Select Photo and Click on Add.

7. Search Documents by Person name or email id

Google provide 15GB of free space to your drive. You can store huge amount of file in 15GB of space. There must be some  incoming files shared with you. If you want to search a file sent by a particular person . Just search for a person name and it will bring up a list of files shared by that person.

8. Use Drag and Drop to Upload Your files

You can Just drag and drop your files to Google Drive and it will automatically get uploaded. You can also upload your files by clicking on upload option of Google Drive.

9. View Your document in Browser

It happens sometimes that somebody shared a document with you and you don’t know how to open it. Don’t worry, You can upload that document to your Drive and open it directly in your browser. Below the list of file types supported by Google Drive you can view in browser.

1. Image files (.JPEG, .PNG, .GIF, .BMP)
2. Video files (WebM, .MPEG4, .3GPP, .MOV, .AVI, .MPEGPS, .WMV, .FLV, .ogg)
3. Text files (.TXT)
4. Markup/Code (.CSS, .HTML, .PHP, .C, .CPP, .H, .HPP, .JS)
5. Microsoft Word (.DOC and .DOCX)
6. Microsoft Excel (.XLS and .XLSX)
7. Microsoft PowerPoint (.PPT and .PPTX)
8. Adobe Portable Document Format (.PDF)
9. Apple Pages (.PAGES)
10. Adobe Illustrator (.AI)
11. Adobe Photoshop (.PSD)
12. Tagged Image File Format (.TIFF) - best with RGB .TIFF images
13. Autodesk AutoCad (.DXF)
14. Scalable Vector Graphics (.SVG)
15. PostScript (.EPS, .PS)
16. TrueType (.TTF)
17. XML Paper Specification (.XPS)
18. Archive file types (.ZIP, .RAR, tar, gzip)
19. Audio formats (MP3, MPEG, WAV, .ogg)
20. .MTS files
21. Raw Image formats

10. Use Offline Mode

This is one of the best features of Google Drive. You can easily create, view and edit your documents in offline mode. All your changes will automatically be updated next time  you are online. This feature can only be used with Chrome browser.

If you have any queries do let me know in comments section.