7 Google Docs Tips & Tricks You're Probably Not Using

hi there Jamie ke here today at teachers Tech hope everyone's having a great day today I want to take a look at Google Docs and I'm going to give you seven tips and tricks that uh some things that I overlooked for the longest time that I didn't realize and they were right in front of me uh that just make your life a little bit easier when managing inside Google Docs so let's get started on these seven tips and tricks here today and remember what if you like what you see please hit that like button share it with a few people and I do these weekly Tech tips so if you like what you see please subscribe to my channel my first tip tonight is about

starting where to start your Google doc from where to open it from you have a few different options when you open up your Google Docs you can simply go up to your launch uh Google launch pad up here where it looks like a rubric Cube click on it and you can see we have Google Docs where did I put my Google Docs right there uh remember you can drag these around too uh if you happen to use one more than another uh so I can go ahead and open my Google Docs and I can I'll get the nice template features I like going to here because if you're using a template they're great but that's not what my tips about here uh so the thing is if I go ahead and create uh let's say just a blank one and I I'm just going to write something in here uh like I'll just say hello where it gets stored is just right into my main part of my document here so I'll just call this one hello and I'll go here and you'll be able to see it's right here hello so I don't uh you know even this in this case right here you can see my Google uh Drive is a little bit unorganized I do have some folders and everything but sometimes I create uh things on the go and I just leave it there since it is searchable but how I like to start my Google uh docs or many of my other apps is going to the place where I want to open them from so if I have a folder I'll just go to this example folder here and let's say if I wanted to put something in here I can just simply hit the new Google docs and go to here now it opens right into a docs and it's going to be saved right into that folder so if I just type I'm going to type uh hello to here and

you'll see if I go back into my Google Drive here it is right here hello to so it gets organized you're saving a step uh in order to move something around later just go into your Google Drive and create the new uh go new and create your doc from there or any of your other documents and it's going to be in a lot in a place and you're going to keep your Google drive a little bit more organized you can also um just if I go into a folder I go right back into this example folder I can just right click and you notice you can start a Google Docs and that's going to be in the correct place so that's a little a tip just about organizing your Google drive with any of your this will work on any of your uh different apps that you're saving uh in here the next tip what I want to give you is about sharing so sharing is a really easy thing to do with our Google Docs or many of the other Google apps uh one of the features I like best about the Google world and you can see right up at the top when I have a document open I can just quickly hit share now what I want to point out to you and a lot of people overlook this because it's written so small at the bottom is this Advan tool right here so normally when we share we would just write in who we want to share with and we add it to there and we hit send uh you can see we can get our sharable link up here but if we click on the advance we have a few more options so if I send this now you'll notice that th this my other this is my other email is added to the list so you can kind of give a quick look to see who has access to this now at this point I can click and you can see I get a few different options if I go below here I can set an expir expiration date on their access to it but you can't give them can edit you'll see when I click this it will change to can comment only make comments or suggestions but I can make a custom range you can see 7 days 30 days or a custom date so then I would if you want to take away that access after so many days uh couple other options if you look at the very bottom here prevent editors from changing access and adding new people disable options to download print and copy uh for commenters and viewers so it's one of those things it's not a difficult things but I just find the way that when people first click on the share button they don't see this Advanced ones uh Advanced one when they're looking for certain things so check that out the next time you're about to share a doc

comments are another great feature in a Google doc and really easy to use a lot of people go up and click on it and create their comments needed for if they're marking something uh maybe it's just to say good job or to bring out attention to fix something I'll just write good job the one thing that you can do I'm just going to hit comment on that you can see kind of my cursor was there so that's where the comment went to if there's c a certain area you want to draw attention to make sure you highlight it first and then add your comment and oops I better put comment and then this time uh I'll just say I'm just going to say wow and if I comment on it this is attached to here so if a person was getting it back they would see exactly where you're about to comment on it uh the other feature that I like with the comments and you notice that along the side down here and this is relatively new this year the comment feature comes up right here so you don't have to go up to the top to click it I'm just going to hit comment uh but the other thing you can do is actually assign people to the document so if I was all you have to do is if I hit the plus uh symbol and I'm just going to hook it to one of my other accounts here and I can have multiple people too so I could add another person uh to it uh so it can actually will be notified uh in this one so if I hit comment and then what I know is this person is going to be sent to comment right now I haven't shared this document with that person so it's saying hey would you like to share so if you haven't shared it will just prompt you on this one so I will share it the other thing uh if you go back I'm going to go back to the comment here and actually I'm just going to pick one more section here I'll just uh go and comment again and I'm just going to hit uh myself back on this here notice right

here you can assign to a specific person so if I click this the assigned person will be notified and responsible for marking as done so you can kind of divvy up work this way by assigning different parts of a document or a task to do uh for different group me members and that person will have to be um have it done one thing to know about this though if I went to like say this area right here and highlight it I can't add it has to be a new section where you assign the role notice that if I highlight uh this and then I go comments and then if I go to put somebody under here and I'll just show you here I got to put the Plus in here and then I have the assigned comments but if I go to here and try to do the same thing it won't allow you to do it on a previous one with a uh somebody already attached to it so just take advantage of your comments and all the different things they can do have

you ever wanted to send a document to somebody and want them to just make a copy of it but maybe they're not sure how to make the copy they're not familiar with Google Docs I'm going to show you a simple way what you can do uh to change this so when they get the uh link it will automatically force them to do this so if you just go up to the URL up to the omn bar up here and look where it says edit if I just change that to copy I'm going to hit return and now if I just take this URL here copy paste that into an email or send it to somebody they're going to get this and it's going to say make a copy all they have to do is hit that blue button and it's going to automatically force them to make a copy the other thing you can do is if I just change this to preview like so I could send this I could put a link to this and notice all my editing tools are gone if I didn't want this to be edited I just want to show somebody by just putting preview and sending out that link that's what they're going to get so try these if you wanted to uh send out to force that copy or just a preview of this it's a simple little thing to do one of my favorite new features in

Google Docs this year and this is another ones too in sheets and in slides too but in Google Docs is the Explorer tool so just down below here in the right hand corner you can see explore I'm just going to go ahead and click on this and what's going to happen is it kind of creates this another panel that I can be looking stuff up it connects me to the web I don't have to be jumping back I can do research right inside my Google Docs so for example I'm just going to type the word dogs here and you can see if I needed images or uh let's say uh let's actually just start with putting in some information so maybe I could do some searching if I wanted to read something that came in from the web results and I read it opens up a new U uh tab for me but if I like what it has and maybe I take some stuff and I have to site it what I can do is use it used to be a research tool that I can insert into this but if you notice if I hit the site as a footnote here if I did take something out here and then I clicked it and I have the uh footnote in if you click these three little dots right over here you can see you can change it from MLA APA Chicago so I'll just go APA real quickly and maybe there was something else that I wanted to and I'll just go right here and I'll put this one in you can see the notes are added to the bottom of the page I can also go to images if I wanted to uh put certain images right in I can drag them over just like this and you can see that the footnote uh will come up on those ones too I can hit the plus we'll also put them right in too with the drive it connects right to my Google Drive so what it does is actually looking through my Google Drive and since my key search word was dogs they're looking to see if I have any stuff that I could connect that I have about dogs and what I found were actually the example ones that I created today for this uh for this tutorial about these tips and it went through and found the words dogs in it so if you have a lot of uh information in your Google Drive and it can automatically connect uh just from that search term so you can search be searching the web the images the drive and it also can site your information for you too I thought this was a great feature how they added this one this year here's something I

overlooked for a long time and I can't believe it was right in front of me the whole time but if I just go right up to the top right beside where the name is Dogs 2 notice star and move to so if you just want to quickly move your uh document to a new folder just go ahead and click on the folder and hit move this item once and then you'll notice that you get this my drive and hit this Arrow you can pick any folder from there so if I click on example I believe it's already in this one but then I hit move so very easy just by hitting that shortcut to move the other one is the star is this a really important document that you want to work on because if it is just simply start if you're trying to find it and then if I go over to my drive notice what I have right here is a start so there it is so if you're working on something really uh you know if you're getting a lot of documents in your Google Drive just simply start it and then just click the start and you'll find that document or a list of your important

documents my last tip today number seven is revision history now this is an old one that's been around for quite a while but if you don't know about it is a great one to know about and what it does is it you can go back in time over your document to change it back to a previous uh version of it so it's real simple to use just go up to file and I'm just using the document I created today and I'm going to go to se revision history now what I can do is expand uh the detailed revision here and you can see my timeline here from where I started at 424 all the way where it is now at 451 you can see there's the images that I put in when I was showing the explore feature but let's say if I wanted to get back to before the explore feature if I click around 440 you notice all the pictures are gone I still have the one uh footnote that maybe got put in and thought okay maybe that's where I want to go to all I have to do is hit restore this revision and restore and then I'm back at that point so it's a great feature to go back in time to uh to get something back where maybe you thought you'd lost it but and check uh check it out to see how far you can go back in time on some of the other documents so I hope you like these tips today uh for Google Docs if you know some other tips uh write them down below in the comments uh I'm always interested hearing what other people know or maybe some good tips or hacks uh inside Google Docs I do these weekly Tech tips so if you uh liked what you see Please Subscribe my channel if you found this video helpful today uh hit that like button and share with a few people I'll see you next time