Google Drive

What is Google Drive?  Why Google Drive?

First Google Drive "lets you store up to 15GB of your stuff for free, access them from anywhere, and collaborate with others".  Google Drive is like another documents folder on your computer, except any file you put in this folder gets synced to your Google Drive and you can access the file on any other device (just like drop-box).  Not only can you use Google Drive as a way of backing up important files you can also share the files you upload to Google Drive.  You can share a file publicly or to just select people.  For full disclosure, if you use Gmail, your gmail storage is counted against your free 15GB.


Why Google Drive?  Google Drive includes Google Docs, a web based version of Microsoft Office products.  What makes Google Docs great it that it includes a ton of great collaboration tools including version control.  What this means is that more than one person can work on a document at the same time and you don't have to worry about messing up the other person's work.    You could use Drop-Box and share MS office files, but then if two people work on the same file at the same time, one person would lose their work.   You can upload your existing Word and Excel documents into Google Drive and they will convert into Google Docs format.  If a file uploads and doesn't keep the formatting you want, you can always upload the file in its original Word, Excel or Powerpoint format.

Like any replacement program it will not do everything the old program did in the same way.

1.  In the case of moving from MS Office to Google Drive the layout of the editors will be different.
2. MS Office files you save to your local computer Vs. Google Drive files you create online, but you can access them offline if you have installed the Google Drive app for your device and enabled offline access
3. Powerpoint editing does not work on an iPad with Google Drive, but does work using Quickoffice on the iPad
4. In Excel you use Visual Basic to add functionality, in Google Sheets you can use scripts or SQL functions (add all the heavy processing is handled by Google's servers not your device)
5. File management can be done on your computer with Google Drive installed or through the Google Drive website.