Google Drive: A Guide to Never Needing Microsoft Word or a Flash Drive Again!

Google Drive is something I've found, to my surprise, that a lot of the students don't actually know about, or know how to use it.

I'm here to remedy that.


Google Drive is an amazing cloud storage system that is built right into your browser, and specifically your University of Delaware email account.

 From this point forwards, I will assume that you are using the "Google Apps" version of Udel's email service. Found here: https://googleapps.udel.edu

 Starting off, your doorway into the magic that is Google Drive starts at the homepage for Udel's Google Apps email.  The Drive tab is conveniently located immediately next to the Mail tab.  If you don't see it here, try the "More" tab for a drop-down menu!

The Drive tab takes you to this starting page, which lists all the documents, presentations, images or files you've created or uploaded.

You can click the "Create" tab to choose which type of file you'd like to create.  Documents, Presentations, even Spreadsheets and Drawings are available options.  This is super helpful if you ever find yourself out of access to the Microsoft Office suite.

I threw together a quick document, with LoremIpsum so you could see how easy (and familiar) the interface is.

Its basically "Mircosoft Word" on the internet, all stored in a convenient to access space next to your email.
The document set-up area has basically all the same tools that Word does, in almost the same locations.  It should be extremely familiar to use.

The last neat thing you can do, which ties in with my "never need a flash drive again" statement comes from the fact that, if you click on the little hard-drive icon next to the "create" button, you can actually upload a wide selection of file types.  From what I can tell, there is about a 10GB upload limit total.  And I can't seem to find anything stating specific single upload limits.  As long as your storage space is less than 10Gb you can keep uploading!

I've pretty much converted to solely using Google Drive for my documents, printing and file-sharing needs, and it hasn't failed me yet!

Let us know what you think of Google Drive and how its affected your workflow!