10 Best Ways to Find Anything in Google Drive In 2024

If you ask me about the application which I use regularly then it is Google Drive. While working, I use it to take notes and form surveys for my website. At home, I use it to track workouts with my friends or to know about travel expenses. It’s a great tool that makes your life sorted.

You will be surprised that there are lots of things that you don’t know about it. Let’s talk about How to find anything on Google Drive and the benefits that one can drive.

Advance Searches: How to Find Anything on Google Drive?

1) Use the Keyboard Shortcuts

Are you searching for ways to streamline your Google Drive efforts? There are tons of shortcuts that you can use like:

  • Shift + s = Create a new spreadsheet.
  • Shift + t = Create a new document.
  • Shift + p = Create a new presentation.
  • / = Search your drive.
Use the Keyboard Shortcuts

Press Shift + /

There are lots of shortcuts. If you want to check the list of these shortcuts then you can press Shift + / on Chrome OS. This will provide you all a list of shortcuts.

2) Send large Files To Others 

Looking for ways to limit the size of Gmail, you can rely on Google Drive. Gmail limits the file size attachment to 25 MB which means you can’t send big audio or video clips or complex images. Google Drive lets you send the files up to 15 GB. To send the file, create the folder and upload the file to that specific folder and then you can share it.

3) Crop, Mask, and Add Borders to Images 

Once you added an image to the document, now you can crop, mask, or even add borders to the image. According to the instructions, you can do it. There are so many outsourcing web services, to handle your accounts. You can use them too, they will give you the best services according to your requirements. If you are a big brand or you are a business then you can use these services.

Crop an Image 

Select the file in your presentation and click on the crop icon in your toolbar. By using the blue handles, you can crop the image according to your needs. After cropping the image, click on “ENTER” to save the image.

Mask an Image 

Masking means fixing up the image in a specific shape. You can do the editing in a drive-in slide presentation and not in a document.

Four mask categories will appear on your screen – shapes, callouts, arrows, and equations. Select one category and fix the image. After fixing the image, you can even resize the image.

Add Borders to the Image 

You can add colored borders to an image to make it look attractive. Pick the image and click on the line color icon, it is in pencil shape. Select the color option according to your preference and after this, simply save the image.

4)  Customize the Drive Items 

Recently, Google has made changes to the drive. The default view is changed from “list view” to the “grid view” so all the documents will display in the large icons, not in a long list. 

You can even change the settings of how the items are densely packed together, you change it from comfortable to cozy to compact. To make the changes, click on the gear icon and then go to the settings option from the dropdown menu.

5) Save the Web Content Directly to Drive

Google has created an extension known as “Save to Google Drive”. This extension allows you to directly send web content like images, documents, HTML5 audio, links, and also video files to the drive-by simply by right-clicking.

Save the Web Content Directly to Drive

To enable this extension on your laptop or PC, download Google’s free browser extension. After downloading it, right-click on the web content that you want to save. You can easily access the file through your drive.

6)  Edit and Access the Documents Offline

There are times when you can’t access the internet and in this situation, Google Drive is there for the rescue. Google Drive allows you to edit or access the files in offline mode on your PC, desktop, on your iPhone, or any Android device. You can only require the internet to access the file but once done you can switch to offline mode to make the editing. All the changes will be restored once you restore your internet connection.  

Google advises you to stick with one particular device instead your data could be at risk.

Desktop

While using the desktop computer, the only thing to consider is the need to use the web browser while viewing and editing the files offline. So, if you want to use the feature you have to download Google Chrome. To start the editing offline, go to the Google browser, and in the right-hand corner, click on the gear icon

iPad and iPhone

In IOS devices, you can edit specific files in offline mode. First, to enable the offline mode you require the internet. 

7)  Check out the Revision History and Restore Previous Versions

It is a unique and amazing feature of Google Drive. It will allow looking at all the changes that have been done in Google Drive. You can even revert to the earlier versions of your file. 

You can go for the quick scan of all the activity and you don’t need to go in the details from the dropdown menu. A panel on the right-hand side of the screen will display all the changes and who made it and when.

To check out the revision history in detail, go to the file menu and choose “See revision history”. From there you can check out the details of the revision history. Don’t worry by revising it, you won’t eliminate any version. Google Drive will keep the history revisions for 100 revisions or 30 days. After that, to save space it will merge the revisions based on the size of the revision or the age of the file in the process known as “Revision Pruning”. If you want to keep the revisions for a longer time say for the file that is updated many times in a day by different people, you can also mark the individual Google Drive documents to keep the versions. 

8)  Set Drive as the default Document Location

Thinking of streamlining your cloud storage experience? You can set Google Drive as your default save location for all your files on your laptop, PC, or Smartphone. 

For Windows Users: on your laptop or desktop, check out the documents folder and right-click on that specific document. Now, from the dropdown menu select the “Properties” option. After that, click on the “Include a Folder…” and search for your folder on Google Drive. From the library location, select the “Google Drive” option and choose the option “Set save location”. To apply all the above-mentioned changes, click on the “Apply” option and you are good to go!!

9)  Search by Who Shared With or By Name of Owner

You can easily share the documents that are cloud-based but managing the files on Google Drive is not an easy task to do. At least, you should have ideas about how to search on the parameters. 

On the desktop in the more search tool, you have two ways through which you can filter the search based on people.

  • Shared With: Documents or files that are shared by a specific person. Also, forget, that you must have the email address of that specific person to search for the information.
  • Owner: You search for the files which are owned by you, not owned by you, or those which are owned by a certain person. However, you will require an email address.

Strangely, in this method, Google won’t auto-complete the email address that is mentioned in your contact list. Google Contact is a new feature of Gmail. However, if you use certain search commands apart from the more search tools, you can certainly get auto-suggestions and on the phone, you can search for the owner.

10)  Search by Inside Files or Title

If you type any word on Google Drive then it will search for that specific word or the name or the content. While it is easy to go through the text files, people don’t have the idea that Google Drive has an in-built feature of Optical Character Recognition (OCR). This feature reads the text in the images and also searches texts within the PDFs.

Besides this, Google’s smart algorithm also searches the content of an image. This is of great use but sometimes it can even lead to cluttered results. If you are looking for the file title and not the full file then go for the advanced search tool to get the item name box. It will show you the results with all the files that contain that specific word but not the content.

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