Get the hang of Google Drive with this quick and easy-to-follow tutorial

Of all the cloud storage and file synchronization services out there, Google Drive is arguably one of the best. The idea behind it is simple: Place any file in Drive and so long as you have Internet access, you’ll be able to view it on any device. Sure, Google isn’t the only company to offer this kind of service — but with its seamless integration with other Google services and a set of dead-simple collaboration tools, Drive easily stands out from the pack.

Using Drive isn’t tricky at all. In fact, it’s probably one of the easiest cloud services to start using. So rather than giving you a needlessly long tutorial, this guide offers a brief introduction to navigating and using the Drive interface, and also includes a few tips to help you get the most out of the service.

 

Getting started

Step 1: If you don’t already have one, get a Google account. It’s completely free, and will give you easy, synchronized access to all Google services. Downloading the Web browser Chrome wouldn’t hurt either, as there are a number of extensions and features that integrate with Google Drive.

Step 2: Once you’re signed up, you can choose to download Google Drive as a desktop app, or use it exclusively as a Web app through your browser. Either method will work, but you should download the desktop app if you want offline access to Google Docs. You can download the desktop software here or head on over to the Web-based version here.

Basic navigation

Google’s UX designers have gone to great lengths to make sure that using their services is extremely easy. Truth be told, you could probably skip this tutorial and use the time you would’ve spent reading to explore the browser and you’d likely get the hang of it after a few minutes. But just to get you up to speed, here’s a quick rundown of the basics.

To get started, in Drive, click on the big red Create button in the top left. When you do, a drop down menu should appear that’ll give you a bunch of different options. You can make a spreadsheet, a word document, a slideshow presentation, a form, a drawing, and a bunch of other things made possible by third-party apps. More on those in a minute.

We won’t go in-depth on how to use each of these free programs — but we will offer a couple quick tips for learning them quickly. 

1.) The buttons are pretty straightforward, but if you’re ever unsure of what one does, just hover over it with your mouse. A popup should quickly appear that explains the function of the button.

2.) If you’ve ever used Microsoft Office (i.e.: Excel, Word, or PowerPoint) then Google’s Sheets, Docs, and Slides software should look relatively familiar. They operate in a similar manner, and are arguably more intuitive. You won’t find as many advanced features as in Microsoft’s software, but Drive is free, so that’s to be expected.

3.) If you ever run in to trouble, just head over to Google Drive’s help page to figure stuff out.

Tips & Tricks: Getting the most out of Google Drive

Uploading and sharing documents

To upload a document to Drive, just click the upload button right next to the big red Create button. It should looks like this: . If you’ve got the latest version of Chrome or Firefox, you can skip this step and just drag and drop files into Drive from your desktop.

Google Drive is great for personal use, but what sets it apart from other cloud services is its powerful collaboration tools. If you ever need to work remotely with somebody on a project, you can share a Google document with them and make changes together in real time. To share a document after you’ve created it, look to the upper right-hand corner of the window and find the  button. Click it and you’ll be met with a window. Here you can give collaborators access to the document by adding their e-mail addresses. Once they’ve been granted access, the document should show up under the Shared With Me tab in their Google Drive dashboard, and a link to the shared document will also be sent to their email inbox.

Whilst inside of a shared document, you can see who else is currently editing it by looking up in the top right corner of the window. Collaborator names will be displayed in different colors so you can easily tell them apart. Just hover your cursor over any color to see who it represents. 

Add lots of collaborators quickly by sharing with a Google Group

If you’d like to share a document with a large group of people, you can avoid having to enter in email addresses one-by-one by sharing the document with an entire Google Group. Every person in that group (as well as people added to the group later on) will then have access to whatever you’ve shared. 

Share lots of files at once

Need to share a bunch of files all at once? Rather than sharing each file individually, you can move them into a folder and share that folder. Everyone you share the folder with will have access to all the files inside of it.

Convert your documents created with other programs (MS office, OpenOffice, etc.)

Need to share a document with coworkers or friends so they can collaborate on it, but you already have the file in another, similar program? Not to worry. As long as the docs are in the correct format, most files can easily be converted into Google docs, which can then be shared and edited collaboratively. To do this, just upload the desired file and open it in Drive. Next, click the File menu and choose Open With. Depending on the file type, Google will suggest the appropriate program to open it with. Below are the file formats that can be converted into Google documents.

• For documents: .doc, .docx, .html, plain text (.txt), .rtf
• For spreadsheets: .xls, .xlsx, .ods, .csv, .tsv, .txt, .tab
• For presentations: .ppt, .pps, .pptx
• For drawings: .wmf
• For OCR: .jpg, .gif, .png, .pdf

Revert to an older version of a document

A major problem with collaboration is that it’s generally a pain to fix something that someone else screwed up. Don’t worry if you find yourself in one of these situations though — Google has your back. Drive is programmed to constantly save your work, so it saves every updated version of your documents for 30 days or 100 revisions, whichever comes first. This makes it simple to revert back to an older version of a document if necessary. To retrieve an older revision of a document, open the document you want to change, click File, and scroll down to See Revision History. After you select this, a bar should appear on the right side of the document that lists all previous revisions in chronological order. Click on any one of them to get a preview of that specific revision. If it’s the one you’re after, click the blue Restore This Version link and everything will return to its former state.

Do more than just documents with Google Drive Apps

Google Drive is more than just a file synchronization service or a suite of free office software. Google clearly has bigger plans for it. In addition to its proprietary software, Google offers dozens of third party applications through Google Drive — apps that let you make diagrams, edit photos, build 3D models, make sketches, and more that we haven’t discovered yet. Files created within these apps will be saved and synced to your drive account just like any Google app. Check them out here.

That concludes our tutorial about how to use Google Drive, but if you’ve got any tips, tricks, or suggestions that we didn’t mention, be sure to tell us about them in the comments! 

Xseed Games is known for bringing niche Japanese games to English-speaking audiences, but it’s also got a habit of putting out games for seemingly dead platforms. Xseed VP Ken Berry talks with Digital Trends about how to keep consoles alive.

Xseed is no stranger to bringing games to the United States that are likely to reach only a small audience. The publisher was opened in 2004 in the grand tradition of game publishers like the now defunct Working Designs, the company that brought Japanese games like Lunar: The Silver Star for the Sega CD and later PS One and Slipheed: The Last Planet for the PS2 to American shores. Its goal: To release in the US the best and brightest Japanese video games that larger publishers will ignore, even if they already own the game. Xseed is notorious for picking up games abandoned by Namco Bandai, Capcom, and even Nintendo in the international market, then finding success with titles like Fragile Dreams, Sky Crawlers, and The Last Story. 

Xseed’s marquee Spring release, Pandora’s Tower, highlights another peculiar trait of the publisher, though: It releases games for platforms that have been all but abandoned in the Western market. On Jan. 15, it release Corpse Party: Book of Shadows for the PSP, Sony’s 9-year-old console that’s all but dead. That was the publisher’s second release on PSP in the past year, joining Unchained Blades as one of the last English games to possibly ever hit the system. Pandora’s Tower, an action RPG, may turn out to be the last Wii game published in the US. Why support dead platforms? Because people want to play them. 

Digital Trends spoke with Xseed vice president Ken Berry about his publisher’s strange business choices, the benefits of publishing on seemingly unpopular platforms, and what’s next.

Xseed has been one of the more adventurous Wii publishers in the United States, pushing games like Fragile Dreams, Sky Crawlers, and others that didn’t enjoy big Internet followings like The Last Story. Why has Xseed stuck by the platform?

We have to be platform neutral and willing to publish the best games available to us, no matter what the platform. With that said, we’re especially proud of the titles we’ve published on Wii since so many of them are category leaders or significant in some way—Victorious Boxers: Revolution was the first boxing-dedicated game, Sky Crawlers was the best flight sim, Fishing Resort was the best fishing game, Little King’s Story was arguably the best strategy game (or whatever hybrid genre it would classify as), Rune Factory: Frontier was one of the top ten most played games on the system for a very long time. Ju-on: The Grudge was… well, let’s not talk about that one.

The same could be said of the PSP. Just this month Xseed published Corpse Party: Book of Shadows, a game targeted at an even smaller niche than the usual RPG crowd since it’s also a horror game. Why stick with the PSP? 

The PSP is unique in that it was so wildly successful in Japan relative to other territories that when developers are making content for it, they don’t consider the international market at all since they are banking on Japanese sales alone. Even now there are still a lot of new games being made for that system as developers want a sure thing rather than transition over to Vita just yet. This creates an abundance of great PSP games in Japan that don’t get localized for overseas, so if we find compelling content and can make the numbers work out somehow. Even with somewhat low sales expectations, we’re willing to take the risk. First, because we’re gamers and want to play these games in English ourselves, and second, our initial investment is small enough that if it sells even remotely well then the title can be profitable. 

Why are publishers so reticent to continue publishing on platforms like PSP and Wii so quickly when those machines have huge, established audiences? What makes a platform “dead” in your eyes?

It’s a combination of retailers not wanting to stock software for older platforms as they reallocate what precious little shelf space they have to software for new hardware, lower anticipated sales volume and lower sales price for each unit sold. All the excitement, and higher price points and profit margins, are with the new hardware so focus shifts quickly for both retailers and publishers. A platform isn’t truly dead until all new software ceases to release on it, which in this day of digital distribution could take a very long time.

With the exception of Solatorobo, Xseed has all but abandoned the Nintendo DS. What was different about that platform compared to the PSP and Wii that pushed you away from publishing there? There are plenty of import-only DS games that US fans are still clamoring for.

Cartridge-based media is much more expensive than disc-based, plus with the PSP we had the great additional revenue from the PlayStation Store digital sales as all new UMD releases had a digital version for sale from day one.

Why do you think The Last Story for Nintendo Wii was so successful for Xseed? Do you think Pandora’s Tower will match its sales? 

I think it was successful mainly because it was a fantastic game with a great pedigree of [Final Fantasy creator Hironobu] Sakaguchi-san and Nintendo behind the development. Informed gamers had been tracking it since its first public appearance in Japan and knew that this was a gem to add to their gaming collection. We do not expect Pandora’s Tower to match its sales as we will be even farther along the Wii’s lifecycle by the time it releases, but we do still expect a strong showing thanks to the great support from the fanbase for these JRPGs on Wii.

What are the challenges in marketing a game for a console that’s fallen out of the popular dialog with gamers and the press? 

The main challenge is how to market the game in stores on a retail level because you’re not sure if and how much support the retailers are going to give a title on that platform. We really need to focus on driving demand with the fans and having them dictate to the retailers with their pre-orders, which titles need to be supported.

It was unusual for Nintendo to license one of its Japanese-published titles to a third party in the US. With Pandora’s Tower, it’s becoming a trend. Do you foresee being able to continue working with Nintendo on projects like these on the 3DS and Wii U? Do you feel like Xseed’s relationship is unique, or do you get the sense that Nintendo is more open to working with others?

I can’t speak on behalf of Nintendo, but I think this is more a special one (or two) time deal rather than any kind of trend. We had special circumstances for The Last Story where our president at the time had a very good working relationship with Sakaguchi-san from their days together at Squaresoft, and our parent company was involved in the programming for that title. Getting The Last Story to market for us was a very smooth process, and since it worked out so well for both us and Nintendo, Pandora’s Tower was just a natural extension of that “one time” deal.

Are there are any other Wii games that Xseed is considering publishing before leaving the system behind? Please say Captain Rainbow.

I think I’ve said this before in a previous interview, but I really mean it this time when I say that I think this will be the last Wii title we publish. Of course things could change if a great Wii title were to fall upon our lap or digital distribution for that platform took off, but as of right now Pandora’s Tower will probably be our final Wii title.

Xseed recently started looking for a Mobile Online Game Operations manager. How will Xseed approach the mobile gaming market? Are there older iOS and other mobile titles from Japan that Xseed thinks will connect with its audience here?

Our parent company, MarvelousAQL, has a very successful mobile business in Japan, and they are the one taking the initiative to start up a new mobile business in the US. They have a great catalog of mobile and social games that they can start bringing over from Japan, and they will publish those with original titles that are being developed here. Our mobile offerings may be more oriented for the mass market than our console RPG fare, but we will always look for games that we think our core fanbase will enjoy.

Has Xseed considered localizing games for even older consoles that are now more accessible to players thanks to digital distribution? Would Xseed ever consider localizing a Super Nintendo or PlayStation game for example?

Afraid not. There is a limit to how far back we can go when localizing games, mainly due to the technical side of having access to the original source code and development team in order to implement the localization programming. Even if the technical side worked out somehow, the challenge then becomes the business side as games that old would likely sell for $4.99 or $9.99 tops, meaning that we would have to sell hundreds of thousands of units to justify the costs and manpower. Too much allocation of resources for too small of a payoff, so our time and energy is better spent on more recent releases.

What merits do you see in releasing unlocalized imports like MonkeyPaw has done on the PlayStation Network?

There’s definitely a great merit for the gamers that get a chance to play games that they wouldn’t have been able to otherwise. From a business standpoint, it’s a great almost risk-free business, if you can find and license the right content.

So… how about a localized Retro Game Challenge 2 on eShop? Please? PLEASE?!

I think you’re asking the wrong people. We loved the original game so much that we really went way above our comfort zone on the investment it took to bring the game over here. It was an incredibly expensive project due to multiple IP owners and the extensive localization programming necessary as it was never intended to be sold outside of Japan. Our love for the game blinded our business reasoning as it was about three times as expensive to license as a typical DS game at the time, and it came back to bite us in the end when sales didn’t live up to our expectations. Even if the IP holder was open to us licensing the sequel, we can’t go into a project knowing that we’re going to lose money, no matter how much the gamer inside us wants to.