Google Drive and Docs

Slideshow presentations can be great for addressing a room full of students or participants, but wouldn’t it be great if you could accept questions and comments electronically during the presentation? Well… you can now! Video shows an example (try to view it full screen!). Step by step instructions under video. Accept and present audience questions Presenters can start a live Q&A session with an audience during a presentation with Google Slides. You can present questions at any time, and people can ask questions from any device. Start a Q&A session Open a presentation in Google Slides. At the top, next to “Present,” click the Down arrow. Click Presenter View. In the new window, click Audience tools. To start a new session, click Start new. To resume a recent session, click Continue recent. To stop accepting questions, click the on/off switch in the Q&A window. Note: If you use Google through your work, school, or other organizations, you can choose who can submit questions: In “Presenter view” window, click Audience tools and change “Accepting questions from…” Show questions from the audience Presenters can display audience questions during your presentation. Under “Audience Tools,” find a question you’d like to display. Click Present. To change the question, find a different question and click Present. To stop showing the question, click Hide. Review recent sessions Presenters can see questions from recent Q&A sessions. Open a presentation in Slides. At the top, click Tools  Q&A history. Recent sessions will appear on the right. Ask and vote on questions Audience members can ask questions during a presentation: Go to the link at the top of the presentation. Example: goo.gl/slides/a1b. Click Ask a question… and type a question. To ask an anonymous question, check the box by “Ask anonymously.” Click Submit. Vote on questions Audience members can vote on the questions they would like answered. Go to the Q&A link shown on the slide. Below the question you’d like to vote on, click  or .

Google Sheets has come a long way, so far that I consider it a viable alternative to Excel. I did, however, bump into a little annoyance recently involving scientific data collected in a spreadsheet. Luckily it has an easy solution. Say you’re collecting some measurements and you want to include “cm” after each value. If you add cm to the data (1cm, 2cm, 2.4cm, 12cm), you’ll notice that sorting the data results in some unexpected orderings. To get around this, you can set up a custom format for the column of data. Highlight the data you want to format. Click the Format menu and hover over “Number” (or click Number format  in the toolbar). Hover over “More Formats.” Select Custom number format. Search in the menu text box to select a format. You can also add your own custom number format into the text box. In our case we would add (0 “cm”) without the parentheses in order to have “cm” added at the end of each value. Click Apply. This works fine as long as all the units are cm. Have to put cm, mm, etc., in the same column? Sorry… I haven’t figured that out yet.

Please also see the knowledge base article on Google Drive for an overview of Google Drive use. Also see Google Team Drive (part of Google Drive) to see if this makes more sense for your collaborative project. Moving content from shared Google Drive folders Here’s what happens when users move items from a shared Google Drive folder. A file or folder in Google Drive can be moved by dragging it to a new location or by selecting the item and clicking the Move to folder icon. Moving a file or folder from a shared folder into My Drive (or any other folder) is a move and not a copy, so the moved content is removed from the shared folder. As a result: Users will no longer see the moved files or folders in the shared folder. Any permissions on the moved content that were inherited from the shared folder will be removed, and new permissions will be inherited from the destination folder (together with permissions explicitly set on a file or folder). Example A file has been shared with users A and B. Users A and B have access to the file, regardless of its location. The file is stored in folder X, which has been shared with users A and C. Users A, B, and C have access to the file. The file is moved to folder Y, which has been shared with user D. Users A, B and D have access to the file, but user C no longer sees it in folder X and no longer has access to the file. Notifications when moving files When a user moves a file from a shared folder to My Drive, the user sees a warning before the move takes effect. This helps reduce the risk of a user accidentally moving files and removing access from other users. If the user proceeds with the move, they will see another message notifying them of the change and giving them a chance to undo it. In addition, users can track activity for files and folders in My Drive to see the history of changes that have taken place, including notices when files are moved. This means if you share a folder from My Drive and someone moves an item out of the shared folder, you can see a notice in the activity history that the file was removed. The notice also tells you who moved the file, and when. Why does it work like this? Google Drive uses the folder metaphor, which states that a file exists in one place. So when you drag a file from one folder to another folder, you remove it from one folder and add it to another. All the permissions that the file inherited from the shared folder are lost and all the permissions from the new folder will be inherited. This is different than how labels work in Gmail or how shortcuts work on computer operating systems. Google Drive works like this because allowing users to...

Insert an equation in Google Drive Open a document in Google Docs. Click where you want to put the equation. Click Insert Equation. Select the symbols you want to add from one of these menus: Greek letters Miscellaneous operations Relations Math operators Arrows Add numbers or substitute variables in the box. To add another equation box, click New equation. To show or hide the equation options, click View Show equation toolbar. Use equation shortcuts You can type “\” followed by the name of a symbol and a space in an equation to insert that symbol. For example, \alpha will insert ?. To type superscripts or subscripts, type “\”, then press Shift + 6 or Shift + –.

Ever wanted to link from one of your Google documents to another? You can! Go to a Google doc you want to link TO. Click on share. You can still make it shared only with you, or whatever is appropriate. Grab the link available in the share area. Go to the document you want to link FROM. Highlight some text in that document and click the add a link button. Paste in the url you grabbed from the share area and voila!

Need an easy way to print materials at CPS that you may have created at home or elsewhere? Use Google Drive! Log into your CPS Google Account and head on over to Google Drive in Google Chrome (which allows easy drag and drop functionality not always available in other web browsers). Put all of your local materials into a folder and drag this folder up into Google Drive through Google Chrome. Once your materials are up in Google Drive, just log into any networked school computer with access to a printer, open up a web browser, log into your Google account, access your materials and print. No need for thumb drives or trying to connect your personal computer to a school printer.

You can have Google Drive files show up in multiple Google Drive locations. You can either copy files, so you in essence have two different files in different locations, OR you can have the same file APPEAR in two different locations. The difference is that if you have an individual file ADDED to multiple locations, edits to the file will appear in both locations. If you make a copy, they are separate, so editing one copy of the file will not affect the other. If you want to add existing Google Drive files to additional Google Drive locations, you can highlight them in Google Drive, hold down SHIFT and Z and then choose the folder you would like to add them to, and then click the green “add here.” This will quickly add existing materials to two or more folders and file changes TO EXISTING files will be inherited. Please note that you’ll still have to add NEW MATERIALS to both locations moving forward… The locations aren’t exactly mirrored, although the FILES themselves reflect changes when put in more than one location. You’ll also need to share the new location… probably with just read/view permissions with those people you wish to have access. You can do this with a link and then just share the link with staff. If staff don’t need to edit… it’s always better to limit them to read. Good things seldom happen with shotgunned heightened privileges when heightened privileges are not explicitly needed.

Someone asked the other day, “Andy, I deleted a bunch of events from Google Calendar, but I want to get them back. Any way to get them back?” Why yes… yes there is a way to get them back! When you delete an event you created or have edit access to, it stays in that Google calendar’s trash for 30 days. When you go to the trash, you can restore events, or delete them forever. Note: Anyone who has “Make changes to events” or “Make changes AND manage sharing” permission for the calendar can see and move events in the trash. On your computer, log in with the appropriate Google account and open Google Calendar. On the left side of the page, find the My calendars list. To the right of your calendar’s name, click the dropdown menu > Trash. You’ll see the events that were deleted from this calendar. Check the box to the left of any events you want to move. Click Delete forever or Restore selected events. To delete all the events in your trash, click Empty trash now.

For an easy way to put words on a page, you can type with your voice in a document. At the moment, this feature is only available in Chrome browsers and on Chromebooks. Before you get started, make sure that you have a working microphone either built in to your device or connected externally. In a Chrome browser, open a document. Click the Tools menu > Voice typing. A pop-up microphone box will appear. When you are ready to speak your text, click the microphone or press Ctrl + Shift + S (Cmd + Shift + S on a Mac) on your keyboard. Speak your text clearly, at a normal volume and pace. See below for more information on using punctuation. When you’re finished, click the microphone again. Note: While voice typing in Google Docs is only available on computers, many Android and iOS phones and tablets have built-in microphones that you can use with a document. Look for the microphone icon on your mobile keyboard. Correct mistakes while voice typing If you make a mistake while you’re typing with your voice, you can move you cursor to the mistake and fix it without turning the microphone off. After correcting the mistake, make sure to move the cursor back to where you want to continue voice typing. You can also right-click words underlined in grey to see a list of suggestions. Use punctuation with voice typing When you are speaking text in a document, there are several phrases you can use to add punctuation to your text: “Period” “Comma” “Exclamation point” “Question mark” “New line” “New paragraph” Note: At the moment, this punctuation is only supported in German, English, Spanish, French, Italian, and Russian.

Having trouble finding something in Google Drive? Here are a few things to note and to try: If you are having trouble finding a new document (or spreadsheet, or slide, etc.) try looking under the “Recent” list. Sometimes it takes Google Drive a little bit to update its file listing, so if you hit “Recent” you can goose it into doing so. This usually happens when a user creates a new document and closes it rather quickly, so Google has a chance to save it, but not necessarily a chance to refresh the file listing. Having trouble finding something share with you? Try clicking on the “Shared with me” option. This will list everything shared with you and it will give you an opportunity to add these to your own drive, so then you can organize them AND so that you will always see the latest version of the shared resource. Still having trouble finding something? Try the search box! It’ll look through everything… and it will also allow you to search through your trash if appropriate. Options are diagrammed below: