Randy Dean Best Microsoft OneDrive Set Up and Usage Tips

All right, hello everyone, this is, uh, Randy Dean once again, and I am actually, uh, wanting to build a new video that sort of adds on to the video I just did recently about Microsoft OneNote. And this time I'm going to be focusing on OneDrive. This will be a bit shorter video, but I see the two products plus Microsoft Outlook sort of working together really cool. And so I wanted to give you a little something to help you with your OneDrive usage as you move with this, as well as one additional app that you might also find useful. Now, if you haven't seen the OneNote video, I'm going to give you the link to that below, and I'm also going to post a link to that video at the end of this video. Once again, my name is Randy Dean. I am called the Email Sanity Expert, professional speaker, author, and trainer on time, email, productivity management, and the related use of technology. Technology. And hey, let's dive in. Let's see what's going on. What is OneDrive? You know, one of the questions I get about OneDrive and Google Drive and iCloud and Box and Dropbox— what are these things? You know, some people are not really sure what they are. I will just say the easiest way to look at it, it's a virtual hard drive. It's your stuff on someone else's computer, and you access your stuff via your internet connection with your computer or your phone or your tablet. Tablet. And in this case, Microsoft OneDrive is stored on the Microsoft servers. And so what that means is you save your data, you save your documents, you save your files, it's all being stored at a Microsoft server location. But then whenever you log in, you can actually access those files. And the beauty of that is that Microsoft— I want you to think about this— what do you think is a bigger risk? Microsoft having a major server failure and with all of their backups and redundancies and a professional IT staff? Or you forgetting to back up your hard drive. And I'll tell you which one I think is pretty strongly the bigger risk. And so that doesn't mean you can't save stuff to your hard drive. You still have a hard drive. Uh, the computer I'm filming this program on has a terabyte hard drive. I mean, it's got a pretty sizable hard drive. But having your documents on a cloud drive like this, um, really gives you a level of security and safety on not losing your work that might be really beneficial. Now, basic setup. Assuming you work in a company that already has you using Microsoft 365— it used to be called Office 365, they just changed the name a little while ago— but assuming that you already have this, you're probably already saving some of your documents and files to the OneDrive that is affiliated with your work computer. And so the first thing I'd recommend you do is just go out and get the app. It's called the OneDrive app, and you can go get it on both Google Play and iTunes. And obviously for Windows devices. And what you'll do is you'll download this, install it onto your computer. It's going to ask you during the login process, what is your, you know, Microsoft 365 account and/or your Microsoft-related email address. You put that in. You put in the password, and boom, you're in business. And what you'll see is, you'll— once you open it up, you'll have access to the same files that you have right there on your desktop. And what's nice about this is not only will you have that on your phone, if you have a tablet, install the OneDrive app on your tablet too, and then you'll have access to all of this in all of these different places, which is, which is really cool. Because the nice thing about that is you don't have to worry about getting your stuff. Your stuff can go wherever you're at, just as long as you've got some access to the internet. The other basic setup thing that you're going to do is right here. Uh, let me move myself out of the way a little bit. You can also, once you've got this thing going on, uh, go down to the bottom of your screen and just click on the Windows icon. So let's, let's go ahead and do that right now. I'm going to pop out— this is the Office icon or the 365 icon— and let's open this thing up and let's take a look here. I'm going to pop down here and click on the icon. It's going to launch my Office suite And then what's going to happen is, as it launches, it's going to open up and show me all the apps that I currently have available that you can get and set up and use on your different devices, including— now, notice Microsoft Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote. I love the Microsoft To Do app. Couple more. But what I want to do here is just click on the OneDrive app. And watch what happens here. I click on OneDrive, and what it's going to do, which is interesting, is it's not taking me out to a web browser. It's taking me to something you should be very familiar with, Windows Explorer, the old file cabinet. And as you can see, I've got files on the PC, including documents and files, but I've also got, as part of this list, my OneDrive list. And so basically, these are— this is a hard drive, This is sort of a hard drive. It's a virtual hard drive that's stored on a Microsoft server, meaning Microsoft's computer somewhere. And, um, now what I've got is the ability to take stuff that's down here on the PC and save it up here into the OneDrive, thus giving me that backup and security that I need so that I'm less likely to lose my work. Additionally, it also gives me that access from everything that's available through the web from different products— my phone, my tablet, maybe somebody else's computer in a pinch. And so that's, that's really sort of nice. And then now let's zoom up here to the top. Here's Quick Access. Now what this is, is here's something interesting. As you start setting up your files and folders, and I want to show you this, I actually have a whole series of folders in here. Documents, um, here's my business account. If I drop down into here, you'll see I've got drop-down folders for a lot of my stuff. And some of the ones that I use most frequently are my presentations folder, my proposals folder, uh, I have an accounting finance folder, I have an article and PDF folder. I use these ones a lot. So let me show you something that's sort of cool. What you can do is if you've got certain folders that you're using all the time, you can actually set them up for quick access. And all you have to do to do that is right-click and then hit pin to quick access. And by doing that, I just pinned my accounting finance folder so that it's up here at the top, but it's coming out of my OneDrive. So this is a series of folders that are down here in my OneDrive. Some of the ones at the bottom are ones that I've used recently, but if you see that there's certain folders you're going to all the time, what you can do is, like I did, right-click and pin to Quick Access. And now my screenshots will be part of the list of folders that I have easily and quickly available. And you'll see documents, pictures, downloads, presentations, proposals, articles, and PDFs. All of this is right here, and I don't have to go searching for it in the dropdown folders down here, which takes a little bit more time. Yet it's still accessing my OneDrive right here. So that's great. Now let's talk about something. So, so this is basically, like I said, just giving you remote backup. You're going to need to build your file and folder structures to make this work. Let's, let's get back to my presentation because I want to share something else that's really cool with you. Um, one of the things that I love about this is that it, like I said, you can get there real quick. Uh, don't forget about the Windows plus the E key. Uh, that's a keystroke combo. The little Windows key that looks like the Microsoft window plus the E. If you hit them both at the same time, it'll pop up your Windows Explorer drive, which means you can get access to your OneDrive quickly that way when you're on your PC also. But here's what I wanted to talk about a little bit. When you first set up your OneDrive, I recommend that you try to take the list of— whoops, sorry about that, went forward one too quick. Take the list of folders that you previously had on your hard drive on your PC and basically make copies of them. Maybe do a right-click on the folder and make a copy of the folder up into your OneDrive account. Drag it up there so that you can make copies of your folders and maybe the files within the folders. So you have a parallel structure that makes sense to you. See, if you've spent time in the past building up a hard drive list of folders and files, why not make an exact copy of that in your OneDrive and copy not just the folders but the documents of the folders? That way, you know you've got your backup. The other thing that you're going to want to do is, um, you know, if you still want to keep some of these things on your hard drive, that's fine, but really think about having that backup built in because all it takes is one significant hard drive failure and you'll understand why this is such an important thing for you to be able to do here. And so you can do this. And one of the interesting things is— let's, let's try something here real quick. I'm going to bring back this— I want to come down here into my lower folders. I'm going to collapse the folders in my OneDrive. And then I'll just reopen it so it's top level. Let me close the Documents folder. I'm going to come down here into the Documents folder here in my business area, and let me go down to my proposals file here real quick. I'll open this up and you'll see I've got a few different documents that are in here. These ones are already showing that they're backed up, uh, which is, which is pretty nice. They've already been backed up on the PC. But let me try something here. I'm going to grab one of these. I'm going to do a right-click I'm going to drag it up and I'm going to try to drop this into Documents up here under my OneDrive account. And so I'm just going to drop it top level. And notice that when you do a right-click and drag, you get the options to either move the file here completely or copy the file. Now, a lot of times I'm going to probably recommend you hit copy, so that way you've got the original file on your hard drive and you've got the copy to your OneDrive. But notice that if you set up the linking with the file, what'll happen is you can actually have stuff on your hard drive that is automatically being backed up into your OneDrive too. You just have to set up the folders and basically say back it up to the OneDrive. Very cool. This gives you a lot of safety and security. Now let's take this one step further though. I want to show you something here. One of the things that I think is super cool about OneDrive is, um, that you can actually set it up that when you're creating new documents, the very first thing you want to do is do a Save As when you create a new, new document. And you can do Save a Copy. What you're going to want to do is make sure that where you're saving it is into one of the folders that's inside your OneDrive. If you do that, that gives you the ability to, uh, know that you've got that in that good location. I do recommend that you use the newest versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. You know, the xlsx, the pptx, and the docx versions, the latest versions that are available, because those ones allow you to then do autosave. And autosave is a lifesaver. And when I say autosave, let's just pop out here. I got a little Word document open up here. This is one right here. And as you can see, I've got autosave turned on. And by having this turned on, what that means is if I'm in here doing editing on this thing and then I step away and all of a sudden my computer shuts off or there's some glitch or something that happens, my work is not going to be lost. It'll still be there. It will do this. And notice that they've actually got a couple out here where I probably had something happen with the computer. And notice that those ones have been saved on the side. One other thing that you can do which is in here, and you'll see this up on the screen. I'm going to close that right now. We're going to talk about that in a minute. I could share this document with somebody else so that they could open it and do editing too. We'll talk about that here in a moment. But coming back to this, you can turn on the autosave. And how do you do that? Uh, it's basically real simple here. Let's pop back into that document I just showed you. You'll have to come up here and you just click the button here to turn it on. Now, if you don't want to autosave, you can turn off. I don't know why you would want to do that, because autosave is a lifesaver. If you've ever even just lost 5 minutes of work, even just 5 minutes, all of a sudden Word hangs up or something on you. That is the most aggravating time loss ever because you might— you probably just composed the best writing of your career and then you lost it. Now you got to redo the whole darn thing. It's just a pure annoyance. Turn on autosave, you don't have to worry about it anymore. Now let's pop back in and keep rolling because now it's time to talk about something else that's really cool. We'll open this thing back up. Um, warning about autosave before I leave this topic. If you like to use previous documents basically as a template for new documents of the same type, uh, for instance, one of the ones that I have is an invoice template. Um, and what I'll often do is I will just pop into my list of previous invoices, open the last invoice that I had sent out, and use that to make the new invoice for the new client or program or activity. Easy. If you have autosave turned on though, here's the problem. Let's say you open up that thing and you start— that spreadsheet, you start changing the name of the company, name of the, uh, program, you know, the amount of the fee, whatever it is. You're starting to make these changes onto that spreadsheet. It's going to say if you don't do a Save As before you do that work, it's going to overwrite your previous version with that same old name, meaning you don't have the original invoice anymore. So one little thing, if you are using autosave aggressively, the very first thing I recommend that you do is do a Save As whenever you're using an older document as a template and you want to just use that same format or template do a Save As and give it a new name as the very first thing you do. That way you don't have to worry about overwriting previous work. Now you might be able to find it through a previous versions, uh, option. Um, you know, some of these programs allow you to do a previous version and find a slightly older version of the document or file, but you don't want to have to count on that. So, um, definitely do that. Now I will tell you my strong opinion that autosave being on far outweighs in terms of benefit having it off and not doing this overwrite thing I just described. I think the risk of losing new work is significantly higher with autosave turned off than the risk of overwriting something before with autosave on. So I'm just giving you a little watch out so you can avoid either problem. Practice, learn, get better. Now, um, one other thing that you can do which is really cool is now once you've got this, you can go into your, um, phone or tablet as well as any internet-connected PC, um, and what you'll be able to do is access your files and documents. Now, this is a screenshot from my smartphone, and you'll notice that I've got access to the same exact files and folders that I had previously on my Windows Explorer account. Have to have the app, have to set up the app with username and password, but once I've got that, it works great. You might also need the related apps for your phone to work on some of these things, like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, even OneNote. By the way, interesting little thing about OneDrive, your OneNote files that you create in OneNote actually appear as OneNote files in your OneDrive, meaning you can actually get to your notes via your OneDrive. You don't have to open up OneNote to get to your notes. I know, a little mind-boggling, but basically, it's where all your stuff is. And so you'll get to learn that. One of the cool things about the app is that you can even open up PDF files on your phone or tablet often without even having Adobe Acrobat installed, because it'll give you an option to see that file in PDF form right through the OneDrive app, which is great. So get these apps, install them on your device if you're ever going to be using these on your device. Device. That way you can still have access to do your editing. Now, the other thing that is really cool that I wanted to show you here is it's a website that you can use, and this is especially useful if you are trying to access your files from a different computer from your primary work or personal computer. It's a website. You just go out and type in onedrive.live.com, and what happens is it will ask you to do a login. And you'll sign in using your 365, you know, email address and password. Once you sign in, you have access to all your files here too. And I will tell you, I know a lot of people, they actually prefer this versus this. Let's open this up. So you've got this view. Let's take a look at this again. So here's the file cabinet that you've probably been using for years and you're pretty comfortable with. Let's take a look at something here. Let's go back and take a look at that presentation view. This is a screenshot of the, of the slide, uh, I mean of the web page of my OneDrive. It's just a cleaner view and you can click in and get to your stuff. And so, um, I actually think that this is an interesting option that, you know, if you like this view, play around with both. You might prefer to use this instead of the old Windows Explorer file cabinet that's built right into your into your system. And it's your place to surf your stuff. It's also a good place— let me show you a little something here hiding in the background. It's a place where you can actually take these things and then potentially set them up to share them once you have documents and files open. So let's, let's keep rolling forward. Uh, one other thing that's cool about this, notice that you have access to this thing. I call it the, um, 365 Rubik. And the reason that it's the 365 Rubik— I'm doing this from a screenshot just to help protect privacy on my, on my PC. But you can click on this. You just put your mouse over this, click on this, it opens up this little launchpad that's right here. And notice what this little launchpad is. This is the 365 launchpad where you can open the web versions of all of these tools: Outlook, OneDrive, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, uh, OneNote, the app, Microsoft To Do, uh, the calendar option just to see your calendar on screen, and Skype. And it's very cool. Actually, one thing that's sort of interesting, let me show you something here. Google's got pretty much the same tool. If you take a look at Google, you go into the calendar, right here is Google's Rubik. And notice this is the launchpad for many of the similar tools inside of Google. Pretty cool. So I don't know who copied who here. I think Microsoft might have copied this one from Google. But don't quote me on that. I'm not sure, but I just happen to notice that these Rubik's— I call them Rubik's, they look like a Rubik's Cube— they've showed up on both the Microsoft suite of tools and the Google suite of tools when you're accessing them via web browser. And it makes it really easy to open and launch the web versions of a lot of these programs and tools. So definitely worth a look. So now, now that we talked about this, let's talk a little bit about document sharing, file sharing, etc. Um, one other thing that's cool is when you have a document open, you can simply go over to the side, come down, and hit the Share option. And what's going to happen is if you've got it running in the background— this is from my local client version of Microsoft Word— the Share options right here, it's going to pop up this little screen, and this little pop-up widget screen is going to say, who can I send the link to? And you'll enter their, your name and email address. Now they might need to have an active 365 account also for this to fully work. I would actually be curious, uh, if there's any viewers out there that have used this with somebody that does not have an active 365 account, were they able to do live sharing? I would think probably not, but I can't say that with absolute certainty. But as you can see, what happens is you can put in their name and email address, and what happens is they will get a link that allows them to click on that and open the file in browser to allow them to see the document and possibly edit the document from their computer while you have the same document open on your computer. And this allows for pretty cool real-time collaboration. You can literally have the documents open at the same time. I bugged my teenage daughter today. I said, "Hey, can you sit down with me for about 10 minutes? I want to play around with this and just make some I'm certain that this is true. She had her computer right next to me. I opened up the Word document I just showed you. She was sitting next to me. I had her log in. I gave her the share link. All of a sudden, I could see the document on her screen. And I typed in, "Hey, can you see this on my screen?" I look over on her screen, and it appears on her screen with just a very minor delay. And what was cool is where I had typed, it also had my initials, RB. Well, what happened is she goes, "Yes, Dad, I can see this. Are we done yet?" And she typed that below what I had typed in the active document, appears on my screen with an HD next to her collaboration. So basically, not only can you work on them simultaneously together, but also you can see who's made what changes where. And so that might make it very possible for you to work with multiple people on a new document or file and put it together pretty quickly, but getting numerous points of view that are in there. Um, now one of the interesting things with this work from home thing we're all going through right now, you might want to consider rolling in Microsoft Teams with this too. And basically what you could do is you could have a Teams window open where you are doing a live video chat sort of like you see me up in the corner, but maybe 2 or 3 people, and have the documents on so that way you're talking, you can see each other, and you're doing simultaneous editing and collaboration on a document or file. And I hope you see this is— this stuff is super, super cool, and it makes it really interactive and able for you to take this to a whole new level. Now, one of the things I want you to think about this Should you consider using OneDrive as your one-stop shop? Now, here's the thing. I sort of am, um, but I also have a Google Drive account, I have a Box account, and I have a Dropbox account. And part of this is legacy. Um, I have the Google Drive account because I also teach platform and stuff on Google. As a matter of fact, one of the things I'm thinking about doing, which is interesting, I took my OneNote video last week and I'm doing this new OneDrive video here. I might use the exact same PowerPoint template I've built to do both of these videos to do Google Keep and Google Drive, because I think they have almost identical capabilities, minor changes at most. And by doing that, you know, you'll be able to see this. But for those of you that are heavy Google and Gmail users, I got something coming for you, so watch for that soon. But the key thing is Do you want to have a work and separation? One of the things that's nice about having OneDrive for my business, I can now use my Google Drive more for my personal stuff. OneNote for my work-related and business-related notes and items. Google Keep for my personal stuff. I can build a firewall. I'm building a firewall between the two data streams. And the nice thing about that, in some places you almost have to do that depending on the job. If you're under things like FOIA and HIPAA and FERPA, and you know, you got litigation risk, you probably don't want to be mixing your personal data information files and your opinion document about the state of the world in your, in your work-related drive or tools or Notepad or documents. Put that in the personal stuff. And if it's really creepy strange, don't even do that on any of your computers. Do that off to the side on a notepad by hand. But, um, basically when you think about this though, all of these other cloud drives like iCloud, Google Drive, Box, Dropbox, all of those are the same as OneDrive. They're, they're your stuff on somebody else's server, which means somebody else's computer, and you get, use, and share your stuff via the web. And that's what all of these tools are. So if you've got your Apple Music, uh, cabinet on iCloud, and you've got some personal documents on Google Drive, but you got most of your work stuff on OneDrive, but you've also got a Box account that you use for third-party sharing— which I'm not sure, do you need that? You might be able to do that with Google Drive or OneDrive— that— think about your platform, think about what you need to be able to do what you need to do, but also keep your data, um, sort of set up so that you've got your security and privacy as necessary. Um, so just some things to think about. Now, one thing that's really sort of interesting here, I want to show you this. I'm going to move down here. Um, they do have something on the smartphone called the Personal Vault inside the OneDrive app. This thing's sort of cool because what it is, is it's a part of your OneDrive where you've got two-factor protection, meaning not only do you have to log in with your 365 password, you'll also possibly get your verification code sent to you, uh, when— by your text messaging app on your phone or your biometric fingerprint before you can open this thing. And what's interesting is when I opened it up, um, I took a screenshot of the very first time I opened this Look what you can put into here. I mean, you, you can put into there the stuff you want to keep super extra secret because it's got that two-factor, um, entry. Uh, and they gave some suggestions here. And let's take this even one step further: passport, driver's license, birth certificate, tax records, 1099, insurance records, vehicle information, etc., etc., etc. But I sort of looked at this and said, well, wait a minute, it doesn't just have to be this kind of stuff. You can make your own files. You can create a folder inside your vault for your private files and documents, your private conversations. Um, you know, uh, what is it that you need to keep secret or private? Birthday and gift ideas, that's a good one. Put those in something like this, and that way if you got anybody snooping, they're going to have a little bit extra hard time trying to get into your stuff. Now, I don't know if I'm going to put all this in here because you got to think about this. Eh, how much of this stuff do you want to make it so we can get out there? Then again, I'm probably going to be making a cop— a few copies of some of these. You know, like the passport and driver's license might come in particularly useful if you're in a travel situation and let's say your wallet or your passport gets stolen. They always say to make a copy. Well, if you have a copy scanned right in on your phone, um, and they don't get your phone, they just get your wallet or your passport, you might still be in business. So, uh, just some things to think about there. Um, one of the other things that I want to finish up this video on is talking about, uh, something that works really cool in conjunction with OneDrive and the other Microsoft tools. It's called Office Lens. Now what's interesting is, take a look at this, it's almost got a full 5-star rating with half a million ratings. You never see that. That's crazy. But here's why. What this thing is, is it's an app you can install on your phone or tablet. What it allows you to do is when you open up the Office Lens app, if you have a physical hard copy document in front of you, you got something sitting in front of you, right? I can take my phone, pick it up, hold it over with the Office Lens app, Open, and it will bring up the camera on the phone. And what it does is it will bring up the, the view of the document that you're about to take a picture of and an automatic sizing box right on the screen. You'll see the sizing box, and once it's sized the document properly, you hit the commit button. It takes a picture of the original document, turns it into an active usable PDF file. But wait, there's more. What if it's a multi-page document? It's got multiple items. Take picture of page 1, flip it over, take picture of page 2. Now you got 2-page PDF by hitting commit after hitting plus for each additional page. So you can make multi-page PDFs. Let me tell you how I use this thing. And, and one of the reasons I love this app is that, um, I've used some of the other scanning apps over previous years. The quality of the scans using this app is Outstanding. Truly wonderful. I mean, they— it looks just like it's on a professional scanner. And here's the thing that's also really cool about it. Because it's a Microsoft product, last I looked, it was still free. Because it's a Microsoft product, you can set it up so that every time you do one of these scans and/or auto-PDF creations, you can automatically save it into the related folder in your OneDrive. And as a matter of fact, when you set it up, it'll actually create a folder called Office Lens, and you can go in there and find all of your PDFs and all of your scans, which means you can then attach them to your emails or drop in that, uh, PDF into a document you're creating or into your OneNote. So it all cross-pollinates. It's Beautiful. And that's how I've been doing my expense reports for about a year and a half, 2 years now. Rather than waiting till I get back to my home office and trying to set up all the receipts on the scanner bed, and I'm oftentimes just sitting on the airplane, I bring down the tray table, I pull out 3 or 4 receipts, and I hold my phone up and Office Lens it. Boom. And if it's, you know, if I got like, you know, 8 to 10 receipts, I can do boom, boom, boom. Send it off before I even land on the airplane, uh, to my client. Here's my receipts from my recent trip. Here's the other thing that's cool. Office Lens won't just do pictures of physical hard copy documents. It can also take any picture that is in the gallery of your photos on your device and turn those into PDFs also, as well as any screenshot. So what that means is let's say you've got a document on your screen in electronic form from another source. You could just do a quick little screenshot of that thing and then use Office Lens to turn it into a PDF from a web page. Pretty awesome tool. Strongly recommend you take a look at it, especially if you're a 365 user. But I have to tell you, This app is so cool, it doesn't matter what platform you're on. If you're using a scanning app, I recommend you give Office Lens a try just because the quality of the output is outstanding. All right, I am out of stuff tonight. I hope you've enjoyed this content. Once again, my name is Randy Dean. I'd like to thank you for your time. Um, if you'd like to learn more about me and my programs, what's interesting is this OneDrive, uh, video plus the Office Lens I'm going to couple that with my OneNote video, which is going to be shared here on this screen fairly quickly. The combination of the two is going to be a new program I'm going to be offering my clients and customers when I get back out on the road, which looks like it might be later this summer. And I'm also going to be offering this as webinar. But if you'd like to learn about more about all of my programs, including my programs on email management using Outlook or Gmail, time and productivity and project management using Outlook or Gmail, smartphone and tablet usage at a higher and more strategic level, etc., go check out my website— web— website— this is my website— website randalldean.com and click on the Programs tab. Also, if you're interested in full-length programs on topics like I just discussed, you can click on the eLearning tab of and basically go check out and see what all of the options are on my eLearning Academy for full-length programs. If you enjoyed this video, please hit the like button and consider subscribing. I'm planning to actually make another pretty cool video shortly about how you can see your Google Calendar in your Open Outlook. It's actually a pretty easy thing to do. So if you like topics and videos, both shorter and this one's a bit longer than my normal video. But if you're interested, go ahead and hit subscribe. And if you'd like to get a whole series of PDF tip sheets on time management, email management, Outlook usage, Google usage, smartphone/tablet usage, and related topics including email etiquette, send me an email randy@randalldean.com. Put YouTube PDF in the subject line and I'll send you out a whole set of productivity PDF files that I've created many of which have links to some of my other YouTube video tips and tutorials. Hope you had fun. Thanks, everybody. Stay safe.