Documents

Linking to another web site is easy as we've seen, but sometimes we'd like to post a document on our site. If it's not too big, you can just copy and paste the text from the document into your web page. If it's a longer document you can embed on your web page, like we did for YouTube videos. This is also easy, but it involves a few steps which you'll see below. Most documents that you might want to share are in either pdf or Microsoft Word format. If you use a Mac and write in Pages, you'll need to save your Pages document in Microsoft Word or pdf format before you continue. You may want to share a web site that is behind a paywall, like the New York Times. You might have a digital subscription to the New York Times, but your classmates probably don't. In that case you can either print the web page to pdf, or copy the article to a word document and then follow the steps below.

Upload document to your Google Drive

To get your document onto your web site, you'll first need to upload it to your Google drive. Your Google drive is a storage area in the cloud where you can upload and share documents. You get to it by typing drive.google.com into your browser's address bar. Once there, you'll see any Google sites that you are editor of and any documents that you may have uploaded. If you have a pdf or Word document that you want to add to your Google site, you should drag and drop it to your Google Drive. To do this, open your Google drive in a browser (drive.google.com), then open Finder (for Macs) or File Explorer (for Windows) and find the document that you want to upload. Select the document and click and drag it to your Google drive. That should upload it and you should see the name of your document in your Google drive.

Make Your Document Shareable

The document in your Google drive can't be shared on a web site unless its settings are set to shareable. Your document is shareable if there is an icon of several people next to its name, like this:

If you don't see those little people, you need to make your document shareable in order for your class to see it. To do this, right click (on a Mac, press Ctrl-click) on the document name in your Google drive. You'll see a window pop up. Click the Share button:

This window should pop up. Note that at the bottom it says Restricted.

Click on the text that says

Change to anyone with the link

You should see this window. It now says:

Anyone on the internet with this link can view

If you wanted to change it back to be restricted, you can click the drop down box, but you don't, so don't do that; just click Done

The little people should be next to the file name in your Google drive, which means the file is shareable and can be seen when published on your web site.

If you wanted to share the document with someone via email, you could click the Copy Link box; that would copy the link to the document to the clipboard and you could paste it into an email.

Insert your document on your web page

Switch tabs on your browser, go from your Google drive to your Google site. Go to the page where you want to insert the document and click Insert Drive on the right hand side, or select From Drive by bringing up the Quick Circle by double clicking (from Drive is in the 6 o'clock position). A list of all the files and folders in your Google drive will come up. Select the document you want to embed and click Insert in the bottom right. Your document will be inserted into a pop-out box. When users want to read it they can expand the box and it will grow to full size.

Alternative to documents in a pop-out box

If you don't like your document in a pop-out box, you can link to the document by highlighting some text on your page and clicking the link icon. If you get the shareable link from the document in the Google Drive (see Get Link above), you can paste it into the link icon to make your text link to your document, just like it could link to a web page.

Preview Your Page

As you go along, you may want to check to see what your finished site will look like and see if the links, embedded photos, documents, and Youtubes work right. You've been working in edit mode, with the edit tools on the right hand side of your screen. To see what the published site will look like, click the preview button at the top of the page.

To get back to edit mode to continue to work on your site, either click the back arrow in your browser, or the click the blue X in the box on your page that looks like this:

Google Sites

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