Saving And Sharing Files

Most of us have learned to use computer programs on a PC or a Mac, and we have learned that you must always Save or Save As your work, or it would get lost - because the program crashed, the computer rebooted, or the power went out.

We have also learned that to share files, we have to email the Word or Excel file to a colleague.

Well, neither of these situations are true with cloud computing using apps in your browser or on your mobile device.

Saving Files

When you use cloud computing, the simple fact is, you don't. The data is saved in the cloud immediately as you make the changes - provided of course that you are connected. As an example, I use a Google Doc file and make some changes to it. When I am connected to the internet, the changes are saved immediately - within a second or less. You can see that happening at the top of your window:

As you type, you might see "Saving..." in the area outlined in red above, but it goes away too quickly and I couldn't even capture it.

Going Offline Temporarily

Well then, what happens when there is a glitch in your connection, and you are working on a document? You can still make changes, and they are kept in your browser, unsaved, until you're connected again. Once you reconnect, the changes will be saved:

To take this screenshot, I turned off my WiFi to go offline. Three things happen:

• The bolt icon appears to the right of the document name to show that you're offline.
• The Saving... notification appears, but doesn't go away because changes cannot be saved since you're offline.
• The Trying to connect... notification appears.

Once you reconnect, you'll very soon get to the situation in the first screenshot above, and "All changes saved in Drive" appears.

I do not recommend working offline this way for extended periods of time. There is always a good chance that your browser or your computer will crash, you forget you have unsaved work and close the browser, or you close the tab. This situation is meant for temporary connectivity glitches, not for real offline work. It is possible to do so (you will have to install Drive File Streaming and use Chrome), but that is a topic for another Article that I don't have time to write now.

Notifying Colleagues About Changes

So, you have finished editing a document, remembered that you don't need to Save it, and now you want to tell your colleagues about the work you did.

There are several ways to go about it:

• DO NOT DO THIS. The obvious one that most people first gravitate to is to use the "Share" button - but please don't do this! See the next section about what Share really means and why I don't want you using it to notify people of changes to the document.
• Useful but not the best. In both the Google Document and Google Sheet browser apps, there is "Email collaborators..." hiding under the "File" pull down menu. This may be a good choice for some types of notifications, but it suffers from the shortcoming that you cannot email individual members of a group, and sometimes you don't want to bother the whole group when you're just collaborating with one or two people. I manage Team Drive permissions using Google Groups, and so I do not recommend the "Email collaborators" action.
• Good with close collaborators. If you've been working with somebody on a document (but not collaborating in real time), it might be OK just to email them "Hey, I changed the Such And Such document. Please have a look!" Presumably they know where to find it in G Drive. That's fastest for you, but it will need little more work from the recipient since they'll have to go hunt for it in G Drive. I have developed a habit to be detailed in my emails and spend a tad more of my time so that the recipient can spend a bit less of theirs. It's just common courtesy.
• Best. This method is the one that I recommend, and I hope that you will take the little extra time to learn it and use it. It involves getting the link to the document, and emailing the link.

Getting the link to a document is something that you do from the G Drive folder where the file (Google Doc, Sheet, or any other file type) is stored. If you don't remember where the file is stored, you can find that location from Document Details (under the File menu in Docs and Sheet, or under the "more" 3-dot icon in PDF). For Docs and Sheets, you can also find it here:

Click on the highlighted icons, and good things will happen.

When you locate the file in G Drive, right click its name, and choose "Get sharable link."

The link will get copied to the clipboard and you will be notified:

The link is now available on the clipboard, and you can Paste it (for example Ctrl+V) into an email that you then send to your collaborators.

About Sharing

I asked you not to a Share a document, but there is obviously a reason why the button is there in the first place. But please only use it if you know what you're doing and really mean it, and not just to inform somebody of a change in the file. That's not the purpose of Sharing.

To Share a document means giving another person (or group of people) the permission to do things with the file and also places that file into that person's "Shared with me" area in G Drive. The email notification that the recipient gets is in fact not the primary reason for the existence of the Share action. Giving a permission to a file this way circumvents other ways we use to control who has access to files in a Shared Drive. It also clutters up the "Shared with me" area of the recipient - who has no control over it - if you share a file with me, I can never unsee it again - it is forever cluttering up what I think of my area.

I by far prefer to manage permissions for an entire Team Drive. Giving permissions on a file-by-file basis is fraught with potential for error, for example giving a person outside of the organization the right to edit or even delete the file!

Please, be thoughtful when Sharing!