Workspaces and Shortcuts: Organising Your Google Drive

Organising Google Drive files can be cumbersome and time-consuming. Google has created inception in its Drive by creating workspaces within Google Workspace, to aid with this issue. Organising files can be even more challenging if you don’t own the files in the drive. Fintan Murphy from Damson Cloud shows us the most efficient ways to organise your folders within Google Drive. 

Understanding Google Drive

Within Google Drive, there is, of course, the traditional way of moving files around by dragging and dropping to moving to another folder. This is only if you have ownership of the files themselves. Within Google Drive, that isn’t always the case. As with other cloud-based tools, someone else may own the file or folder and you may just have view rights over it. That can be a challenge when you might want to access documents that are placed in lots of different folders and files for a project. 

If you do have the ability to move files around this, you can potentially disrupt team members as you try to organise things efficiently. For example, you might be working on a project with documents in lots of different folders and move it somewhere else. Another team member comes to try and open it and finds it missing from the folder it was originally in. Clearly, it is more useful to have those documents in one place but how can that be achieved? Google has answered by offering shortcuts and creating workspaces within Google Drive. 

Priority and Google Workspaces

The priority area is a smart method that Google has created to give users ease of access to their documents. At the top of the priority area, it will show you common files and what you are working on in that exact moment. It will also try and predict the documents and files you might need. You are able to scroll across to see what it is suggesting to see if these are relevant to your projects. 

You can also create workspaces within the priority area. Workspaces are private only to you - other people can’t see them and you can’t share them. Based on the names of files and contents of files, Google will suggest if you’d like to add documents to your workspace. Files can be easily added through the sections of ‘Recent’, ‘My Drive’, and ‘Shared Drives’. 

You can select files and add up to 25 files to your workspace. This makes accessing particular files much easier. You can see the first five documents you have placed in the workspace but click on ‘more’ to see what other documents you have placed there. This is a great method to bring documents together that you may not have ownership of into one place without disrupting the file structure for other people. 

Shortcuts in Google Drive 

Shortcuts are a great way of adding one document to a file without removing it from a folder. Simply hover over a document and right-click to be given an array of options. One of these options is to add a shortcut. When you hover over it with your mouse, a question mark can be seen to the right of the option which can explain a little more about shortcuts and how they can be used. By clicking it, you are creating a shortcut to the original document. 

You can add these to any folders and they make accessing priority documents much easier. From here, you can even add them to a workspace. 

With a shortcut, you can single out the documents that you actually want and need, rather than recreating the extra folders in a workspace. One thing to note is that adding a short cut will not inherit the permissions of the folder that it is in. 

If you add the shortcut and place it in your folder, and want other people to have access to it through your folder, you will have to ensure people have permissions in the original document or folder. 

Organising Your Drive

Due to most of us using cloud-based storage as our primary place for storing documents, these tips can help with the organisation of these spaces to ensure ease of access and neatness for productivity. 

As a longstanding member of the Google Cloud Partner Program, Damson Cloud specialises in bringing people and ideas together through new ways of working. We champion the very best practices in remote working and change management, helping companies and their teams collaborate productively from anywhere in the world. To find out more about our services, check out our library of tutorial videos or our blog.