Speaker 1: Hey everyone, in today's video, I want to show you exactly how to use Dropbox if you're new to using Dropbox. Dropbox has been around since 2008 and is one of the most popular file hosting platforms out there. File hosting just basically means they take all the files that you give them and they store it in the cloud on their own servers, so you could access it from any device at any time. Now there are two things I really like about Dropbox before I get into showing you how to use it. The first is the fact that Dropbox syncs between all your devices. So I typically use it on my computer, but a lot of times I want to access a file on my phone or on my iPad, or on a tablet, on my laptop, somewhere else working remote. That allows me to do that. So I'm not tied into a computer, Mac or PC at home or at work, right? I could work from anywhere using Dropbox because all my files are stored on Dropbox.com. So I'm going to show you exactly how that works. And the second thing is, typically from time to time, maybe once a decade, something might happen to your hard drive or your computer, and you may lose files because of this. So I make sure the files I really care about, I put on Dropbox to make sure I never lose those files, right? They're much more secure because they're not just on your computer. And there's a lot of other reasons for using Dropbox. File sharing makes it easy, working remote that I mentioned, you could easily work with other people on projects on files here using it. And again, as I mentioned, there's desktop and mobile apps for it too. Now previously I made this video and I jumped around between the desktop app and the mobile app and the web version. So in this video, I'm going to show you how to use Dropbox.com, the website, because that's the easiest way to get started. Then you could watch my videos on using the desktop app and then the mobile app. So then you could figure out how it all works together. But just to make it very straightforward, let's jump into Dropbox.com and sign up. And if you click the link below, it will bring you to this page. But let me quickly show you the different plans and pricing here because there is a free version of Dropbox, but it is limited. So if you need something more than free, you'll have to upgrade to the different plans they have. And they have business plans and personal plans. So you could see the difference over here. Typically, it's related to how much space you get. So two terabytes is typically more than a lot of computers have. So that's how much storage you get and you could pretty much put everything you want. I have some of these bigger business versions that have three terabytes and more. If you're storing large video files, for example, that could come in handy. But on Dropbox.com, you can actually get started for free with very little space. But just to show you with this tutorial, I'll sign up for a new account. So the two gigabyte space is what I'm going to select over here. But if you really want to use this, make sure you select one of the plans from the other page that I just showed you. But the basic plan here again is free two gigabytes of storage and you can see some of the limitations. The biggest one is this is limited to how many devices can actually access this. The paid plans don't have a limit. So I could have them on all kinds of computers and tablets. And I have the business plan that gives me a lot more and you could compare all of that here. But let's go ahead and start with this one here. And after you go through this video, I do recommend you download the app here. It works exactly like Dropbox.com, but it's an application that you open on your computer. Everything else that I'm showing you here happens on Dropbox.com. So I'll go ahead and sign up for a new account so I could show you from scratch instead of using my business account. This tells you to download the Dropbox application, so you could actually download the application from here. And make sure you go through the install process of downloading this locally on your hard drive on your Mac or your PC. And then you could open this as a standalone application and it'll also show you this little icon up here that basically shows you what's going on with your Dropbox. But I'm going to go back to Dropbox.com and that will bring me inside of Dropbox. And this is going to look pretty much the same on the desktop application if you go through that process. The first thing I always recommend people do on Dropbox is create these type of folders that you see. And it's going to give you some recommendations just here. It says create this folder, create this folder. I'm just going to press X and start with a completely blank canvas here. So to create folders you just press this option right here and you could create a folder where you're the only one having access to this folder. You can share that later though. And you could create a share folder if you know right away that you want to share this with other people. I'm going to create a regular folder here and let's call this marketing. And do I want to invite other people right away? Right now I'm just going to set this folder to only me. I'll explain the sharing options in a second. And by default it brought me straight into that folder right now. I'm going to go back to the Dropbox icon here so I could see that folder structure. And I'll create another folder here and I'll call this sales and let's go ahead and press create. And I'm just setting this up for business. But again, this could work for personal, just backing up your computer files, anything you really could think of where you could store your files on the cloud instead of on your computer. Now inside of each of these folders anytime you could jump into these folders here by clicking on them and you could create things inside of that folder. You could create another folder to create a more organized structure and you could create documents. So you create a Word document for example or a Google Docs document. Dropbox paper again works like these other documents. But right now if I create a Google Doc document, it's going to just open up a Google Docs and I could sign into my account. And then it will be stored over here just like this. You could see untitled Google Docs documents in my marketing folder. And you also have the same option for spreadsheets and more over here as well. But typically what I do instead of creating anything from here is I upload things that are already on my computer. So if you just choose upload, you could upload files or entire folders into Dropbox. And that's typically what you want to do to get it off of your computer or to just back it up here on the cloud. So I'm going to press files and let's say I had some pictures here that I wanted to back up. So I could just select the picture. In fact, I'm going to select multiple pictures here and press open. And you could see it's going to upload those into my marketing folder just like that. They're still on my computer though. So I can delete them on my computer, but they're also backed up now. This is a great way to create redundancy if you want the same things on the go and backed up you could use Dropbox for that. Let's say you log in to Dropbox on a different computer. You could just go to dropbox.com, log into the same account and then select any of these files that you have. Just press the check mark and then you could download it to your local computer that way or on your phone or tablet as well. There are also with these three dots lots of other options besides downloading it. You can move it to a different folder, copy it, rename it, delete it. I could go ahead and press the star right here to make it my favorite here and all these types of options. But the ones that come in really useful are the download here and then I'll talk about sharing it in a second. Anytime you could also preview it by using open and preview with Dropbox and it's going to basically let you take a look at what you have on there full screen. So that's creating folders, bringing in different files, creating different files into those folders. The same thing I showed you with files you could do with folders with the check mark as well. So all your options from moving and renaming and downloading can happen with folder structure or individual files. And as far as the type of files anything you could think of you could put here as a digital file, right? Movies and videos and pictures and files. I even saved my Adobe Photoshop projects, Adobe Premiere projects, cat files. Anything you could think of it can be stored over here and backed up and accessed from any other device. So that's the overview of the structure of Dropbox, how it works with different folders and different files inside of those folders. And as I mentioned that anytime you could log into dropbox.com on any device or get the Dropbox app on your phone and you'll have exactly all of these things from anywhere that you access this from. But the second really useful thing besides just backing up the files on the cloud here and working remote is the ability to work with different people. So let me go back to Dropbox and this time let's go ahead and create a shared folder. It says I like to create and share a new folder. You could also share an existing folder. I'll show you that in a second too. But with a new folder, let's call this just shared folder and all you have to do is type someone's email here and then give them permission. So if you want them to work with you on something you could let them edit so they could delete comments and add files to that folder. Or you could just let them be a viewer here. I'll type their email and then you could write them a message too if you wanted to and then press share. And it has automatically opened that folder. Let me just show you the file structure. So this is the shared folder. It gets a little bit of a different icon over here and you could invite a lot of different members. It's going to show you how many people are inside of it, two members right now. I'm going to go back into the folder and you can see the people will have their icon over here on the right side. And when you send an invite like this, they will get an email that looks like this so they could go to the folder like this. This is how they get notified that you're trying to invite them into a shared folder to view it. So when they come here, whatever is inside of this folder, they will see that. If there's a bunch of pictures here, they will see those pictures when they go to this folder. If there's PDF documents, Word documents, they'll see that over here. If you let them be an editor, they could also create different things like documents and presentations or upload anything they want onto here. It's a great way for two or three people to work on a project together and make this basically their digital hub. Everything they want to do, they just come to this Dropbox folder from any device. Let me go back and show you here also how to share an individual file. So back on here, let's say I wanted to share this picture with someone. I'll just go back here. Let me press the check mark next to it. And here is that option right here, share. You could press this right here. And these are the share options for individual files. They work with folders too. But basically you could add someone's email over here and press share file or you could create a link. So if you wanted to add this, but not just send them directly from a Dropbox, you could copy this link and then paste that link into an email or into a note for someone else. And there are share settings here that I wanted to kind of explain because they do come in handy. You could let anyone with the link that I created have access or only the people you invite if you want this to be more secure. If someone gets a hold of this link, you don't want them in some cases to be able to open it if they don't have this option. You could always delete this link though and just do the first thing I showed you. And with some of the paid options with Dropbox, you could let things expire or disable downloading as well. But this part of Dropbox is very very useful. The ability to share files of any kind with anyone with some security options included. That's probably the main reason I have Dropbox and I have a paid upgrade to it. And the last thing I'll show you that I use Dropbox for is on the left side, there's this thing called file requests. So you could go to this tab and actually send a new request to someone. So you could set up a new request and then set up a folder or just leave the file request folder and then create that. This way people that get this email will know that you need something from them. And then they could just jump into this folder from their email and upload something. So if you have a file here, you could title it that will make this folder for you or you could change it here and description and press create and it's going to create this folder. Then I could share this file request with someone. I'll just type their email or share the link, press share. They will be notified. They'll get an email that looks like this. They know that I'm asking for their quarterly reports. They will just have to press upload and this is what they see from their perspective. They could add files from here or drag files into here. So I'll just show you as an example from my computer. That's what I want to do. And I just added that file. I could press upload and it's done uploading. I could upload more and let me show you from my perspective as the person that requested that file. If I go back to file request, there it is. I could go in here and I could see that file that was just uploaded by the other person I requested it from and I could just click on it. I could go ahead and download it or I could open it with Dropbox preview or some connected apps if necessary. But most of the times I will download it to my computer so I could open it with the correct software like Microsoft Word or Excel. Anytime you could go back to the home tab and home does organize things for you in a little bit of a different way. But you can always go to the all files tab and see the organization that I set up in the beginning of the video. And there's always a search bar if things get crowded and none of these views from grid to list view are not helpful for you, you could use the search option on top. So at this point I recommend you finish the downloading and the installing of the Dropbox app for your Mac or PC. And whatever you do works the exact same way I showed you on the website and they sync up between the different devices. Then watch my video on using the mobile app because the app I have on my iPhone is really really handy. I could jump in and view PDF files, Word documents, pictures and videos right on my phone. I never have to jump back into any computer if I didn't want to to view things or to even upload things from my phone as well. And that's your crash course on using Dropbox. And if you want to learn more about Dropbox, let me know in the comment section and I'll add resources in the description just like I have with the other videos covering Dropbox with different formats and different devices. Thank you so much for watching this video. Make sure you share it with anyone that needs to learn Dropbox and please give it a thumbs up and I'll see you next time.