Google Snacks Volume 2 - Chrome Tab Features

The tabs at the top of your Chrome window have some features you may not know about. The two we are going to go over today are Pinned Tabs and reopening a closed tab.

Pinning tabs allows you to keep tabs from accidentally getting closed. This can be especially nice for tabs you keep open all day, everyday, such as Gmail or Drive. You can organize your pinned tabs by dragging and dropping. Pinned tabs will always be on the left side of your window for easy organization. Let's take a look at the difference between pinned verses not pinned tabs.

The above screenshot has pinned tabs. The below screenshot has not pinned tabs.

With your tabs unpinned, you can accidentally close your tabs when switching between them since the X button is almost the same size as the tab. With the pinned tab, the X is gone to prevent them from being accidentally closed.

In order to pin a tab, simply right click on the tab you want to pin and choose the option Pin Tab. It will then move to the left side of your window where all pinned tabs stay. You can drag them around to organize them as well. To close a pinned tab or to unpin the tab, right click on the pinned tab and either select Unpin Tab or Close Tab.

If you have ever accidentally closed a tab you didn't mean to close or realized you still need the tab you recently closed? Use the keyboard command Ctrl+Shift+T to reopen the last closed tab. You can even repeat this to open multiple closed tabs. Again, that keyboard combination is hold Control and Shift, then press T.

I hope this helped you get to know a Google feature you didn't already know before. If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to leave them in the comments section.

Google Snacks Volume 1 - Drive Priority and Workspaces

The new Google Drive Priority and Workspaces feature is located in your Google Drive under the New button on the left hand side. The Priority feature shows your most frequently used or most recently used files from your Drive. This is also where the new Workspaces feature is located, which is the main focus of this training.

Workspaces allow you to pin files from your Google Drive into shortcut type areas and allow you to group files that may seem unrelated into one area. You can add any type of file to a Workspace, this includes but is not limited to, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Forms, PDFs, etc. As long as the file is in your Google Drive, it can be added to a Workspace.

Why use Workspaces when you already have things organized in folders? There are a few features Workspaces offer that folders cannot. You can add files to the same Workspace from your My Drive, Shared Drives, and Shared with me. This is the first (and only) way to organize your Shared with me section. As I mentioned before, Workspaces allows you to group files that may seem unrelated into one area, and it does this without disrupting your folder organization. Since you can add files from anywhere in any drive, you can a couple files from several different folders without messing up your organization. Let's look at an example Workspace to get a better idea.

The Workspaces above are ones I created in my own Drive. I created one for files I frequently use at the beginning of the school year and the end of the school year. These files are located in Shared Drives in various folders, and while I use them frequently at the respective times of the year, I don't want to mess up the organization of those folders, especially since more than just I use them. Creating a Workspace for things that are shared with you frequently such as EOC testing materials, or IEP materials is also a good idea.

You can create a Workspace two ways. The first way you can create a Workspace is shown in the picture above, where you can create it from the Priority section. The second way is by simply right clicking on any file in your Drive and selecting Add to Workspace.

This allows you to add files to Workspaces and if you did not create one a head of time, you can create one on the fly as well. You can also add files from the Priority section either when you first create a Workspace or later on.

I hope this helped you get to know a Google feature you didn't already know before. If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to leave them in the comments section.