This post by the author, a Google Docs expert, has really helped me in my learning process. I’ve been trying to develop an organized system of folders and files for a little bit now. This will definitely be useful later on when I start my own Google doc and have tons of files to organize.
You can find some great online articles on the Google Docs website. They have a great section on the Docs section.
I think the best way to organize docs is to use their structure feature. After opening a Google Doc, you can add a folder and name it “doc” and then drag the files in that folder to the left. As long as you are in the “doc” folder, all the files in your Google Doc are in alphabetical order. That makes it easy to find a file if you accidentally forget to add or delete a file in the wrong folder.
I like the structure feature because it keeps my documents from getting too cluttered. I also use Docs2Go (which I just installed) to search my doc collection, and it’s great for searching my entire Google doc collection.
Docs2Go works on any platform that supports Google Docs, including on Mac, Windows XP, and the iPad. It also works as a search engine on the iPad, so you can search for documents by their title or by filetype.
Docs2Go is free, and you can add your Google docs to it for free. If you’re on a Mac, you can find its software here, or on the Mac App Store. On the Windows side, I can’t guarantee that it works on all versions of Windows, but it should work on Vista, 7, and 8.
This all sounds very cool, and you can do it using Docs2Go, but I’m not sure how you would do it when you’re sitting down and writing a document.
I use this exact same trick on my mac laptop, and it works pretty well. You can click the document you want to search for, and then click the menu button to search the document you want. You can also use the Find menu to search for specific words.
I thought I read online that Docs2Go would give you the ability to search for all documents in a directory. I guess you can search only the docs you want to search for, but I haven’t tried this out on Vista yet.
This is actually something I’ve been working on recently. You can add a search option to your documents, and your search results will be displayed in a list. It’s pretty cool. It also helps you find documents you might have forgotten about, or ones that have been stored in a different location.
