Today’s Tech Tip the second in a series where I’ll cover the use of OneDrive, Teams and Sharepoint to save and share files you’re working on. In this tip I am going to cover saving and sharing files from OneDrive. Remember, OneDrive is best used for files that you are working on individually or with maybe one or two other people at maximum.
So firstly, to easily save files you are working on directly to a folder in OneDrive, make sure you’ve added a link to OneDrive in your Finder using the following steps. 
- Open Finder and click the “Finder” menu at the top of the screen, then click Settings
- In the Finder Settings window, select the “Sidebar” tab from the top
- Check the box next to “Cloud Storage” to add it to the Finder sidebar.
- Close the setting window
Now when you save a file, you can select Onedrive as a location from the left-hand side of the save window, rather than needing to click “Online Locations” and navigate to OneDrive. The beauty of saving a file to Onedrive is that it will continue to automatically save whilst you’re working on it once you have saved it the first time.
So if you can get your students into the habit of saving their work to Onedrive it can help to prevent them losing their work.
Secondly, when it comes to sharing a file from OneDrive, I would recommend opening the Web based version of OneDrive using the waffle menu from this link that posted last week. https://nanjingschool.sharepoint.com/sites/NISHub
This is because you get a lot more options available. For example, under Home you can see files from OneDrive that you have been working on recently, under Shared you can see files you have shared, or that others have shared with you and under My Files you can see all of your files and folders. This is also where you can easily share a file or folder with others.
To share a file for others to work on collaboratively,
- Select the file or folder, then.
- Either click on Share (found in the menu above), or click on the three dots, then select Share
- In the Share dialogue box, start typing email address of the person you want to share it with. Select them from the names shown.
- The MOST important step if you want to allow others to edit the file, click the drop down arrow and change it from Can View, to Can Edit.
- Add a message to describe to the recipient why you’ve shared this file with them.
- Click Send to send the link via email, or click “Copy Link” if you want to link to this shared file from another document or presentation
That’s it for today’s Tech Tip. Next week we’ll continue with this series and I’ll give some tips on the use of saving and sharing files from Teams specifically.
Tech Coach Ken