Sign up & Register for one drive account

Launching One drive from your desktop/Laptop

Step 01 – To get started let’s start up OneDrive by going to the bottom right hand corner of your Windows Task bar near the time & date. We’re looking for the OneDrive icon which could be located either on the task bar -OR- if you single click the UP arrow it will give you this expanded menu and the OneDrive logo should be there, click on it to launch it.

Step 02 – Once you clicked on the OneDrive icon this window should pop up, if your not logged into your OneDrive account than you may get prompted with a SIGN IN screen. If your having trouble with logging in check the OneDrive Login tutorial for assistance. 

Step 03 – With this OneDrive window opened we have two options, we’re going to go with the option (02) and go ahead and click the “View Online” button to continue. Once you click the View Online button it will open your OneDrive account through a web browser (i.e. Chrome, Fire Fox, Edge…etc).

Once your OneDrive account is pulled up on your web browser (i.e. Chrome, Firefox or Edge). Your OneDrive window should look very similar to what is in the picture above. As you can see on the left hand side of the window under your account name you have My Files, Recent is essentially a log file that keeps track of recent activities you’ve completed on your OneDrive account, Shared is files your sharing with other people and Recycle Bin is just a trash receptacle to delete files or folders.

Understanding Onedrive file system

If you are already familiar with how file systems work you can skip this section, this is a just a overview of the file system Microsoft uses (similar to other cloud services like Google Cloud) in OneDrive.

Once you have successfully launched your OneDrive account through a web browser this is the screen (or something similar) you will be greeted with. Let’s quickly go over the main features (picture above), +NEW button allows you to create NEW folders which is obviously important for organizational purposes. Also the +NEW button allows you to create new Microsoft product documents like EXCEL worksheets or documents in Microsoft Word.

Finding Home

As you can see above we have two screens on display, in this section we will be demonstrating an interaction before we dive into that let’s me put a few things into context first. If you look at Screen 1 notice in the top left hand corner marked with the (01) “My Files” this is telling us where we are inside our OneDrive account. When you see the “My Files” in the corner that’s telling us that we are on the HOME or base/starting location of your OneDrive account. Anytime you log/sign into your OneDrive account this is the page you will see. No matter where you are navigating through your OneDrive account you can always click the “My Files” and it will take you back to your home. Now that we have the “home concept” down we can now move onto Interaction 1.

Interaction 1

In this interaction we just want to go into the “Email Attachments” folder, so very simply we are going to click on that folder and now it will open up Screen 2. Now let’s talk about that location indicator again on the top left hand corner (02) you can see it says “My Files > Email Attachments” this is just telling us that we are inside the Email Attachments folder that is located inside your (home base) “My Files” folder. Anytime you see an arrow in between two names it’s telling you the order hierarchy in which the files/folders are being placed. Again remember no matter where you are you can always click on “my Files” to return to the your home/starting location.

using onedrive to send large file via email

The problem with e-mail servers is that there are some restrictions, the one were tackling today is limited file sizes you can attach to your emails. With OneDrive we are going to resolve this issue and you will learn how to attach a link for the location of the file IN THE CLOUD. First of the file we will be using today is an image, it’s  T-REX logo file. Let’s go into the “Email Attachments” folder and find that file, here it is. (Picture below)

Step 01 – Now that we found the file we need let’s start by hovering over the file and you’ll notice a symbol with THREE DOTS, click on that (01) and a new menu will expand. Scroll down to “Copy Link” and click (02) on that and this new screen will pop up. It looks intimidating don’t worry we’ll walk you through it, next we need to talk about managing permissions & access.

Step 04 – We need to talk about permissions & access, once you clicked on the “Copy URL” OneDrive wants to know “who, what where & why” gets to access your file and what they can do with it. For this tutorial we will not be diving into “SHARING & COLLABORATIONS” with others, we will cover this topic in the future.

Anyone with the Link – This is the default that OneDrive will use, this just allows anyone with this link access to the file. Not the more secure way, please use better measures for more data sensitive material.

People in “Name of your organization” with the link – This is set for people that are within your company, group, school or organization.

People with existing access – This just allows you to manage and track who you have already given access to this file/folder.

Specific People – This is a custom list allowing people from any groups within your contact list to be added for permissions & access.

 If you have the premium version of OneDrive you also have access to set a expiration date on when the permissions would end. Once you have your permissions set and copied that link we can move onto using our Email service to create and add the URL LINK for our large file attachment.

Now just jump into your preferred email service provider, I’m using Outlook through my Fire Fox web browser. As you can see I’m sending my boss Chris that TREX logo image file we were looking at on my OneDrive account. Now that I have the link I’m going to just paste that link into the email so now when he clicks on that link he can look -OR- download the image. Now that my email is complete I just hit the send button and this task is complete.