With spring almost upon us I wanted to give a few tips to you for clearing up your Google Drive. It is pretty normal for most of us to find that our Google Drive has become a hot mess of files and folders and these can make finding and editing your documents more difficult.
Remove Untitled Documents/Sheets/Slides
If you do a search of your google drive you will probably find a lot of documents called “Untitled”
I just checked my drive and I have 12 “untitled documents”. How do I know which of these can be deleted (removed from drive)? If you click the Grid View Icon 
you will see that list as a bunch of thumbnails. Pick the ones that are blank or you know you can delete and remove them.
Bonus tip: if you hold down the CTRL or CMD key when clicking on files you can choose individual files without having to select them all.
Use the trash icon 
once selected to put the files in the trash. Files in the trash are emptied automatically after 30 days.
Give Your File a Useful Name
This might seem obvious but naming a file something useful can really help when you want to find that file. Most users will use the search feature to find a file before they look in folders.
If you put more information in the file name then it will make it easier to find! Put the date or year in to help differentiate between files.
Organize with Folders
Making folders is a great way to put files that belong together into one place. One tip if you cannot decide where to put the file is to just make a folder for certain document types.
Color Code Your Folders
If you right click on a folder you can use the change color sub menu to add a color to your folder.
Here is the same list of folders as shown above but with colors applied.
How to Deal with the “Shared with Me” Folder
My last tip is about the Shared with Me folder that appears in the left sidebar. Spoiler alert! You cannot organize this folder since the files in there do not belong to you!
What you can do is to add items from the Shared with Me folder to My Drive. Select the file and choose Add Shortcut to Drive. Once the shortcut has been added then you can put it in a folder, and organize to your heart’s content.
Happy spring cleaning! I hope that you find some time to clean up your Google Drive as well!
Google Certified Trainer