From the course: Google Docs Essential Training

Sign in and create a doc

From the course: Google Docs Essential Training

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Sign in and create a doc

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- [Instructor] Let's create a Google Doc, which is Google's product name for a word processing document. Think of it as the Google equivalent of Microsoft Word. There's a few ways to create and access a Google Doc. The first way is to go to Google Docs directly by pointing your browser to docs.google.com. Before you can use Google Docs, you'll need to be signed in with a Google account. And if you don't have one, you'll be prompted to get one the first time you visit the site. And remember, it is free. Now, I'm currently using a Google Workspace account for this course, which is the paid version, but it's completely free. And in fact, if you are signed in and you have multiple Google accounts, you can make sure you're signed into the right one by clicking on your profile avatar on the top right-hand side of the screen. This actually works with any Google product on the web, by the way. So from here, you can see what Google account you're signed in as. And if it's not the right one, you can click Add Account down here at the bottom. From here, you can just flip back and forth between accounts, which is useful if you have a personal Google account and a work or a school account. I can see down at the bottom all of my recent documents that I've already created with Google Docs. And to create a new one, you can always click Blank Document here on the top left-hand side of the screen. If you need a little help getting started, you can use any of these templates to get started. In fact, you can click Template Gallery here and expand this into a much larger list. There's so many options here, from teaching aids to business aids to personal aids. And to use any of these, you can just click on it, and it's going to create a document that's populated with this information, and you can just change it with your own. I'm going to click the arrow to get back to that main screen. So I could click this to create a blank document. Most of the time, however, you're going to be creating a Google Doc from Google Drive. Now, Google Docs is built directly into Google Drive, which is Google's very popular and fantastic cloud storage service. And I do have a course in the library on Google Drive, so if you're interested, I do recommend watching that to find out everything that Drive can do for you, which is important because Docs, after all, is built in so heavily with Google Drive. To get there, point your browser to drive.google.com. And also, from any Google product, once you've signed into your Google account, you can always click this thumbnail grid icon on the top right-hand side. Now, this is across every Google product, just like your avatar icon. From here, you can click to access Drive or Docs. To create a new Google Doc from Drive, click the New button on the top left-hand side of the screen. From here, you could click once on Google Docs or hover your mouse over the arrow to the right of it. And you can click to create a blank document or choose from that Template Gallery that we just saw. I'll create a blank document, and this is going to bring you to that same place that it would hit if you clicked that Blank Document icon right in Google Docs itself. It's going to take you to this screen, a blank, new, untitled Google document. And now we are ready to get started.

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