Google Docs Training Tutorials – Viewing Documents
Google Docs Tutorial - Part 5. How to view documents in Google Docs
As you use Google Docs more and more, your list of docs will get longer and longer. You may then want to start organizing your documents so that they are easier to find and use. In the illustration below, there are some extra documents listed for purposes of some exercises regarding viewing and organizing documents.
Your document organization will start in this column labeled All items. You have several different options, with the first being All items. With the All items option selected, you will see all of your items, that is, except for those that are hidden, as you will see later on. If you do not see the list of extra items below All items, then you may have a “+” showing here instead of a “-”. Clicking the “-” will make the “+” and then hide all of the items below All items. Clicking the “+” will make the “+” a “-” and show all of the items that were once hidden. Notice the two options for All items below.
With All Items expanded (“-”), the first option in the All items list is the Owned by me option. Clicking on this option will show all of the documents that are your documents – these are documents that you have created.
The next option is Opened by me – clicking here will show not only documents that you have created, but any documents that you are working on, even if they are owned by another user and you are sharing them. Right now, since there are not any shared documents, this list is the same as the Owned by me list.
The next option is Starred. As seen above, there are not any starred documents, so when you click on Starred under All items, there are no documents listed. Google Docs users may employ the starred option for different reasons. To explore this, click on the All items section and you see that there is an open star next to each document. If you are working on a set of documents for a project and want to find them easily, then you might want to “star” them by clicking the stars next to the documents. Then any time you log into Google Docs, you can click on the Starred option to see those starred documents that belong to the project.
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To the right, you will notice that all of the banana project documents have been “starred” so that they are easier to find.
Then, when you click on the Starred option, you will only see the starred documents (see below).
If you want to remove documents from the Starred screen, just click on the star again (see below), and it becomes an “open star” or non-clicked star. Then you will see that those documents are no longer “starred” in the All items list, and they will no longer appear in your Starred items list.
The next option under All items, is the Hidden option. If you have documents that you do not want to see when you first log into Google Docs, you can select them, and then click Hide on menu bar. If you made a mistake of hiding documents, you can click Undo to “unhide” them.
For example, if you click on the All Items option of Hidden, notice there are no documents.
To hide items in the All items list, click the check box next to the file or files that you want to hide, and select the Hide choice on the menu bar. Two selected documents are now hidden, but you can undo this operation (see below).
If you keep them hidden, they can be seen in the Hidden list. Click on the Hidden option under All Items. Now you can see the two documents in the Hidden list.
If you no longer want these documents hidden, select them as seen in the picture below, and then click the Unhide button in the menu.
They will be removed from your Hidden list and be visible again in your All items list.
The last option under All items is Trash. This is where you dispose of items that you no longer wish to keep on your Google Docs account. Right now, there are no items in the trash as seen below.
To see how the Trash works, you can experiment with putting an item in the Trash. To begin this, click on All items again and select the Banana Tree document. Then click the Delete item on the menu bar, and this will move your document to the Trash.
If you made a mistake, you can click the Undo link, and it brings your document back to the list.
In this experiment, you want to see the document in the Trash, so if you clicked Undo, be sure to click Delete again. Now, when you click on the Trash option under All Items, you can see that the Banana Tree document is now in the Trash.
If you are sure that you no longer want this document, you select it and click Empty trash on the menu bar. Be careful: This will permanently remove the document from your Google Docs account.
If you want to continue working with this document, you do not want to empty the trash. Instead, you should click Undelete on the menu bar.
The document is removed from the Trash, and it will again show in the All items list.
