Hello, it's Matt. Welcome to Collaboration Coach.
This time I want to talk about OneDrive file synchronisation.
So a lot of my customers right now have moved into Teams
and are starting to get curious about OneDrive and SharePoint.
I'm getting a lot of questions on this subject so I thought I'd do some videos to help answer them.
In this video I'm going to explain what syncing is, why you'd use it...
...and then I'll show you how to set it up for OneDrive and SharePoint.
To explain what synchronisation is I'm going to go to the Whiteboard.
Now, when you use Office 365 all your files are stored in Microsoft's cloud.
To open and edit your files, say in Word or Excel,
your device connects to the cloud and opens up the file
and then all the changes you make are saved into the cloud.
Microsoft's OneDrive and SharePoint work this way
and so do other apps like Dropbox and Google drive and many others.
To synchronise a file is to make a copy of that cloud version onto your device,
so you have one version in the cloud and one on your device,
so when a change is made to one version,
the change is copied to the other so the files are always kept in sync.
Note that only the changes are synchronised,
so for example if you add a sentence to a Word document and save it,
only that new sentence is sent to the other version,
not the whole document.
With OneDrive and SharePoint synchronisation, syncing happens in the background,
so as you make the changes they're synced automatically
and you don't have to worry about it.
Okay so that's what syncing is, but why would you want to do that?
I think there are two main reasons.
The first is if you want an offline copy of your files.
Say you were traveling on a long flight and there was no wi-fi,
while all your files are in the cloud you can't get to them without the internet.
Because syncing has made a copy of your files onto your device,
you can work on them without the internet
and with OneDrive sync,
the changes that you make to your files offline are automatically synced to the cloud
when you have access to the internet again.
The second reason is if you prefer to use Windows explorer or Finder on a Mac...
...to manage your files instead of a browser.
If you're an old geezer like me, you've spent most of your life using Windows explorer and Finder
and you've got used to working that way and just find it easier.
As I'll show you soon, syncing files means that there is a version of your file...
...that you can use in explorer or Finder,
so you can drag it around, right click it and copy it with a keyboard
and do all those other things that you're used to.
So these are the main reasons and I know there are more,
so if you have any ideas and you want to share them then please let us know in the comments.
And if you like what you've seen so far then please subscribe to the channel
because we're posting videos like this every week.
So that's the "what" and the "why". Here's the "how",
and I'm going to show you how to sync from OneDrive and SharePoint.
Almost wherever you go in OneDrive and SharePoint
you're going to see this sync button.
The sync button is all you need to choose to start syncing.
The OneDrive sync is an app that's part of Windows 10,
so if you're using an up-to-date version of Windows 10
you don't need to install anything to start syncing.
If you're using a Mac however, you will probably have to install OneDrive
and you can get that from the app store -
just search for OneDrive and it's a quick and easy install.
And I recommend you do that before you follow the next steps.
Let's start syncing OneDrive, and we're going to do this on Windows 10.
Now before I start syncing I just want to show you what Windows explorer looks like now.
You can see there's already a link to OneDrive in the left-hand panel
but there are no files in it
and in a moment we'll see what it looks like after we sync.
So to sync I just open up OneDrive from the app launcher
and I press the "sync" button.
This window appears and in the background OneDrive will start
and I have to run through the setup because it's the first time that I'm using it.
It will ask you if it's okay to start it - and just check the "always allow" box here,
and then open Microsoft OneDrive.
Then you have to sign in and it should pick up your username
and add it in here for you like it's done for me.
But in some cases you may have to type it in.
Then you choose "sign in" and the next question is where to sync the files to.
You get to choose but I recommend that you leave it as the default location.
So just choose "next" here.
It may ask you if you want to backup your folders.
These are the desktop documents and pictures folders that are already on your windows computer.
This is a good idea too - so keep those checked,
but remember if you have a lot of files in those folders
it will take longer to sync for the first time.
Then you can choose to continue to finish the setup
and then click through the messages until you get to the "open my onedrive" folder.
This will open explorer
and now you can see the OneDrive link has all your files and folders listed.
You can see it's renamed the OneDrive link to "OneDrive - Collaboration Coach".
Now I can use my OneDrive files just like any other.
I can drag it into other folders. Right click it to get to the menu
and I can use ctrl c and v to cut and paste.
To show you sync working I can snap explorer to this side of my desktop and OneDrive to the other
and if you see this PowerPoint file here called "Collaboration Coach"...
...I can rename it in OneDrive over here,
and that change will sync immediately in explorer over here.
And if i delete it, it gets removed immediately
and the same applies for any other changes that I make.
Now let's look at syncing SharePoint.
You can sync any library or folder from SharePoint in the same way as you can with OneDrive
and the good news is that if you've already set up OneDrive
then a lot of the work is done.
So to demonstrate this,
I'm on the home page of my Design SharePoint site here,
and if I move to the Assets library I can see the sync button up here.
This will sync the whole library to my Windows 10 computer
then what's happening in the background now is that SharePoint is syncing the files in the library.
If I go to Windows explorer,
I can now see a link called "Collaboration Coach",
and that's where all my SharePoint libraries and folders will be synced to.
And inside of Collaboration Coach you can see my Design - Assets folder
so that's the site name and then the library name together
and if I snap explorer and the browser side by side
you can see they both have exactly the same files and folders.
So that's a quick overview of OneDrive sync.
Thank you so much for watching and see you next time
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