Drop-In for Success (Q1)

Hello, everyone, and welcome to drop in for success workshop. What we're gonna be covering today is we are gonna be talking about file requests, naming conventions, folder automation, Dropbox transfer, tagging, and PDF editing.

For the next part of our session, I will be demonstrating these various features right on my desktop. So we're gonna head in there now and take a little look. Let's head on over here to my desktop, and let's take a look at these different features.

Alright. So first off, I wanna start with file request workflow. That allows you to request and collect files from anyone with or without a Dropbox account. For example, an event coordinator could directly collect content, submission files from presenters for upcoming conferences. Anyone can send you a file you've requested, whether they have a Dropbox account or not. All the files you collect are automatically organized into a Dropbox folder you choose. People who will upload files to your file request cannot access your Dropbox account. Only you can view files uploaded by others, unless you decide to share them.

To get started, let's go ahead and navigate to the file request here in the left sidebar. If I had any existing requests, I would see those here. So let's go ahead and go to file requests. And as you can see, there's nothing here; it's gonna allow me to create my very first file request.

The first thing I can do is I can go in and I can type a title for this. And I'm gonna go ahead and call it project a. I can also go in here and give it a description if I need a little bit more detail, and it's also gonna create a folder automatically in my Dropbox account under file requests. If I go under my account, look for my name and look for file requests, I'll find that. It'll also be listed with the name of the title that I've given to this particular project.

I can change the folder if I want; I can also set naming convention. So I can go in here, and I can decide how it's gonna look. So by default, it's gonna be file name and the sender's name. I can add some additional rules. I can go in and I can add things like the date uploaded, maybe a keyword, maybe the date that it was captured; there are a lot of different choices for me. I'm gonna go ahead and just leave it as the default. I can also capitalize initials and separate words with spaces, underscores, or dashes. So we'll go ahead and set that as it is. We can set a deadline for this particular request and even add a password. So let's go ahead and create our file request.

When it does that, it's going to allow me to actually add people's names or their email addresses. I can copy a link to this file request and I can just give this to people through email, through social media, or through instant messaging. So let's go ahead and copy that. I want to show you what that's gonna look like when we go ahead and give that to somebody. So we'll go ahead and put that link in here, and it's gonna go ahead and bring it out.

Now, what you'll notice is you'll be able to just click on the "add files" button. You can even drag things in here as well. If you have a Dropbox account, you can sign in and then you can add files from your Dropbox account. But you do not have to have a Dropbox account; you can just use this link to add files. So that's the process of going in and actually using a file request. Very, very straightforward.

So when we've looked at creating and managing requests, what does it look like in your folders? I want to show you that. So let's go ahead and go into my folder here, and you'll see we have a folder called file request. Click on that, and then we have project a. And any files that were actually added would be listed there, and you could take a look at them.

Let's go ahead and take a look at automations. With Dropbox automated folders, you can create folders that automatically perform specific tasks like converting, categorizing, sorting, or tagging. So, basically, every time a file is added to an automated folder, the requested action occurs. You can either create a new automated folder or apply automation to an existing folder, as well as any files that already live within that folder. If you're applying a new automation to an existing folder with files already in it, the automation may take a little bit of time to complete.

So let me go ahead and select the folder, and I'll just use our project a folder here that we created for our file requests. And let's take a look at how we can actually go in and create an automation for this. So we'll click the little ellipses right here on the folder, and we can choose "add automation."

We have quite a few different things that we can choose from. We can choose a category to sort the files, we can set a rule that renames the files. What we're gonna focus on here is converting files to PDF. So let's go ahead and click on that, and we can go and we can actually, if you are working with a folder that has files in it, make sure you choose the option here to apply to the current files. It'll then take this automation and apply it to all of the files that are in there. We can even go in and choose specific files that we want to convert to a PDF. So not everything is gonna get converted when it's dropped in here. And of course, a PDF will not get converted into another PDF, in this case. So let's go ahead and save this. And now we have an automation for this particular folder.

If we wanna go in and edit this particular automation, we can go in, click on the ellipsis here, and we can choose "edit automation." We can deactivate the automation, we can pause it, or we can actually go in and remove the automation completely and choose another automation if we want. So if we wanted to, we could add any of the other automation that are available, like zipping files and so forth. A lot of different choices here. So that's the process of adding an automation, editing it, and also removing it. Now adding automations can only be performed by people who have editing abilities for a folder. This action is not available if you have view-only access to the folder.

Now delivering large files or collections of files to colleagues and clients can be a challenge. While sharing through Dropbox is great for collaboration, sometimes you want to just hand off files without having to worry about permissions, ongoing access, and storage. Dropbox Transfer lets you easily and securely hand off large files or collections of files and confirm delivery. You can hand off up to 100 gigabytes of files in each transfer. You can control access with password protection, confirm delivery with download notifications, and you can even add custom branding by choosing a background image and logo for your transfer's download page. You can send the link to anyone, even if they don't have a Dropbox account, or send an automatically generated email right from the transfer.

So let's go ahead and take a look at the process of actually going in and doing this. So we'll go, we'll click on the little grid here in the upper left, we'll go to "Transfer," click on that. And we don't have any transfers set up here yet, but let's go ahead and create one. We could just go in and upload files from our computer, we can go and upload files from Dropbox, we can upload folders. And once we get done with this, we can actually, let's just go ahead and choose a file here from Dropbox. We want to create a transfer. So we'll choose our template here, it's gonna expire at a particular date. No password is currently required, but we can edit this. So let's go ahead and create our transfer. Take a few moments here. And it's gonna give us a choice to send emails to people if they want to have access to this. We can copy a link to this transfer and we can send it out through social media, we can put it through, you know, instant messaging, really, whatever we wanna do. So I'll copy that link here because I wanna show you what it looks like. And then we'll also go back here and take a look at our file transfer on how you can actually change that expiration date and re-get the links and so forth.

So let me go ahead and show you what it looks like when someone has the link. So we'll create another window here. And we'll paste it in. You'll be able to see that we can actually go in and download this file, we can preview the file. If we have a Dropbox account, we could actually download it to our Dropbox as well. So that's the process of actually receiving files through a transfer. Very, very handy feature. If you wanna go in and change the date, just go back to the transfers. You'll be able to see your transfers here. You can change the expiration date for it. You can go in and set it to expire, you can delete it if you want. All of that's available right here. And you can also send it out and do some additional changes. You can even customize the design if you want. You can go in, click on "customized design," you can upload a background and a logo, and this will make it so that when they're doing their file transfer, they'll be able to see a great background a little bit to go along with it. So that's the process of doing a transfer.

The next thing I wanna take a look at is we wanna talk a little bit about how you can actually add tags to files. So let's go back here to our list of files, and we'll look at adding some tags to some things. So we're gonna go ahead and add a tag to our vendor contract. You can go in, give it a name, and we'll just call this project quadruple a. Add that. And you can add up to twenty different tags here. The tags must be less than thirty-two characters and can only contain letters, numbers, and underscores. So I've already added a tag here, and you can add them to folders, you can add them to multiple documents, whatever you want. So let's go ahead and add one to this business letter as well. We'll just click on that business letter, and we'll go over here to the right, and we'll choose, let's make sure I click on this one. There we go. And we will add project hey. Here we go. If we wanna remove a project, all we have to do is just click the little x here, and it will, I guess if we wanna actually remove a tag from any of our documents, like this project quad a, we can just go ahead and click on that x and it will remove it. If we wanna search for anything, just type in the name. So project. And it's gonna bring up both of the files that I added that tag to. So you can quickly find your files just by adding tags to your files; a really great feature.

And finally, let's go ahead and talk about editing PDFs. This is another very powerful capability you're gonna find in Dropbox. So we can find a PDF, and we can just click on the name of the file. And this will open it up here in a preview mode, and then we can just hit the edit button. For me here, it's gonna go ahead and take us right into the PDF, and we're gonna have some options up here. Some of the great things that we can do is we can actually move pages around, grab a page. Let's say, for example, if we wanted to move this page 3 where page 2 was, we can do that. We can go in and we can rotate, right or left. So if I wanted to rotate this particular document, I could do that. I could also go in and insert pages. I can highlight. If you're working with text, you can go in and if there's fields that are editable, you can go in, click on those fields, and you can actually type text in there, or you can just choose the add text capability here. And you can click and just type in some text to add it to the document. And you can adjust its color. You can adjust its font, how big it is, all that's available here. And, of course, you can delete that as well. When you get done, you can go in and you can choose to save a copy of the document or even replace the original document. So you can edit right here right within Dropbox with your PDFs. Very powerful capability, and it makes your life a whole lot easier.

So I wanna thank you all for attending; I really appreciate your time today. Let me take you back to my slides here for just a moment. We're gonna wrap things up. We went through; we covered all of these key things. We talked about file requests, naming conventions, we talked about folder automations, we talked about Dropbox file transfer, tagging, PDF editing, all of these things we covered today. And we've reached the end of our session. Thank you so much for joining us. We appreciate your feedback, and I hope you have a great rest of your day.