Google, unfortunately, does not provide a software package for Linux for Google
Drive support. However, one can still get support for Google Drive through
third-party software or one can use support provided with
GNOME
Files, aka Nautilus, which is the default
file
manager for the GNOME desktop software under
CentOS 7
Linux. To be able to access files and transfer files to and from Google Drive
storage under CentOS 7 Linux, take the following steps:
Click on Applications at the top, left-hand corner of the screen and
select System Tools.
Then select Settings.
Select Online Accounts from Settings.
In the online accounts list, click on Google.
You will then be presented with a Google Account sign in window where you
can provide your Google credentials, e.g., an email address or phone number.
After you hit enter and log in, you will then be asked to accede to allowing
GNOME to access your Google account, which will allow GNOME the following
access:
Read, compose, send, and permanently delete all your email from Gmail
See, edit, create, and delete all your Google Drive files
See, edit, create, and delete any of your Google Drive documents
Manage your printers
See, edit, download, and permanently delete your contacts
See, edit, create, and delete your spreadsheets in Google Drive
See, edit, share, and permanently delete all the calendars you can
access using Google Calendar
Manage your photos and videos
View and send chat messages
Create, edit, organize, and delete all your tasks
You can scroll down to the bottom of the list and click on the
Allow button to accept the agreement. You can then close the Google
Account window by clicking on the "X" at the top, right-hand side of the
window.
If you then click on Applications and Files, you
should see your Google account listed at the left side of the window.
You can then copy files to and from your Google Drive folders to the local
host or access files already stored in Google Drive.
Since today is the yearly
Safer Internet Day,
you can get a free, permanent additional 2 gigabytes (GB) of storage on
Google Drive today just
by checking the security settings for any Google account you
may have, e.g., a Gmail account. If you are signed into your Google account
in your browser, when you go to
www.google.com, you should see "It's #SaferInternetDay. Stay safe online
with a 2-minute Security Checkup". If you click on the
"Security Checkup" link you will be prompted to verify your security settings.
If you are not signed in, you will see
"It’s #SaferInternetDay.
Explore tips to help
you stay safe online", instead. You can also start the process by going to
Security Checkup and signing in to your Google account from that page.
If you missed the storage upgrade opportunity on February 9, Valentina
Palladino notes in
Today you can get 2GB of Google Drive storage for free that
"There's no word on when this 2GB offer will expire, but you have at
least one week to complete the security check-up."
It should only take about a minute to complete the process.
At the first step of the process you will be prompted to
"Check your recovery information" for your account.
Help us get in touch with you if there’s unusual activity in your account or
you accidentally get locked out. Don’t worry, we’ll only use this info if we
need to reach you about your account.
You will be asked to verify that your recovery phone number,
recovery email address, and security question are correct. At the next
step you will be asked to "Check your connected devices"
Next, please review the devices connected to your Google Account. Let us know
if any of these devices look unfamiliar to you, and we'll work together to
ensure no one else has access to your account.
You will be shown a list of devices identified as "Windows", "Linux",
etc. depending on what devices you use to access your account, and a city
where that device was used to log into your Google account. If they look
ok to you, you can click on "Looks good" and proceed to the next step,
which is "Check your account permissions". E.g., if you use Google Drive,
you may see it listed with "Has some account access, including Google
Drive, Google Hangouts". You will see other services listed to which
you've given permission to access some information associated with your
Google account. You will see the date authorization was granted to a
service and you have the opportunity to remove access to Google account
information by that service. If they all look ok, you can click on "Done"
to complete the process. If you click on "Continue to account settings",
if you click on "Your Google Drive storage" under "Account preferences"
on the left side of the browser window, you should see that you've been
granted another 2 GB of storage on Google Drive.
The files that you store in Google Drive are always encrypted in transit
between your systems and Google's servers and also while stored in Google’s
data centers. By confirming the settings for your account, also, you help
to ensure the security and privacy of the data that you store using Google's
services.
I use my personal cell phone for work purposes as well, since I don't want
to carry two cell phones. I have the phone's number registered with the
U.S. government's National
Do Not Call Registry. Unfortunately, though, that has not stopped all
telemarketers from calling. Since I can't know the phone number for everyone
who may call me for work-related purposes, I can't choose to ignore incoming
calls based on whether I recognize the incoming number and often
telemarketers
spoof calling numbers, so that, for instance, if you have a phone number
that is 555-555-5555, the telemarketer will spoof the number from which calls
are being placed so that you see a similar number as the calling number, e.g.,
555-555-5566, which may lead those called to assume the caller is someone
local that they may know.
When I'm working I don't want to be interrupted by telemarketing calls,
requests for donations, political spiels, etc. So I registered for a
Google Voice number, which provides me with another phone number that I
can provide to businesses or other entities that I believe may possibly
sell my phone number to others or call me when I don't want interruptions
because I'm working on something I need to focus on. Through the Google
Voice webpage, I can configure the settings for the phone number provided
by Google to automatically forward calls and text messages to the Google Voice
number to my mobile number or stop the forwarding of calls and texts to the
mobile number. When calls/texts aren't forwarded, callers can leave voice
messages, which you can listen to through the Google Voice webpage or
from email in your inbox. You can also view text messages the same way.
E.g., I wanted to check on refinancing my mortgage through LendingTree
which required I provide a phone number at the website. I didn't want to
provide my mobile number for fear I might start receiving a large number
of calls when I'm trying to work. I don't want to turn off the phone, at
such times which would mean I might miss work-related or calls or texts
from family members. And I can't be certain that my phone number won't be
sold to many telemarketers increasing the number of annoying telemarketing
calls I receive. So I provided the Google Voice number. If at some point
in the future I find I'm receiving a large number of unwanted calls to
that number, I can just delete that number from my Google Account.
The process for obtaining a Google Voice number, which is free, is
fairly simple.
If you want to synchronize files stored on a computer with the Google Drive
cloud from the command line, the only way to do so currently using the
application provided by Google appears to be to kill the
googledrivesync.exe process that handles the synchronization
and then restart it. You can kill the processes - there are actually two
of them running with the same "googledrivesync.exe" name - from the command line
with taskkill /f /fi "imagename eq googledrivesync.exe" and
then restart them with the command
"C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Drive\googledrivesync, assuming
that the googledrivesync application is stored in the
default location of "C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Drive\.
If you are using Google Sheets, which is a free online spreadsheet
service that is part of
Google Docs, for spreadsheets and need to define a name for a cell as
one can do in Microsoft Excel, select the cell for which you wish to create
a name so that you can reference the cell by that name rather than its
specific location, such as Sales!B3 to reference the cell in column B row 3
on the Sales worksheet, take the following steps, assuming you wished the
name to be Bobs_Sales:
Select Data from the menu bar at the top
of the spreadsheet window.
Select Named ranges.
Click on Add a range.
Fill in the name you wish to use to refer to the cell and below it the
location, which can include the sheet name, if you have multiple worksheets
in the spreadsheet, followed by an exclamation mark, i.e., !,
and then the cell location, i.e., columan and row, e.g., Sales!B3.
Click on Done to add the name and close the Named ranges
window by clicking on the "X" in the upper, right-hand corner.
You could then put =Bobs_Sales in a cell in the same
sheet or another sheet in the workbook to have the value stored in
Sales!B3 appear in the location where you've placed =Bobs_Sales.
That allows you to use a name that is easy for you to remember rather than
having to remember or look up the specific location for the data.
To count the number of cells containing content, i.e., those that aren't
blank, in Google Sheets, which is part of
Google Docs and is
Google's online equivalent of Microsoft Excel you can use COUNTIF
or COUNTA. E.g., suppose you wish to count the number of cells
in column A from A2 to A64 which contain data, ignoring any cells that are
blank. You could use COUNTIF(A2:A64,"<>"). The
"<>", instructs Google Sheets to only count cells that
don't have a null value, i.e., ones containing some data. Alternatively,
you could use COUNTA(A2:A64). If you wanted the number that
were blank, you could use COUNTBLANK(A2:A64).
For instance, I often use Google to find articles on my own site when
I encounter a problem that I resolved previously while working on someone's
computer when I can't remember exactly what I did previously or the cause
of the same issue when I previously encountered it. I go to google.com and
spcify some keywords I know would be on the page or blog posting I created
and follow the keywords with site:support.moonpoint.com so
Google returns only results from my site. But I've recently found that
Google is reporting it has found no results for my site when I know it should
be finding them since I know the Googlebot has crawled the site subsequent
to my posting the entries on the site, some of which I posted quite some
time ago, and since it has shown me results that indicate it has
indexed material from the site only the day before. Checking the
Index Status report for my site, I found that the number
of pages indexed has declined considerably since this time
last year, whereas I haven't deleted pages and have added over
one hundred pages/blog entries since that time. Checking the Crawl Errors
report, I see quite a few "Not found" entries I need to fix,
but they don't explain the decline in the number of indexed entries,
so I know I need to do further investigation.
If you are using Google
Sheets, which is Google's free, web-based spreadsheet program, for
a spreadsheet and need to reference a sheet in a workboook that has a
space in the name from another sheet, you need to enclose the name of
the sheet in single quotes. E.g., if I have a sheet named 2014
MoonPoint and need to reference a cell, e.g., D292, in that sheet
from another sheet, I could use '2014 Moonpoint'!D292
to reference the cell from which I need to obtain information. You
will also need to use single quotes to enclose the name if you have
other non-alphanumeric characters in the name, i.e., if you use other
characters besides letters and numbers in the name.
I sorted a spreadsheet created in
Google Sheets on a
column containing a date in order to revert to my original ordering of the
data after sorting on a column containing numbers. The spreadsheet had
a header row and another row at the bottom of the column where I summed
values in the column I had first sorted on. I was hoping merely to undo
the result of the numerical sort and get back to the sorting by date,
but I found that the sort on the date column put the header row at the
bottom of the worksheet along with the monthly sort by numeric value,
i.e., it sorted on those rows as well. I could have avoided including
those in the sort by selecting just the rows I wanted sorted by clicking
on the first row I wanted sorted and then the last one while holding
down the shift key, but I hadn't done that.
I couldn't find any way to unsort the data, i.e., to turn off the sorting
to revert to my original ordering, but Google Sheets does provide
the capability to revert to a prior version of a document. To do so,
click on "File" at the top of the workbook then select "See revision
history", which you can also get to by Ctrl+Alt+Shift+G. You will then
see a "Revision history" list with the times of prior revisions. You can
select one of those to restore a prior version of the workbook. When you
click on the entry for a prior revision, a link will appear beneath it
to "Restore this revision". You will also be shown the workbook as it
looked for the prior revision, so you can decide whether that is the
revision you wish to restore before actually restoring it.
Google Sheets
provide a free online spreadsheet program. If you want to insert
a URL into a cell in a Google sheet, the syntax is
=HYPERLINK(URL,cell_text). The cell_text is
the text displayed for the URL. It is an optional argument; if it isn't
provided, the URL will be displayed. The URL and cell_text need to be
enclosed in double quotes.
So, how do you specify cell text when that text includes quotation marks.
E.g., for a title of Fixing "To" Addresses in a Queued Message,
using
=hyperlink(http://support.moonpoint.com/blog/blosxom/2005/04/06#fixing-to-address","Fixing "To" Addresses in a Queued Message")
won't work, since the first double quote character appearing after the beginning
one before Fixing signals the end of the cell_text.
Often a backslash character, \ can serve as an
escape character
indicating that the character that follows isn't to be treated the way
it would normally be treated by software, i.e., any special significance
for the following character is to be ignored. But in this case that didn't
work. I still saw #ERROR! in the cell and a little red triangle in
the cell that when clicked on displayed Error: Parse. Nor would
using the &ldquote; and &rdquote;
that can be used in HTML coding to signify left and right double quotes.
That just resulted in that text being displayed with the rest of the
cell text. What I found did work was to use the double
quote character itself as an escape character, so that if
two double quotes are placed one after the other in cell_text,
a double quote will appear within the cell_text. E.g., in the above case,
=hyperlink("http://support.moonpoint.com/blog/blosxom/2005/04/06#fixing-to-address","Fixing ""To"" Addresses in a Queued Message") worked
to display Fixing "To" Addresses in a Queued Message for the cell
text. You don't need to escape any single quotes within the cell_text,
only the double quotes. You can also escape double quote characters within
a URL the same way.
