12 Shortcuts for Google Drive

One of my favorite ways to save time is with shortcuts for Google Drive. These are simple shortcuts and provide such a nice way to save time while working with Docs, Slides, and Sheets.

And some of the shortcuts only require ONE simple keystroke! Such a timesaver!

The only problem?

It can be tough to remember all the different options.

But I have a way to help remember those shortcuts…and save you time!

shortcuts for google drive

Today, we’ll take a quick look at:

• how to use these different shortcuts
• a visual tool you can store in your Google Drive so you can remember all of them

The Google Drives shortcuts are divided into two main categories…let’s take a closer look:

SHORTCUTS TO CREATE NEW ITEMS

These shortcuts for Google Drive all use the shift key plus a letter to create a new file.

When you are in your Drive and want to create a new Google Slide, for example, click shift and p at the same time.

A new Slide will be created automatically, saving you time from navigating to create a new file like usual!

Here are the shortcuts to create new items:

SHORTCUTS ON SELECTED ITEMS

These are my favorite shortcuts for Google Drive because they only require ONE keystroke!

As long as you have an item selected, such as a Google Doc, you can click any of these keys to access the shortcut:

My go-to shortcut is rename!

Just select a file, click the letter n, and you can rename it!

SO much faster than right-clicking on the files, navigating down to rename, and so on!

REMEMBERING ALL THOSE SHORTCUTS

So these are pretty amazing little shortcuts, right?

But it can be tough to memorize all of them. To help with this, I created a little resource for us!

These little menus can be stored near the top of your Drive. I named mine 1 and 2 so they would appear at the beginning of my Drive where I can always see them.

I store them along with my custom colors swatches…you can read more about those here: How to Add Custom Colors to Google Drive.

Now whenever I’m creating, I just take a peek to use those shortcuts and save time:

Would you like a copy for your Drive?

Both slides are in one file to make it easy to share with you. To view them as two separate files in your Drive, make a copy and delete the first slide. Now you can store the two separate at-a-glance menus in your Google Drive and save some time:

Looking for more colorful timesavers? Here are a few of my go-to resources guaranteed to save so much time:

Thanks for reading! I hope these shortcuts for Google Drive will help save you so much time in your teaching!