Email sent 17 June 2015
It’s similar to a competitor’s program, DropBox, with free access to the cloud (for the first *15 gigabytes) with your unique email address as a user ID, and a Microsoft account password, which you enter when you first install it, and it then can be stored on your PC (to save entering it all the time).
*Free space decreased to 5 gigabytes for new users after July 2016. Office 365 users have 1 Terabyte of free space.
While it’s similar to DropBox, it has features specific to Microsoft Office, which it ties in tightly with. If you don’t have Microsoft Office, there’s a free preview version (Office16) which I recently installed, and after a few hiccups , learning experiences, it’s been most helpful.
Go to
to install it.
How it works when it’s installed is like this
First, it automatically creates a folder on your C: drive
C:\users\ (user-name) \onedrive\
with a few folders within that folder. One of them, which I’m using a lot, is called Documents for all my Word documents and Excel spreadsheets which I copied in there. I also created a few other folders for a few other large files.
As I said, it automatically creates the free space in Microsoft’s cloud services on the Internet.
Just login, if you use another PC, with your email address and password.
As you add, delete, or modify your Microsoft Office documents (inside your OneDrive folder), it automatically synchronizes those changes in file addition/deletion/modification on the cloud (i.e. inside Microsoft’s cloud services).
If you use another PC , it synchronizes the changes, then synchronizes both PCs without you having to think about it.
If you want to fetch files from another PC that are not in the OneDrive folder, that option must be first specified in the sending PC, then Microsoft's cloud services will allow you to upload and download files and folders to a second PC. You may switch this option off on the sending PC when complete.
If you want to share files with other users, you can specify that by entering their email address against the files/folders you want to share. Then tick the box. The email address can be any email address. It then sends those people an email containing the hyperlink with "read and edit" permission or "read-only" permission, as stipulated by you as owner of the file/folder.
A shareable “Get a link” option allows you to create a published link to the file or folder, so that anyone knowing the link can access it. Once again, you can choose what people with the link can do to the file — whether they can just view it or edit it as well. You can also make the file available publically i.e. for search engine queries by people who don’t know the link.
Importantly, when you provide "read and edit" permission, any changes or additions made to that file/folder will then be replicated on your local hard drive, so be careful. Obviously, it can also be very useful when you are seeking group input.
You can stop sharing a file/folder at any time (by removing its tick box).
Click here for further details on sharing.
I’ve already found OneDrive’s Recycled folder quite useful, I’d deleted a file in OneDrive on my computer and had emptied it from my Recycle Bin. But it remained inside the Microsoft’s cloud services Recycled folder, so I was able to recover it easily.
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