Controlling the View in Drive

by Allen Wyatt
(last updated January 2, 2014)

The purpose of Google Drive is to store files so that you can easily work with them. Drive provides two different ways you can look at (and work with) the files you've stored or created.

  • List View. Shows a vertical listing of all your files, sorted by whatever column you select. (The colums are Title, Owner, and Last Modified.) You open a file by clicking on its title.
  • Grid View. Shows small thumbnails images for all your files, organized both horizontally and vertically (like a grid). You can sort using a control at the upper-left of the grid area. You open a file by double-clicking on it.

You switch between the two views by using the Switch to List or Switch to Grid buttons, near the upper-right corner of the Drive screen. (See Figure 1.)

Figure 1. Switching between views in Drive.

Just click one of the buttons and the view immediately changes. As you work with the differing views, you'll discover that Grid view takes a bit longer to display than does List view, particularly if you don't have a fast Internet connection. The reason is because Drive needs to generate the larger preview thumbnail images used in Grid view. Thus, if you have many, many files in Drive or if you have a slower Internet connection, you may want to work more with List view than with Grid view.

Author Bio

Allen Wyatt

With more than 50 non-fiction books and numerous magazine articles to his credit, Allen Wyatt is an internationally recognized author. He  is president of Sharon Parq Associates, a computer and publishing services company. ...

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