Is this file on my computer or in the cloud?
Answer five everyday office situations before reading anything, and find out where you're starting from.
Free course. Your Maestro, an AI, .
In this course you work at the head office of Papelería La Tapatía, a made-up chain of office-supply stores with three branches in Guadalajara: Centro, Norte and Sur. Ana, your coworker, handles sales, and Lucía, your manager, puts the budget together. Their files live across laptops, OneDrive, SharePoint and Teams, like in any office, and on every page you sort out something that happens there every week. If your job uses a Mac or Google Drive, the course shows you your version too.
We'll start with five situations, before any explanation. Answer with what you'd actually do, without looking anything up. Your answer is marked as soon as you send it, and your Maestro explains why.
This isn't a test: these five questions just show where you're starting from. At the end of the course you'll see the same ideas in different words, and you'll notice the difference.
Check yourself: You're on a flight to a meeting in Monterrey, with no wifi. In your OneDrive folder you see reporte_ventas.xlsx, the file Ana sent you, with a small blue cloud next to its name. You double-click it. What happens?
If you said it opens, you're not alone. For years, "it's in my folder" meant "it's on my computer." With OneDrive, SharePoint and Google Drive, that's no longer true: a folder on your computer can show you files that actually live in the cloud and only download to your disk when you open them. From the outside, they look almost the same.
That's the thread running through this whole course: the same file can show up in several places at once, and knowing which is which saves you from some nasty surprises. Before you go on, tell your Maestro where you keep your work. That way it can point you to the parts of the course that matter most for you.
Four more situations.
Check yourself: Your computer is running out of space. In your synced OneDrive folder you delete a 2 GB file, figuring it's still in the cloud anyway. What happens to the file in the cloud?
Check yourself: On the laptop La Tapatía gave you, you save a presentation to your Desktop. You never set up anything in OneDrive. Could that presentation also be in the cloud?
Check yourself: Lucía, your manager, messages you: I uploaded the budget to our department's SharePoint library. You open your OneDrive folder on your computer. Will you find it there?
Check yourself: Ana messages you on Teams: the March close is at C:\Users\ana\Documents\Informes\cierre_marzo.xlsx. You paste that path into File Explorer on your laptop. What's most likely to happen?
With these five answers, you already have a map of what's ahead:
- In module 1 you'll learn what a folder is and what a path is, a file's exact address, and you'll practice in a terminal right in your browser.
- In module 2 you'll see how a folder on your computer can also be the cloud: the icons, what happens when you delete something, and where things from OneDrive, SharePoint, Teams and Google Drive end up.
- In module 3 you'll put it all to work to send, find and open files on the job.
If any answer surprised you, ask your Maestro before you move on. If not, let's start with the basics: what's a folder?