Do you know where your file lives now? Eight situations to find out
Go back to the situations from the start, in new words, and see how much the way you look at a file has changed.
Free course. Your Maestro, an AI, .
At the start of the course you answered five situations. Here are the same ideas in different words, plus three from what you saw later. Answer without going back to the pages: the point is to see what stuck. Each answer is marked as soon as you send it, and your Maestro explains why and, if you need it, which page to review.
Check yourself: You're in a meeting somewhere with no signal. You want to open the presentation you see in your OneDrive folder, which has a blue cloud next to its name. What do you expect?
Check yourself: To make room, you delete a folder of old photos from your work OneDrive folder. What happened?
Check yourself: You copy the path of a file in your Documents and see that it goes through a OneDrive folder, even though you never set anything up. What's most likely?
Check yourself: Lucía, your manager, says: I put the templates in the department's SharePoint library. What do you do to have them in File Explorer?
Check yourself: You sent a client the quarterly report as an attached copy. The next day, you fix a number in your file in OneDrive. What does the client see?
Check yourself: A coworker hands you a script that opens C:\Users\luis\Documents\datos\clientes.csv. On your computer it fails. Why?
Check yourself: You need space on your laptop. In your OneDrive folder, you right-click a folder of videos and choose Free up space. A week later, where are the videos?
Check yourself: Before sending out the meeting notes, you open them from your Google Drive folder on your computer to review them. It's a Google Docs document. You double-click it. Where does it open?
What you believed and what you know now
The eight questions on this page are the eight beliefs this course set out to take apart. Compare:
| What a lot of people believe | What actually happens | To review |
|---|---|---|
| If I see it in my folder, it's on my disk | A file with the cloud icon is online-only, and without internet it won't open | Blue cloud or green circle |
| Deleting it here only deletes it here | In a synced folder, deleting deletes everywhere; there's a recycle bin for a while | If I delete a synced file here |
| Free up space means deleting | Free up space leaves the file only in the cloud, without deleting it | Blue cloud or green circle |
| My Desktop belongs to my computer | It can live inside OneDrive, even if you never turned that on | Why does my Desktop say OneDrive? |
| OneDrive and SharePoint are the same thing | OneDrive is yours; SharePoint holds the team's libraries, including Teams channels' | OneDrive, SharePoint or Teams? |
| Sending the link is sending the file | A link is one file for everyone; a copy is another file that stops changing with yours | Should I send the file or the link? |
| My path works on any computer | A path that goes through your user folder only exists on your computer | How do I read a file path on Windows and Mac? |
| A Google Doc is like a .docx | It opens in the browser, in Google Docs | What if my job uses Google Drive? |
If any of the questions above gave you trouble, ask your Maestro what to review.
For tomorrow at the office
Five five-minute things that will save you the next scare:
- Check the path of your Desktop and your Documents, and find out whether they live in OneDrive.
- Find a file with the cloud icon in your OneDrive folder and decide whether you need to mark it Always keep on this device before your next trip.
- Open the OneDrive recycle bin on the web once, so you know where it is the day you need it.
- Bring the team library you use most onto your computer with a shortcut.
- Next time you attach a file, ask yourself the three questions: Will they change it? Do I need a snapshot? Can they open it?
What's next?
If you now want the computer to do the work with those files, so an AI agent reads your data and helps you analyze it with your own judgment, the next step is Agentic AI for Data, a paid course. Its first module starts right where this one ends: a folder of your own, the files you move into it and the terminal that tells you where you are.