Once you have Google Drive setup, visit your personal homepage by visiting drive.google.com. The right pane will list all of your documents; the left pane is for navigating. View it now if you haven't already.

To get started, click Create from the left pane. A drop down list of all the different types of documents you can create will appear:

Additionally, you may upload a file to Drive by dragging and dropping to the Google Drive folder installed on your PC, or by clicking the "Upload" button next to "Create" on the Drive home page. If you upload from the home page, you must allow Drive to convert the file to Docs format if you want to edit it. In the past this feature was highly unreliable, but I've recently converted many .doc and .odt documents successfully, so I guess it's improved. (The same goes for downloading docs, though .epub conversion from a Drive-exported document is something of a pain in the what.)

Click "Document" under "Create" to create a new document. You will be taken to a new tab with a blank page on it. This is the document editor.

If you close the tab now, nothing will be saved and this empty page will cease to exist. Click in the upper right corner of the screen where it says "Untitled document" and type in the name of your document. Close the tab now and you should see the new file listed on your homepage. Click it again to open it to be taken back to the blank page. From now on you don't need to do anything to save the file; every edit you make, down to the keystroke, will be saved automatically. Try it now.

You can review previous edits by selecting "See revision history" from the file menu or by hitting Ctrl Alt G.

It is helpful to create folders to organize your files, and Drive lets you do this from its own page. Click Create again and this time click New Folder. The folder will appear alongside the left pane. Give it a name. Drag and drop the recently created file from the home page to the folder to store it there. You can color code your folders for better distinction. Documents and folders can also be starred so they can be accessed from the "Starred" folder in the left pane.

If you have Drive for a mobile device, as of this writing you cannot create folders, and the document editor is essentially broken--but you can still access and edit the documents you stored in the cloud and vice-versa, including the folders.

Next we will explore some features of Google Docs.