Google Drive Gets Copy, Cut, And Paste Shortcuts

Google has announced that users of Google Drive can now use the familiar keyboard shortcuts Ctrl + C (or ⌘ + C on Mac), Ctrl + X and Ctrl + V to copy, cut and paste Google Drive files via the Chrome browser.

Timesaving And About Time 

By (finally) introducing what is now a decades-old feature to Drive, Google says it will save users time by allowing them to copy one or more files and move them to new locations in Drive, and across multiple tabs, with fewer clicks.

Easily Paste Into Document Or Email 

Google also says that a link to the file and its title will be captured when copying a file, which allows the user to easily paste them into a document or an email.

Shortcuts 

To help users more easily organise files in multiple locations without necessarily creating duplicate files, Ctrl + C, Ctrl + Shift + V will create shortcuts.

Tabs Too 

Google also says that, with the update to Drive, users can open files or folders in a new tab using Ctrl+Enter. This will allow users to easily view multiple files at once or use different tabs to organise files more easily between two different folder locations.

OneDrive and Dropbox

Introducing the shortcuts to Google Drive adds a little more flexibility than rival cloud file storage platform Microsoft’s OneDrive, which doesn’t support the cut, copy and paste shortcuts. It does, however, offer ‘copy to’ locations on right-mouse click. Dropbox offers some keyboard shortcuts by clicking ‘Files’ and pressing the question mark key to access the keyboard shortcut menu. However, this is still unlikely to be a convenient and familiar to many as offering straightforward cut, copy and paste keyboard shortcuts.

Copy and Paste From The 70s

The cut/copy-and-paste commands to move and copy text first came into use with text editors at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in 1974. “Larry” Tesler was credited with proposing the terms ‘cut’, ‘copy’, and ‘paste’ for these actions.

What Does This Mean For Your Business? 

Using cloud-based platforms for collaborative work as well as secure and convenient storage has become much more popular since the lockdown and with the advent of hybrid working. Any time-saving, straightforward features are likely to be valued by businesses, and it may be a surprise to many that it has taken so long for Google to introduce such an old and widely used set of commands. However, it is better late than never, and the introduction of these keyboard shortcuts are one of a constant stream of updates and improvements that Google is making to try and retain users and compete against rival platforms like Dropbox and OneDrive.