Paul Thurrott - Windows 8 Secrets

For years, Microsoft has offered a cloud storage service called SkyDrive that has offered an industry-best allotment of free online storage—7 GB most recently—but few ways to use it effectively. As a result, SkyDrive had been largely ignored by the computer-using public, while competing offerings from Apple (iCloud), Amazon (Cloud Player and Cloud Drive), and Google (Google Play and Google Drive) have grabbed all the headlines.

SkyDrive has had a few names over the years, including Windows Live SkyDrive. Today, however, it’s referred to as Microsoft SkyDrive, or simply SkyDrive.

That’s changed. And while there are many reasons why SkyDrive is central not only to Microsoft’s vision for Windows 8 specifically, but also for all of its consumer-oriented offerings generally, here’s one pertinent fact that may drive this home nicely. Windows 8 doesn’t provide a way to browse the local filesystem from the new Metro environment. But it does offer a way to browse your SkyDrive storage, and the SkyDrive app is a neat little solution for those of us with our heads—well, our data at least—in the clouds.

There is one important consideration with the SkyDrive app. We mentioned early in the chapter that the People, Mail, Calendar, and Messaging apps require you to sign in with a Microsoft account, though you can do so even if you’re signing in to the PC with a traditional local account. The SkyDrive app does not allow this: To use this app, you must sign in to the PC with a Microsoft account. To change how you sign in, you can visit PC settings, Users, and then select Switch to a Microsoft account. (Or, if you’re using a domain account, you can connect a Microsoft account to that domain account.)

The SkyDrive user interface, shown in Figure 8-46, replicates the folder structure of your SkyDrive storage.

You can also install the SkyDrive application for the Windows desktop and view and manage your SkyDrive-based storage from there.

To understand how this is so, compare it to the web-based view of the same SkyDrive account, which is shown in Figure 8-47. Restyled to resemble the Metro app, the SkyDrive web interface also utilizes Metro-style elements to represent folders and files, providing a more consistent experience.

Figure 8-46:The SkyDrive app

Figure 8-47:SkyDrive on the web now resembles the Metro SkyDrive app too.

Navigate inside one of the folders in the SkyDrive app and you’ll see a similar Metro treatment applied to documents as well. In Figure 8-48, you can see a SkyDrive-based folder that contains both subfolders, on the left, and documents and other files, which are displayed on the right.

Figure 8-48:Documents in the SkyDrive app

Beyond that, SkyDrive offers browser-like navigational controls, including a large, obviously placed “Back” icon in the top left of the screen. Keyboarders can also use the browser-based Alt + Left Arrow shortcut to navigate back if they’d like.

As with other picker-style Metro user experiences, there’s a subtle widget next to the SkyDrive title. Click this widget, which resembles a downward-facing arrow, and a small menu, or jump list, appears, as shown in Figure 8-49. This menu lets you jump to frequently needed locations, including the root of your SkyDrive storage as well as virtual views such as recent documents and shared documents.

Figure 8-49:SkyDrive’s jump list

Would you prefer to open that document in Microsoft Office on your PC? You’ll have to download it first, as discussed next.

To open a document, simply tap (or click, or otherwise select) it. Some document types, like PDF files, will open in the Metro-style app, or Windows desktop application, that is associated with that file type. However, some behave a bit differently than expected. For example, Office documents—Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, and PowerPoint presentations—as well as OneNote notebooks open in the SkyDrive-based Office Web Apps instead. This can be seen in Figure 8-50.

When viewing a folder full of photos, as shown in Figure 8-51, SkyDrive provides a more compelling and panoramic view of the folder contents.

But there’s still little you can do beyond viewing individual photos: No slideshow is available, and you can’t even manually switch from photo to photo in a pleasant full-screen view.

To copy (or download) a document, photo, or other file from your SkyDrive storage to the PC, simply select it and then display the app bar (Winkey + Z is quickest). Then, select the Download button, which can be seen in Figure 8-52. You can perform this action on individual files or multiple files.

Figure 8-50:A SkyDrive-based Word document will open in the Office Web Apps.

Figure 8-51:Viewing a folder full of photos on SkyDrive

To copy (or upload) a document, photo, or other file from your PC to SkyDrive, navigate to the destination location in SkyDrive, display the app bar and then select the Add button. A File picker screen will appear, allowing you to select one or more files from your local filesystem, as well as from various Metro-style apps that are connected to online services of their own.

Figure 8-52:You can download SkyDrive-based files using the app bar.

As you select files to upload, they are added to the File picker’s basket, which runs along the bottom of the screen. This basket lets you collect files from various locations and then upload only when you’ve gotten all the files you want, no matter where they’re found throughout your PC’s filesystem and potentially on other storage services in the cloud.

To share files from SkyDrive, you use the system-wide, Metro-style sharing mechanism that’s available to all apps. Simply open the Share pane (via the Charms bar, or with the Winkey + H keyboard shortcut) and you can share the currently selected document, photo, or other file via any apps that are configured to offer this capability. In Figure 8-53, you can see that Mail and People are available for sharing the currently selected document.

Figure 8-53:Sharing a file from SkyDrive