Easily Share a File Link from Dropbox Folder – Here’s How

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Over the past couple of days, I have had the honor of helping my fellow lifeguards work the Future Events Experience at AIBTM here in Chicago. During this time, I had a couple of speaking sessions on the Innovation Spotlight Stage and during my Thursday 1/2 hour, I shared a piece of advice that I do my best to live by (but it is hard). That little nugget of wisdom is pick an app, program, or tool, and stick with it until you know how to work it like a pro and avoid “Shiny Object Syndrome” (SOS).

What is SOS you might ask? Well, let me tell you.

SOS is the act of jumping from one thing to another because it might be better. You can do this for many things in life but because The Meeting Pool is about meeting and event technology, technology is to what I refer. SOS is something that we are all guilty of at one time or another, but let me give you a scenario that could be you or me.

The Scenario

You really need an app that will help you do something really important. If you can find the right app, it will be life changing for you and this app will make you a better person and the purchase of this app may actually bring about world peace. So, you research for a whole week for this wonder app that you know is out there and you find a good one. You are convinced it is the best app ever so you pay the $4.99 to get it from the app store. Oh the joy! You start to use it, think that it is perfect and for a couple of days it is like a marriage made in heaven. But, love is a fickle thing.

Sometime around the fourth day, you go into the office and you start telling Water Cooler Gary about your search and he just sighs. He tells you all about the most amazing app that not only does the same thing your new app does, he swears that his really awesome app will make coffee and feed the kids! OH NO! A better app.

Now you, the good little app junkie, rush to the app store, search for Gary’s app and with a bead of sweat on your lip and a trembling click finger, you download yet another $1.99 wonder app and whew…. Gary was right. The nausea subsides. You had make the wrong choice and now all is right and things get so much better because this app is the BOMB. It rocks. Holy crap, where has this app been all your life. For the next week, you fiddle, you learn, and you get OK at this new found wonder of the world. But something happens that makes you feel like a total failure. A worthless app searcher that should have known better.

You see. You have to go to Aunt Becky’s for dinner.  You are excited to be sitting next to Cindy, she is so cool. She will love the app that changed your life and you will finally look hip in her eyes! You have longed for this because she is the most wonderfully smart person. She went to Harvard and drives a convertible.

After hearing your story, Cindy just laughs at you and proclaims that you REALLY need to dump that awful stone age app because it is dreadful. She says that you should use her app cause it is just “wicked” and will not only make the coffee and feed the kids, it will put the kids to bed and make you and your significant other a romantic dinner for two, light the candles, and do the dishes… wink, wink.

So, you switch to yet another amazing app and start the learning process all over again. What have you done? What is wrong with you. You just needed something to make your life better!

What have you done

What you have done is lost a couple of weeks of your life and are no more productive, smart, or cool than you were when you first downloaded the perfectly acceptable and capable app in the first place.

Get to it

You just need to pick an app that has decent ratings, and some good reviews and then stick with it for God’s sake. Make your life better and more productive and when someone tells you to switch because their’s is more awesome, tell them thanks for the recommendation and that you will check it out later. Now file this info away in Evernote for a few months and get back to working with the app that you have because it is FINE.

You can do your own dishes and light your own candles damn it.

The point of this post

Guess what… I do believe that I have just wasted a ton of your time getting to the point of this post …… which is how to use a really good cloud storage app a little smarter and a little better. That app is Dropbox and you probably knew that because it is in the title of the post. So let’s get to it.

When you want to share a file using Dropbox, there is a really quick way to share the link so someone else can download the file lickity split.

Navigate to your Dropbox folder, find the file, and right click on the file name. You will see the dialog box pop up and then just click the link “Share Dropbox Link”.

Now, you can open an email, write up your message, right click, and choose “paste” which will drop in the link to the file and you can hit send.

You have now learned another trick for using a really good app, making it even more valuable to you and your team making you faster and more productive.

Oh and if you are already using any of the other really good cloud storage apps like Box, or Skydrive, or Google Drive? Stick with them because the are OK, they work great.

We will have tips for these apps coming up as the days go by.