Beyond the primary uses for the Mac and PC Dropbox app (such as syncing, sharing, and Camera Upload—all discussed elsewhere in this book), a number of special features have appeared that will appeal to certain users.
In this chapter, I describe the Dropbox badge (for Microsoft Office users) and integration with Adobe’s Acrobat products. Also, in Manage Desktop Notifications, I cover desktop notifications, which are perhaps less special (in that they’ve been around for quite some time) but still worth knowing about—especially if you find them excessively intrusive or annoying.
Later in the chapter, I talk about Finder integration for OS X users in Use or Disable OS X Finder Integration.
On Macs and Windows PCs, if you open a Microsoft Office document that’s stored in your Dropbox, you’ll see the Dropbox logo in a circle on the right edge of the window. This is the Dropbox badge.
By default, a popover (Figure 35) with various relevant commands appears next to the badge; you can toggle the display of this popover by clicking the badge icon.
The purpose of the badge (or, more specifically, the popover) is to give you a quick shortcut to activities you may want to perform with these Office files:
In addition, if the file is in a shared folder, you may see one or more of the following in the popover:
If the badge is in your way (by default it appears on the right edge of the window, in the middle vertically), you can drag it to any other location on the edge of the window. And, if you don’t want to see the badge at all, you can hide it in any of three ways:
If you use Adobe Acrobat DC or Acrobat Reader DC to view and edit PDF documents, you may appreciate the way Adobe and Dropbox have integrated the most recent versions of their respective apps. Thanks to this integration, you can access documents in your Dropbox right from within Acrobat (just as you can do with documents stored in Adobe’s cloud storage or on a Microsoft SharePoint server); any changes you make to a document opened this way are saved automatically to your Dropbox.
This integration requires a one-time setup procedure. I’ll describe how to do this in Adobe Acrobat Reader DC for Mac; Acrobat Pro for Mac and the Windows versions of both apps are similar. Follow these steps:
Having done this, you can view the contents of your Dropbox from within Acrobat; select Dropbox (Personal) in the sidebar (Figure 38).
By default, the Mac, Windows, and Linux versions of Dropbox use their respective operating systems’ notification systems to inform you about activity in your Dropbox. For example, if a file in a shared folder changes, or Dropbox creates an automatic link to a screenshot, or someone invites you to share a folder, or any of numerous other events occurs, you’ll get a visible (and possibly audible) notification.
In OS X, the notifications appear in the upper-right corner of your screen by default; Figure 39 shows a few examples. (If you have Growl installed, Dropbox uses that for notifications, thus enabling you to customize them to a greater extent than OS X’s built-in notification system allows.) Windows puts notifications in the lower-right corner of your screen by default. (Linux notifications vary by distribution.)
If you have only a small number of collaborators and shared files—and if it’s critically important for you to be aware of every trivial change to those files—then you might find these notifications useful and interesting. On the other hand, if (like me) you have dozens of collaborators and thousands of shared files that are changing by the minute, the constant barrage of notifications becomes distracting. (And if I train myself to tune them out, they do me no good.)
Dropbox lets you turn these notifications on or off globally; if you leave them on, your operating system may give you slightly more control over how, when, and where they appear. Here’s what you can do:
On a Windows PC, go to Start > Settings > System > Notifications and Actions > Dropbox (Figure 41) and adjust the settings. On Linux, consult the documentation that came with your distribution.
Both OS X and Windows enable you to turn off notifications and decide whether they appear as banners, play sounds, or appear on your lock screen (among other settings).
Unfortunately, because the Dropbox app’s own settings are limited to enabled and disabled, you can’t display notifications only for certain files or folders, only when certain people make changes, or only for certain kinds of actions—exactly the options that would make notifications far more useful to me (and, I’m guessing, most other people).
If you’re a Mac user, you’ve probably taken advantage of Dropbox’s integration with the OS X Finder. With this integration enabled, the following changes occur in the Finder:
Ordinarily, all these features are useful, they work when needed, and they’re unobtrusive when not needed. However, if you find any of these extra items visually distracting—or if you encounter crashing or other misbehavior in the Finder that you suspect Dropbox may be involved in—you can disable Finder integration. To do so, go to Dropbox Preferences > General and deselect Enable Finder Integration. (You can return at any time and reenable it by rechecking that box.)
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