GitHub Desktop

Make sure you've installed Git standalone first

• Download GitHub Desktop here.

• Log in with your GitHub username.

• "Clone" the repository to your hard drive.

  • I put all my Git repositories in D:\GitDir.
  • You can put them anywhere you want, EXCEPT DROPBOX

You will now be looking at the repository as you cloned it. The most important thing to note is that you never want to do any work directly on the "master" branch.

Here I clicked the dropdown and added a new branch called test_branch. Note that when you create a branch this way, GitHub doesn't actually know about it until you "push" or "publish" the branch.

Now you can just go about working in the folder as you normally would. In this example, I added a new excel file to the repository, called variable_list.xlsx. Now, when you look in GitHub Desktop, you'll see that you have 1 changed file.

Click "+" to add the files/ changes you want to keep. Then, leave a short "commit" message (ie "added var list"). To finalize the changes, click "Commit to test_branch".

Everything you just did only exists on your local computer. To share it with the team via GitHub, you need to "push" your changes at the top.

Finally, when you're done whatever task you were working on in the branch, you can submit a "Pull Request" on GitHub.