You'd think that Google considered Docs & Spreadsheets important enough to make it easy to import files. Or to export files. You can do that one file at a time, but it becomes tiresome if you have a lot of files.
Fortunately, the latest version of Google Toolbar for Firefox has a feature that lets you drag and drop files to your browser and they are automatically uploaded to Google Docs. To upload more files at a time, go to Windows Explorer or other file manager, select your files and drag them in Firefox.
To activate the feature, to go to Google Docs & Spreadsheets after installing the toolbar. You'll get a prompt that asks you if you want to enable the feature. Alternatively, click on Settings / Options and enable "Docs & Spreadsheets".
Related:
Upload files using drag and drop in Firefox
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Is this a brand new feature? I remember trying this a couple weeks ago, to ill results:
ReplyDeleteI tried to batch-upload by dragging-and-dropping files into firefox, which (through the google toolbar) should upload them to Google DS. No luck, though. Only about 50% of files seem to get through, making the toolbar worthless for batch uploading.
It's not technically a feature of Google Toolbar, but you can use it this way if you want.
ReplyDeleteI tested this with 5 files from a folder: 2 .doc, 2 .xls, 1 .ods. I dragged them to Firefox and each one opened a new tab where it was uploaded and then opened for editing.
It's weird that when I tried this with identical copies of a file, only one copy was uploaded. I tried to upload 2 copies of the file A and 3 copies of the file B. The toolbar opened 5 tabs: 2 of them contained the files A and B, two redirected to the "Upload a file" page and the other tab gave an error: "we were unable to upload this document".
Thanks for the experiment.
ReplyDeleteHopefully this will be solved eventually. (As good or better would be an api, that would allow file manipulations through a program...)
Re. Batch Upload to Google Docs & Spreadsheets . . .
ReplyDeleteunfortunatly this seems to be another example of how Google with all it's might doesn't seem to understand the difference between alpha and beta testing. . . .
here again Google is using its prime users as crash test dummies instead of its employees . . .
that's right, alpha testing (where these and other bugs are usually ironed-out) is internal testing of an app using emplyees and other named testors . . .
following a whole bunch of that sort of testing, usually done completed systematically in a series of iteratives steps . . .
a good dev company will give fair warning and put out the immature code and app to a core group of it's users . . .
lastly, these last tests, or beta tests go thru a series of test iterations, where commercial code is developed and eventually released to its broad user community . . .
this is beta testing. All of this can and should be compressed and the release cycles can certainly overlap to obtain faster maturity in the target code . . .
but that's not the sort of thing I've noticed with the Google squirt-gun teams.
ciao dog food is good - try it.
I have just uploaded about 180 documents and it seemed to work great. Thanks I have been looking for this feature for a while. You can upload pics to sites by the folder that take a lot of space but somehow a documents are different.
ReplyDeleteThis might only work for us old-time Writely users, but I'm able to upload documents just by sending them to a special email address. In my case the address is tunheim-xxxxx-xxxxx@prod.writely.com (some random characters that I've replaced with x-es).
ReplyDeleteAlso the problem of mass-exporting documents is yet unresolved. To me /any/ service without a decent exporter is an attempt of lock-in. This is why I like gmail (export mail and contacts), but I'm sceptical to google talk (no export of conversations).
I think google docs doesn't have the elementary usability features that requires wide acceptance.
ReplyDeleteI can't do batch upload, download in an easy way. I don't want to be locked to google toolbar to use these features.
I can't store my source codes in google docs. Maybe it is not specifically designed for this, but it would handle it as well.
so i guess it doesn't work for powerpoint files?
ReplyDeleteI just tried it with xls and doc. Still not working. March 7, 2008
ReplyDeleteStill NOT working April 14th.
ReplyDeleteSo when I try this, I get a yellow bar at the top of firefox that says "Loading (doc name) in Google Docs and Spreadsheets." But then, that's it. Nothing happens. I return to my google docs page, and the new doc isn't there. What am I doing wrong?
ReplyDeleteIt would be better if you provide facility to upload Docs with huge size(Around 1Gb).
ReplyDeleteWorks like a charm! I have a firefox 3.0.3, installed google toolbar. enabled google docs and spreadsheets in the google toolbar settings, drag a sample file to firefox and presto! google opened the document.
ReplyDelete@vidyadhar: Who the hell has documents 1G in size? What could possibly create a text file that large. Christ, my Windows page file isn't even that big.
ReplyDeleteWill this be available for mac users in the future?
ReplyDeleteWow it is worth trying and cool to use.. thanks goes to all who created it..
ReplyDeleteKagoye Geofrey.. Uganda, East Africa
I am wondering if there is a Google Toolbar available for Chrome, would be ironic if Google doesn't support its own browser.
ReplyDeleteNo, it wouldn't be ironic, since Chrome doesn't have support for add-ons yet. Don't worry, Google is working on this and Chrome will add support for add-ons in a few weeks.
ReplyDeletenot a big fan of toolbars... need a better way
ReplyDeleteupload ZIP/RAR set of documents? to be extracted google side
ReplyDeleteYou can send files by email.
ReplyDeleteI'm on Firefox 3.5.1 in Vista and I tried .docx and .odt and so far only .odt works. When I try to open up the .docx the box opens up asking me to a select a program to open the file, my only choice is MS Word 07. Anyone know how to fix that?
ReplyDeletehi.. chech this link..
ReplyDeletethr is a software for batch upload..
http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2008/01/google-docs-uploader.html
I made a tool for batch upload any types of documents including PDF:
ReplyDeletehttp://code.google.com/p/google-docs-upload/