April 8, 2007

Batch Upload Files to Google Docs

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

24 comments:

  1. Is this a brand new feature? I remember trying this a couple weeks ago, to ill results:

    I 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.

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  2. It's not technically a feature of Google Toolbar, but you can use it this way if you want.

    I 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".

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  3. Thanks for the experiment.

    Hopefully this will be solved eventually. (As good or better would be an api, that would allow file manipulations through a program...)

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  4. Re. Batch Upload to Google Docs & Spreadsheets . . .

    unfortunatly 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.

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  5. 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.

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  6. This 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).

    Also 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).

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  7. I think google docs doesn't have the elementary usability features that requires wide acceptance.
    I 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.

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  8. so i guess it doesn't work for powerpoint files?

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  9. I just tried it with xls and doc. Still not working. March 7, 2008

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  10. So 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?

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  11. It would be better if you provide facility to upload Docs with huge size(Around 1Gb).

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  12. Works 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.

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  13. @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.

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  14. Will this be available for mac users in the future?

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  15. Wow it is worth trying and cool to use.. thanks goes to all who created it..
    Kagoye Geofrey.. Uganda, East Africa

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  16. I am wondering if there is a Google Toolbar available for Chrome, would be ironic if Google doesn't support its own browser.

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  17. No, 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.

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  18. not a big fan of toolbars... need a better way

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  19. upload ZIP/RAR set of documents? to be extracted google side

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  20. I'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?

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  21. hi.. chech this link..
    thr is a software for batch upload..

    http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2008/01/google-docs-uploader.html

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  22. I made a tool for batch upload any types of documents including PDF:

    http://code.google.com/p/google-docs-upload/

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