Importing and Exporting Docs

 

One of the valuable uses for Google Drive is to have one centralized location where you store your files. Think about it like a flash drive that you never lose. Whether you're on your personal computer at home, your phone or tablet, your school laptop or office computer, or the presentation station in your classroom, you have access to all your documents in your Google drive.  Before, you saw how you could organize and search through your drive. Now I'm going to show you how to get currently existing documents into and out of your new drive.

Importing Documents

Click the New button, and choose to upload either a single file, or an entire folder.  If you want to dive in head first, select your whole documents folder and upload it all. You can see below that I'm currently using just 2 GB of my available 15 GB storage space. Because I work on many different computers, out of multiple offices at two different schools, I use my Drive as my primary file system. And it works wonderfully. :)

 

If you've uploaded compatible documents, like Word or RTF files, you can convert these into editable Google Docs so you can continue to work on them in your drive.  If you have incompatible file types, like PDFs, images, audio and video, or other proprietary formats like Canvas .imscc files, you can still load them into your drive and have access to them and sharing capabilities. You just won't be able to edit them in your drive. You would need to download them first.

Here you can see that I have a Microsoft Word document in preview mode from my drive.  If I would like to continue editing it, I click "Open With" and then choose Google Docs. This will create an editable Google Docs copy of this file in my drive.

 

Exporting Documents

Additionally, you can also export your docs in standard file types for editing in Word, or sharing copies with others that don't use drive... I've heard there are still a few left that don't. ;)

Click on the File menu.  Select "Download As" and then choose the file type that you would like to export your document as. Notice that this option includes .epub if you would like to publish your work as an ebook.  

 

Click Next below to learn how to create and edit your first Google Doc.