For years, I've been using Google Drive as a quick and dirty way to convert dozens of Word files into PDFs with a few clicks (using this great tutorial as my guide). This saved me a lot of time in creating handouts for my students.
How to OCR Documents for Free in Google Drive. The file will open in Google Docs with the PDF converted to text, but with little formatting applied. Now Get Working! Google Drive provides a quick and easy way to convert image and PDF files into editable text for free using its built-in OCR featue. Google Docs VS. PDFelement Now you know how to create a PDF using Google Docs. However, the output PDF will not contain any images or graphics, only plain text, which is not ideal. If you would like to save the Google Doc to a PDF file, the formatting and the layout of the original file will be lost.
However, in the new Google Drive, the option to bulk download your Google Docs files as PDFs is gone (instead, it just defaults to downloading them as Word files). You can still download Google Docs files as PDFs if you open them up individually -- but that's pretty time consuming if you have dozens of handouts to convert (as I do pretty much every semester).
For awhile, I got around this by switching back to the 'old' Google Drive whenever I wanted to do a conversion, but that option has now disappeared. There are other tools out there for bulk converting PDFs though, annoyingly, many of them (especially on Mac) don't retain hyperlinks.
Thankfully, there's a workaround that allows you to still use Google Drive to do your batch conversions: Google Takeout. Google Takeout is a service offered by Google that lets you essentially download all of your data from Google services -- emails, photos, documents -- into one massive ZIP file. But you can also use it to do a batch conversion on a single folder of documents.
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First, check your Google Drive settings and make sure its set to convert uploads to Google Docs format (you can switch this back after).
Now create a new folder in Google Drive (like 'PDF Conversions') and upload all your Word files to that folder. If you want to convert files for multiple projects at the same time (like handouts for several different classes), just create subfolders within that one main folder.
Go to Google Takeout. By default, everything will be selected for download. You don't want this (it will take hours). Click on 'Select None' then scroll down to Google Drive and turn it on. Then, instead of downloading 'all files and folders', choose 'Select files and folders' and choose your 'PDF Conversions' folder. Then make sure that the file format for documents is set to 'PDF'.
Click Next. The defaults on the next page (ZIP file, email notification) are fine. Press Create archive.
You'll get a little status bar showing you how the conversion is coming along but you don't have to sit there and wait. Close your browser and you'll get an email when it's all done (depending on how many files you have, this may take a few minutes). Click on the link and then download the archive.
Open up the ZIP file and you should have all your PDFs -- with hyperlinks included -- inside. I've used this technique a few times -- including for dozens of Word files at a time -- and it seems to work great. The only minor bug I've noticed is that if your Word filename is longer than 90 characters (before the .docx), everything after 90 characters seems to get cut off.
Hope this workaround saves some other folks out there some time.
(For those wanting an even quicker, but much nerdier, solution, if you install LibreOffice you can use its command-line tools to batch convert DOCX files to PDF too. On first glance, it seems to handle some of the formatting a bit better than Google Drive. Thanks to Kevin McArthur for the suggestion.)
Cloud storage has given us the ability to access files and documents from anywhere. Even more conveniently, some services allow us to add, edit, and share said files while anywhere in the world. Google Docs has always been a popular choice for those who want to access and share documents with ease. No matter how useful cloud documents can be, however, sometimes you want to convert it to a tried-and-true format, such as DOCX.
If you have a document stored in Google Docs and you’d like to download an offline copy, it’s easy to convert Google Docs to Word format.
Note: while you can convert documents from Google Docs to Word, there is no guarantee that the formatting in your document will be preserved during the conversion.
How to Convert a Single Document
Because Google Docs are in an online format, we can’t just import them into Word! In order to use them within Microsoft Word, we’re going to need to convert Google Docs to Word’s DOCX format, then download it afterward. You can easily perform this conversion from both Google Docs and Google Drive.
Converting within Google Docs
First, open the file you want to convert to Word format. Click “File” at the top of the document, then hover over “Download as.”
You’ll see a list of options appear within this menu. As you can see, conversion to Word documents isn’t the only thing Google Docs can do! If you’re ever in the need to download a Google Doc as a PDF, or even convert one into the EPUB ebook format, you can come back to this menu and do that. For now, however, we’ll click the “Microsoft Word” option.
Google Docs will open a “Save As…” window where you can select where you want to save the document. Once saved to a memorable location, you’ll be able to open the file in Microsoft Word.
Converting within Google Drive
For Google Drive it’s even easier to perform this conversion. You won’t be able to perform a conversion to other formats (like PDF and EPUB) in Drive, but if you’re just after a Word document, this method works perfectly fine.
To do this, locate the document you want to convert in your Google Drive. Then, right-click it and click “Download.”
Google Drive will automatically convert it to a Word format and open up a “Save As…” window to save it.
How to Convert Multiple Documents at Once
Sometimes you don’t want to save just one document as a DOCX file. Sometimes you want to convert multiple Google Docs into Word documents all at the same time. Unfortunately, because the Google Docs method relies on you entering each document to download it, it’s a little time consuming to download them all. However, because Drive performs its conversion through a right-click menu on the main page, we can do it there instead for a much faster and easier experience.
Batch Converting within Google Drive
The Google Drive batch download method works near-identically to downloading a single document. However, if you hold down the CTRL key when you click on files, you can select multiple files all at once. The files that are selected in the batch will light up blue as you click them:
Then, right-click any of the highlighted ones and click “Download” as normal.
When you click this, Google Drive will convert all the documents selected, then pack them into a ZIP file. When it’s done, it’ll give you the ZIP file to download. Just save this somewhere memorable and unzip it to access all of your files.
Downloading Docs
Despite all the benefits of cloud storage, sometimes you just need an offline copy of your documents. With a few clicks, you can convert Google Docs to Word files with very little hassle.
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How much do you find yourself using cloud-based documents over “physical” ones? Let us know below!