Top Tricks for Google Drive

Top Tricks for Google Drive

in Marketing , Content development , Content organization

Google Drive is probably the most frequently used content management tool. I’m sure that’s no surpise to you 😎.

From our perspective, sales teams are the ones constantly creating and sharing your Google Drive files with your prospects to move them towards conversion (closed-won!).

The challenge is, that sharing your sales content in google docs, slides, or sheets can give a messy experience for the reader/viewer. The login requirements, the menus, and all the options hanging around just make it…not cool.

It simply gets in the way when sharing files with the intent to make them easy to access.

Here are a few tips and tricks to improve this experience of sharing your Google Drive files with your prospects, customers, and partners.

And then we’ll dig deeper and talk about some better options to use when trying to organize, share and track files for sales and marketing.

Create a reader mode for Google Drive files

Here’s a great tip for a “view” mode for your Drive files 🙌.

You may view native Google documents in reader mode by replacing the /edit portion of the Google Drive file URL with /preview. This mode is less clustered without any menus and toolbars and thus loads faster.

Let’s say the original link to your file is:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/17hWzPvwCr7QVQx0EfScQPw72SQ2UbW7f2E0TjZRGfwA/edit

You can view a cleared up version of this in reader mode by adding preview at the end.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/17hWzPvwCr7QVQx0EfScQPw72SQ2UbW7f2E0TjZRGfwA/preview

Note: file access is still managed by Google Drive permissions. If you want to share a file with someone who doesn’t have access to your Google Drive, you’ll need to change the file permissions.

Embed your Google Docs in web pages

We can go one step further with the preview mode (above) and embed this /preview mode into a webpage 👇.

Simply paste the code into your webpage HTML where you would like the document to appear. The code will automatically resize the iframe to fit the width of its container.

If you need to change the size of the iframe, you can do so by modifying the width and height values in the code.

When adding the code to your page, be sure to replace “YOUR_FILE_ID” with the actual file ID for your document. You can find this ID by opening your document in Google Drive and looking for it in the URL.

<iframe src="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/YOUR_FILE_ID/preview" height="600px" width=“800px" allowfullscreen/>

This is great for embedding Google Drive files into Wordpress and any CMS that allows you to add HTML code.

Downloading native Google files

This URL trick will come in handy if you want your users to download your Google doc as a read-only PDF or your Google Spreadsheet as an Excel XLS file.

We break down each case below:

Google Docs to PDF

To export and download a native google document, replace /edit with /export?format= at the end of the file’s URL.

That means your link like this:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/YOUR_FILE_ID/edit

changes to this:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/YOUR_FILE_ID//export?format=

Remember to add a format at the end of the link above. You can choose any format from the list provided below:

  • .pdf
  • .doc
  • .docx
  • .epub
  • .txt
  • .html,zipped
  • .odt
  • .rtf

If you want to download a pdf format of your file, your link should look like this:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/YOUR_FILE_ID/export?format=pdf

Here’s an example using our Product Messaging Template.

And if you want to export and download your google document as an ebook then the link should look like this:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/YOUR_FILE_ID/export?format=epub

Export Google Slides into PDF/PPT file

The Google Slides direct download links are slightly different from those for Google Documents.

From the URL replace /edit with /export/<format>, and choose pptx or pdf as the export format.

Google Slides export links look like this:

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/YOUR_FILE_ID/export/pdf

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/YOU_FILE_ID/export/pptx

Here’s an example .

Export Google Slides as PNG File

With Google Slides, you can either export the entire presentation as a PDF or Powerpoint presentation or you can create links to individual slides by exporting each slide as a high-res PNG file.

Simply include ?PAGE_ID=pPAGE_NUMBER to the export URL like this:

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/FILE_ID/export/png?PAGE_ID=pPAGE_NUMBER

Let’s say that you want to export the 3rd slide from your presentation as a PNG, you will mention the page ID and page number at the end of the URL as shown in the link above.

You can find your page ID by going to that specific page you want to export. The URL should look like this:

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/YOUR_FILE_ID/edit#slide=PAGE_ID

Once you place your File ID, page ID and page number within the export URL, you will be able to export your slide as a PNG file.

Here’s an example.

Google Sheets export to Excel

Exporting and downloading your Google Sheets is not much different from Google Docs. Having direct download links makes them more accessible for those times that you want to export your sheets into Excel, PDF, CSV easily and quickly.

You can use the following link to get started:

  • Export sheets to PDF: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/YOUR_FILE_ID/export?format=pdf
  • Export sheets to Excel (xlsx): https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/YOUR_FILE_ID/export?format=xlsx

The direct download link is similar to the one we used from google docs and these sheets can be exported in different formats. These formats include:

  • .xlsx
  • .ods
  • .pdf
  • .html
  • .csv
  • .tsv

Here’s an example.

Note: when exporting a specific tab, you’ll have a gid parameter in the URL. You’ll want to keep that.

Export a specific tab from a sheet

When exporting a specific tab, you’ll have a gid parameter in the URL. You’ll want to keep that:

The export link will look like:
.../export?format=csv&gid=YOUR_GID

Create a copy of shared Google Drive file

If you want to copy a Google Drive file, all you need to do is replace the /edit in the URL with /copy and anyone can make a copy of that file in their own account (if they have access to the original document).

This comes in handy if you want to quickly make a copy of a Google Spreadsheet, Google Document or Google Slides and Google Scripts. Or you want the recipients to grab a copy and not edit the original file.

You can also copy all the comments from that document by adding ?copyComments=true instead of /copy.

However, if you are trying to copy a Google Form, you will need the owner of the form to grant you access to make a copy.

  • If your original URL looks like this:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/YOUR_FILE_ID/edit

  • Here’s what a copy URL looks like:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/YOUR_FILE_ID/copy

Example: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/17hWzPvwCr7QVQx0EfScQPw72SQ2UbW7f2E0TjZRGfwA/copy

  • If you want to copy the document along with the comments, this is how your URL should be formed:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/YOUR_FILE_ID/copy?copyComments=true

Example: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/17hWzPvwCr7QVQx0EfScQPw72SQ2UbW7f2E0TjZRGfwA/copy?copyComments=true

Invite users from original document to copied version

If you add userstoinvite=email@domain.com to the copy URL, the Google user who is copying the document will be prompted to share the document with the specific Google account immediately after copying the document.

Sometimes, when you are copying the document, you may want to invite the users on the original document to collaborate on the copied version of the document 👏.

The link will look like this:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/FILE_ID/copy?userstoinvite=email@domain.com

Remember, to replace email@domain.com with the email address of the users you are inviting 👌.

We covered how you can maximize the efficiency of your Google Drive URLs when sharing files across different channels with a few tricks up your sleeve 🙌.

We also looked at how these URLs can help you engage with your prospects – hopefully improving your buyer’s experience.

Sharing is just one part of the equation, once you start tracking your links and learning how they are used and by whom, you can provide powerful insights to your marketing team, which can then provide a feedback loop to strengthen your content even further.

Organizing, tracking and reporting on prospect activity is something that Google Drive doesn’t offer.

A sales enablement tool like Content Camel can help you:

👉 Sign up for a free trial of Content Camel: Try FREE now

Written by
Fazeela Dar
Fazeela Dar Content Strategist