Downloading Documents to Your Local Computer

by Allen Wyatt
(last updated December 19, 2013)

1

Part of the beauty of Google Docs is that the document files are stored "in the cloud," which means you can edit them from anywhere you have an Internet connection and a Web browser. There are times, though, when you might want a "local copy" of a document. Fortunately, Google Drive allows you to download files—either a single file or multiple files—to your local computer. It even converts the documents into a number of other formats so you can use them with whatever software you have installed.

To download documents to your local computer, follow these steps:

  1. Log into Google Drive (drive.google.com).
  2. Locate the documents that you want to download to your computer. (Your documents should be listed in the main Drive screen.)
  3. Select the checkboxes to the left of each document you want in the download.
  4. Click the More button. (Make sure you click the one at the top of the screen, not the More link at the left of the screen.) Drive presents a number of options you can choose.
  5. Click the Download option. Drive displays a dialog box that shows the formats in which you can download the documents. (See Figure 1.)

    6. Figure 1. Downloading files to your local computer.

  6. Click Download. Drive starts zipping the files into a single ZIP file.

When the processing of the documents is complete, Google starts downloading them to your computer. When downloaded, you can put the file on your desktop, double-click it (to open it), and then access any of the documents in the file.

Author Bio

Allen Wyatt

With more than 50 non-fiction books and numerous magazine articles to his credit, Allen Wyatt is an internationally recognized author. He is president of Sharon Parq Associates, a computer and publishing services company. ...

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What is one more than 5?

2014-02-20 19:22:25

Jim

How is this idea different from having an offline Google Drive on the computer? The offline version is very handy and syncs to the cloud version easily.

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