Google Docs as a Batch PDF Converter

Written by Abhishek, on October 26th, 2009

Not Yet Rated

Our Rating

Not Yet Rated

Avg. User Rating

IF you have loads of of Word Documents, Excel Spreadsheets and PowerPoint Presentations on your hard disk that you would like to convert into PDF at once without investing it in commercial software like Adobe Acrobat,try Google Docs.

Batch Conversion to PDF with Google Docs

Step #1 – Create a new “input” folder in Google Docs where you’ll upload all your documents and presentations that are to converted into PDF.

Step #2 – Now select the Upload Document option in Google Docs, set the destination folder to the one that you created in Step #1 and upload* all your documents.

Google Docs officially supports the following file formats though you may also upload images:

Microsoft PowerPoint (.ppt, .pps).
Microsoft Word (.doc, .docx), OpenDocument (.odt) and StarOffice (.sxw).
Microsoft Excel (csv, .xls, .xlsx) files and OpenDocument Spreadsheet (.ods).

pdf upload documents

[*] You may also use the email option to upload documents onto Google Docs but that would put everything on the main folder and managing documents can therefore become a issue especially when you have too many files.

Step #3 - Once all files are uploaded onto Google Docs, open the dashboard again and select the “input” folder from the right sidebar. Select all the files in this folder and choose “Export” under “More Options”.

Here’s select “PDF” (or HTML) as the output format and all your Word Documents, presentations, spreadsheets, etc. will be instantly converted into PDF.

batch pdf convert

And if you are converting a large batch of documents into PDF, you don’t have to wait in the browser for the conversion to finish as Google Docs will automatically send you an email once the processing is over. The email will have a link from where you can directly download all the PDF files in one large ZIP.