I know you can publish a Doc as a web page but is there a way to make a link that when clicked downloads it as a .doc file?
ATM I'm downloading then emailing the file, what I want to do is just send a link so that my friends can just download the file themselves. |
When you publish a document it is given a unique URL that looks something like this: docs.google.com/View?docid=[ID].
By modifying this url we can link straight to the document as a file without hitting save as. More importantly, on any published document ANYONE will be able to save your document as any filetype by simply following the provided link.
The modified URI looks like this: docs.google.com/MiscCommands?command= saveasdoc&exportformat=[FORMAT]&docID=[ID]
Where [FORMAT] can be either pdf, doc, oo, rtf or txt and [ID] is the unique ID of your document.
This is also possible for spreadsheets except that the URL will instead look like this:
spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=[ID]&output=[FORMAT]
Where [FORMAT] is either pdf, ods, csv, txt or xls.
(credit: ahab, Google Groups) |
Thanks for that! It'll make things a lot simpler for me :-) |
This should be a feature, not something we have to do ourselves |
DPic You mean an "URL generator"? Otherwise, I don't see any solution, except perhaps in all Google Apps (and only Google Apps), the hyperlink editor could detect Google docs/spreadsheet and propose to open it in a specific format. |
Publish --> Publish to web, publish as [select format(s)] |
I see a greasemonkey script coming :D
(please....someone?) |
Google Spreadsheets already has this option:
Publish > More publishing options > File format > Generate URL
Google could try to be a bit more consistent... |