Google Docs | PowerCram Network

Use Google Docs as a Batch PDF Converter

If you have multiple Word Documents, Excel Spreadsheets and PowerPoint Presentations that you would like to convert into PDF at once without investing in commercial software like Adobe Acrobat, try Google Docs.

While it has always been possible to convert Office documents into PDF using Google Docs, the new export feature makes it even easier for you to batch convert Microsoft Office and OpenOffice file formats into PDF (or HTML) in three easy steps.

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.

pdf input queue

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

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.

Perform OCR with Google Docs – Turn Images Into Editable Documents

Google Docs can perform OCR on digital images. You can upload an image containing typewritten or printed text (like a fax or a scanned document) to your Google Docs account and it will turn that image into editable text.

The OCR feature in Google Docs is not part of the standard UI yet but you can use this sample form to upload scanned images to your Google Account and the server will automatically try to extract text from these images provided the image resolution is good and that the text inside images is written using Latin character sets.

The OCR feature can also extract text from “noisy” images as well though the recognized text is not very accurate and the document formatting may be lost.

If you are a developer, you can add the ocr=true parameter to your upload request and Google Docs will automatically scan that image for text patterns. You can also upload images to Google Docs without the OCR parameter but in that case, the image will be converted into a new Word document sans OCR.

Like Google Docs, Google Search too includes OCR features but the difference is that while Google Docs can extract text from images, the OCR in Google Search works only with scanned PDF files.

Access Google OCR.