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google-sheetsgoogle-workspace

How to get a *.gsheet file on a network drive

First of all, I'm not a programmer or IT manager, I work in a social non-profit organization (local, small) but I'm the one who gets (tries) to sort things out when it turns to IT related issues.

Recently, we decided to move our shared folders from Google Drive to a local server. Not much of a change... We had xls and gsheet files, which were copied to the new drive and work just about the same. We still use google accounts for emails, and shared google files for collaborative, simultaneous work.

Now the problem is when a team member creates a new gsheet file. Ideally, we'd like the .gsheet file to appear in the network drive's directory structure. But there's no way to export the file in this format directly from the google sheet interface.

Things I've tried : I edited the content of the .gsheet file in notepad and it looks pretty simple (file ID, owner...). I could generate the file "manually" but my colleagues wouldn't like this option. Other option is to have Backup and Synch running and get the gsheet file from there, but computers are not assigned to a specific team member so they would have to re-log into the synch app as well. I tried to understand how the google API "files: export" works, but it's too complicated for me.

In short, is there a simple way to generate a .gsheet file so it can be accessed from a network drive ?

Thanks in advance !

Solution

  • The *.gsheet file extension is created automatically and it essentially represents the shortcut of the spreadsheet from the Drive.

    So even if you make use of Drive's files.export request, it won't solve your problem as the request exports a Google file to the requested MIME type and returns the exported content.

    According to the documentation:

    You cannot upload or download folders, shortcuts, third-party shortcuts, and Google Workspace documents to or from Google Drive. However, you can upload or export Google Workspace documents if they use compatible formats. For example, you can create a Google Doc when you import a PDF. Similarly, you can export a Google Slides presentation as a .pptx file.

    Therefore, since the extension that you want corresponds to a Google Sheet, the only solution is to have all the files needed in a shared drive and have the Sync enabled.

    Reference