Office MacGyver

With all this talk of the “cloud” why is it that to copy files in the cloud we still have to download files from the cloud and re-upload them to the cloud? Well, with Google Apps’ new “upload any file” feature you don’t have to. Here’s an example. Of course, one could argue that one of the benefits of the cloud is that you don’t need a copy and to that I’d say you’re probably right but people are information packrats.

SO here’s a real-world example: say you’re searching for the owner’s manual for your cordless telephone system and you want to keep a copy for future reference. In the past you would search for the file on the Web, save it your hard drive and then possibly re-upload it to some remote storage. In this new era of cloud computing, though, here are the steps I took:

1) Search for the file on the Web. I google’d “kx-tg4000b manual filetype:pdf” (I wanted a PDF file specifically) and got a handful of results (duh)

2) Copy the link URL. The second result was what I was looking for: a link to a PDF copy of the owner’s manual for my phone system. So I right-clicked on the link and chose “Copy Link Location” (Firefox) so that I had the URL for the file I wanted.

3) Upload to Google Docs. Now here’s where we save a step. In the past I would have downloaded the file to my local machine and then done what I needed to with it. This time, I went to Google Docs instead and clicked the “Upload” button at the top of the navigation bar on the left. I clicked the “Select files to upload” link and got the familiar Windows file dialog. I pasted in the URL I had copied in Step 2 and hit “Open”

After a brief pause Google had sucked over the file info (I thought it might just be downloading the file to my desktop and re-uploading in the background but I took a look at the network traffic and that doesn’t seem to be the case) and all I had to do was hit “Start Upload” (NOTE: checking the “Convert documents … to Google Docs format doesn’t seem to have any impact on PDF files).

And there you have it! Your very own “cloud-to-cloud” copy of the file.

As I like to say, there’s a fine line between being lazy and being efficient… and this definitely straddles that line.