Thursday 18 April 2019

What to do when .gdoc and .gsheet no longer open correctly.

Okay, so here's a problem I've had for a long time and only just ciphered out this morning.

I use Dropbox for most of my file syncronizing needs.  It is very frustrating to use - I don't approve of some of the business decisions they have made as a company, they have killed off several useful features (currently the predicted time of sync), and they don't have a good way to share plans with family.

But I also really enjoy using Google Docs - it's very helpful to not have to have an office suite installed on my smaller computers, and the instant syncronizing of spreadsheets and documents is a real boon.

I would have switched to Google Drive last week, if only they offered a 1TB package similar to what Dropbox does...  Instead, they jump from 200GB (too little) to 2TB (too much) - I need that Goldilocks zone!

Anyway, I keep Google Backup and Sync running in the background so I have a local copy of my documents - they would be pretty devastating to lose if something ever happened to my Google Account.  I also like to organize the documents on my local drive to help keep them clear in my head.

The issue I had was that sometimes I'd see a document locally and want to open it from my drive, rather than try to use the web-based documents interface, which isn't very intuitive for an old-timer like me.

Somehow the association must have broken at some point, and of course, I tried to open them with Chrome - a natural assumption, as you view and manipulate them in Chrome.  Unfortunately, they wouldn't open.  You'd get a cryptic address that CONTAINED the online address for the file, with other settings, but didn't actually OPEN the file.

Google searches were surprisingly unhelpful!  Hence this post to help anyone out...

Change the association for .gdoc and .gsheet from Chrome to Google Backup and Sync!  It then passes along the proper address to Chrome anyway and things work as expected.

So in file explorer, you right click, scroll down to "open with..." and on the next screen, first make sure you check the box "always use this programme to open files of this type" and then select backup and sync as the programme to open with.  If it isn't immediately displayed, select the more option, and if it still isn't there, then select that you will search for a programme, and drill down to the backup and sync executable (C:\Program Files\Google\Drive\googledrivesync.exe on my machine).

It's as simple as dat!  (Simple, but not easy - at least for me, and seemingly many, many others...)