Google Docs Low Vision: Converting Word and PDFs into Google Docs

Hi, my name is Vikki Vaughan, and in today’s workshop, we’ll learn to convert various file formats into Google Docs.

As we’ve discussed in another workshop in this series, lots of family and friends might not be using Google Docs just yet. That’s why it’s so great that Google makes it super easy to convert familiar file types, like Microsoft Word or PDF’s, into Google Doc files.

On the flip side, Google also makes it simple to convert Google Docs into several different file types including Microsoft Word, RTF and PDF’s. If that’s something you’re interested in, be sure to check out another workshop in this series.

Let’s head over to our Google Drive at drive.google.com. Once we’ve signed in, we’re ready to open the New command.

Now I’m a big fan of keyboard shortcuts, so let’s try out the keyboard shortcut “C,” as in Charlie, to open the New command. If you prefer using your mouse, simply select the New button in the left pane.

Now we’ll use our down arrow to move to File Upload. Once again, you can always use your mouse to select each step, if that’s how you roll. Once we’ve landed on File Upload, we press our Enter key.

A new window opens and this is where we grab the file we wish to convert. Let’s select a Microsoft Word for this round, and we’ll check out PDF’s a little later in the workshop.

When we select the desired Word file, the upload begins immediately. It takes just a few seconds, and once complete, we see a small window pop up which notifies us that the upload is complete. Let’s select the X in the right corner to close this notification.

We now see our uploaded document in our Google Drive File list. At this point, it’s still a Word document and if we wish, it’s possible to select it and read it as a Word document. But If we want to edit it, enlarge the font size or print it, we’ll have to convert it to Google Docs. Let’s do that now.

We select our Word document, then use our context command of Shift and F10 to open the context menu. For those of us who prefer to use our mouse, we right click on the document to open the menu.

Let’s down arrow to the Open With option, then right arrow to open the submenu. The first choice in our submenu is Google Docs.

Since this is the program we want, we press the Enter key to select it.

There’s a quick progress window as the file opens in Google Docs. We can tell it’s now a Word document because at the top of the window, to the right of the title, we see the extension “docx.”

Hang in there, we just have a couple of other steps. Let’s open our File Menu with Alt+F, for File.

We can now use another shortcut, the letter “U,” as in Uniform, to Save as a Google Doc.

Voila! Our document is saved as a Google Doc. We can now edit, share and print this file. Pretty easy, right?

Now let’s have a look at converting PDF’s. One of the really cool things about this is our ability to convert any PDF into a document with text we can edit. Let’s say we receive an inaccessible PDF. When we open it in Google Docs, we can edit it.

This means we can enlarge the font size and make it easier to read. Now that’s something we can’t do with a PDF, which is basically an image of a document. This ability to customize the font size is a huge plus in my book!

We can also save it as an RTF or Word file, if we desire.

Let’s go back to our Google Drive and select the New command with our shortcut, “C,” as in Charlie.

We down arrow to File Upload, then grab our PDF.

As with our Word upload, we see a small window pop up which notifies us that the upload is complete. Let’s select the X in the right corner to close this notification.

Once the upload is complete, we see our file in our Google Drive File list.

Let’s select it with our right mouse button, then choose “Open With” and then select Google Docs.

Our PDF is now a Google Doc, and we can edit our font size to suit our individual needs.

We’ll quickly return to our Google Drive tab with the keyboard shortcut of Control+Tab. We see both the original PDF and our new Google Doc version of our document in our list of files. They both have the same name, but the original PDF has the PDF extension.

In today’s workshop, we explored converting several different file formats into Google Docs. I’m Vikki Vaughan and I thank you for joining me.