Google Drive/Docs users--any advice for me?

DEVONthink Tips
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TL;DR: I want DTP to index my Google Docs and Sheets that live in my company’s Drive, so that they appear in search results along side my local files. Judging by my board searches it looks like this isn’t currently possible, is that right?

Hello,

The vast majority of my note taking life is plain text (and most of that is Markdown). I’ve indexed these for search in DTP, and I edit them externally (BBEdit or Byword).

But the majority of my work documents are Google Docs, with a handful of Google Sheets. This is out of necessity, as this is the system my company uses. Many of these are shared resources, and it’s currently the best thing out there for real-time collaboration.

I want DevonThink to index my Google Drive, and when I search pull up results from my Drive as well as my local stuff. As with my plain text life mentioned above, I’m fine if I have to then access that file outside of DTP. Launch me into the browser to see it, that’s fine. I know you can sync your Drive contents down to your Mac, but DTP would only be able to read into PDFs because the Docs and Sheets stored there are only references, either to the web store of documents, or to the database within Chrome that I’m sure is securely off-limits to scanning from other apps. In my scenario the only things I really need scanned are Google Docs and Sheets. Everything else in my Drive would only be “nice to have”.

Is this possible yet?

If not, any one have any workarounds you’re using successfully?

Feature Request: DevonTech folks: may I suggest looking into using the Google Drive API for indexing? So so many people are in the cloud for this stuff now, by choice or by necessity. (Says the guy who won’t have to engineer such a feat…)

Scenario I just lived through: I just spent fifteen minutes searching for a plan for work in DTP, only to realize I had made it a Google Doc because when it’s complete, it needs to be shared across the web in real-time. Google Drive API integration theoretically could address this!

Thanks, all.

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And what happens when your network is down or your server crashes? :smiley:

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How is this helpful? You can’t just pray away the cloud.

“We can’t technically do this.” Or “Helping you index your cloud assets is not a planned direction for our software”, these are reasonable answers, although they would personally disappoint me. I don’t think this is too much to expect out of an official support forum. And its not welcoming to new members.

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You can index local resources, not web resources. If your Google documents are local to your machine you can index them. However, as you said, some items will only download as links. There are currently no plans to index online assets.

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What is the current status of indexing google docs in DT3? If I am syncing docs to my computer and index that folder, is there a way to index the content of those google docs? I am trying it now, and DT3 doesn’t seem to recognize the content of the google docs. I just get links to the online versions. Is there a way to set this up so that the content of my google docs appear in DT3 searches? Are there any plans to integrate this into DT3?

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What is in the local Google docs folder? A screen capture could be helpful.

And no, there are no plans to index online contents.

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When you sync Google Docs to your desktop, Google just provides a tiny file (like 600 bytes in size), that is a link back to the online version. There is nothing there for the Finder or DevonThink to preview, let alone interact with.

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Thanks for the heads-up. I figured as much, but I don’t use the service myself.

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Thanks. I just thought I would check.