Add link to open a local file in Google Docs

Hyun-geun Kim picture Hyun-geun Kim · Aug 29, 2014 · Viewed 40.1k times · Source

I have made a guide (or something like a tutorial) about my tool to share with my company. I used Google Docs to do that, and I would like to add links to open video guides. I want to know a way to add link in the document.

Answer

Hudson picture Hudson · Aug 10, 2017

What I do is the following. Links in sheets ( or in your case Docs) only respond to internet protocols e.g. HTTP://, HTTPS:// and so on... . It does not respond to file explorer protocols (like excel or word does) e.g. file:\\ or C:\.

So I installed WampServer (any other server will do as well, I just use this) and then copied the files into the WWW folder.

Now you can link to files that way. Google Docs/Sheets accept links to localhost as acceptable files to establish a link.

Be aware, your server will have to be online for the links to work. But this is how I solved my problem without uploading items to the cloud that I want to keep private and still use in google docs.

This is just for my local computer, if you want to share the doc with others in a local environment a little more understanding of your local server operations will be needed (i.e. do not use localhost, but refer to your IP-address).

The server can be scale-able on your local network as well, at this point a little more education will be required.

However, if you want to share the doc with others around the world this will not work at all