I figured it out after a bit of experimenting. The documentation doesn't really go into any detail about what happens when you make that API call, it just says it performs a file download?

When you call get(), what actually goes into $content in the example? Is it the contents of the file (in which case this seems troublesome when dealing with large files - surely you'll get out of memory?!) or is it some type of stream reference that I can call fopen on? How would I save this file to disk?

I'm having trouble understanding how this works though and have trawled through the code but it didn't give much more info. $content = $driveService->files->get($fileId, array( Using API v3 this appears to have been deprecated, and according to the docs you call files->get() on the Drive Service with an array parameter of 'alt' => 'media' to get the file itself rather than the metadata.Īnd their example was: $fileId = '0BwwA4oUTeiV1UVNwOHItT0xfa2M'

Used the downloadUrl parameter to get a direct link to the file, attached an oAuth token to it and made a GET request to that.

Google Drive will then convert it to a format that is compatible with Google Sheets.I'm trying to understand the download flow for the Google Drive API v3 using PHP. If you open Google Drive on your computer you can click the New button, choose the File upload option, then upload your Excel file.

While this article focuses specifically on how to turn a Google Sheets file into a Microsoft Excel file, you can go the other way, too.These include the OpenDocument format, a PDF document, a Web page, a comma separated CSV file or a tab separated CSV file. You can convert Google Sheets spreadsheets to other file types as well.This guide discusses how to use strikethrough in Docs. Sheets and Docs have many of the same formatting options that you will find in their Microsoft counterparts.You can still use Google Sheets to edit the original file, but those changes will not be reflected after you have already downloaded the Excel format copy. When you convert Google Sheets files to Excel files you are creating a copy of the Google Sheets file in the Microsoft Excel.

More Information on How to Convert Google Sheets File to Microsoft Excel Have you been curious about using pivot tables in Microsoft Excel, but weren’t quite sure how? Learn about pivot tables in Excel 2013 to see the different functionality that they use to make it easier to sort and analyze your data.

How to download google drive