Teacher Tech blog with Alice Keeler

Paperless Is Not a Pedagogy

Alice Keeler

Opening a CSV File in Google Drive

Managing CSV files in Google Drive
Opening a CSV File in Google Drive
YouTube video

Personally, I find myself needing to read a CSV file a lot. What is a CSV file? Basically it’s a spreadsheet that is not a spreadsheet. WHAT??? When you download your roster from your gradebook there is a good chance it downloads as a CSV file. So what do you do if you want to view the file?

A CSV file is data but no formatting.

This means the first row will not be frozen, no bolding, no conditional formatting. It is just a straight data file. So it is a smaller file size but not necessarily attractive to look at. If I try to open it from my computer it opens as a text file that looks like all my data dumped together into a giant paragraph… not super useful.

Upload to Google Drive

From my downloads folder on my computer I drag the CSV file into Google Drive. I have a folder in my drive specifically for this purpose just because I am going to end up converting the CSV file to Google Sheets.

Right Click

After uploading the file to Google Drive, right click on the file to choose “Open with.” Select “Google Sheets.” This will make a COPY of the CSV file and organize your data into a spreadsheet. Enjoy 🙂

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