Add link to open a local file in Google Docs

Question

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.

I wonder if there is a way using a "user script" (cf. Tampermonkey). — JinSnow
This has nothing to do with Google docs.. Hence answers given here are the same as if you had asked how do you , within an Ms Word document, add a link to a local file. Which is also nothing to do even with Ms Word. It's simply asking how to add a link to a local file. Links are normally in webpages though other platforms can support them. After that, one can say, I see that google docs doesn't support file:///c|/carp/a.txt or file:///c:/carp/a.txt but u can always do 127.0.0.1/a.txt youd have to set up a web server. Nothin to do with gdocs. Same applies from any webpage. — barlop

Hudson Hudson · Accepted Answer · 2017-08-10T00:15:09

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

Add link to open a local file in Google Docs

3 Answers