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Paperless Is Not a Pedagogy

Alice Keeler

Making a LOT of Copies of the Same Google Docs

Making a LOT of Copies of the Same Google Docs

Duplicate a lot of copies from Google Drive

Sometimes I have need to make a lot of copies of a document in my Google Drive. For example, I have a template for creating badges in Google Draw. However, I need a lot of badges for my project. Manually duplicating the template 50 times is tedious. I wrote a script to accomplish this faster for me.

Script

http://tinyurl.com/copydocscript

The above link will take you to the script. You will need to make a copy so you can edit it to copy your document instead of my badge template.

Edit

Be careful what you edit. You will want to only change 2 things on this script. The number of copies of the document and the document ID you are copying.

You will notice in the script it says i<30. This is telling the script to make 30 copies. If you want a different number, change the 30.
Change number of copies

Each Google document (Docs, Sheets, Slides, Forms, Drawings) has a unique document ID. You need to open the document and copy the long string of number and letters out of the URL. In the script you will want to replace my document ID with your document ID.
2015-07-11_08-24-31

Click on the save button in the toolbar.

Run the Script

When you’re ready to make your copies, use the “Run” menu to run the script “copyDocs.” Go look in your Google Drive to see that all of your copies were made!

28 thoughts on “Making a LOT of Copies of the Same Google Docs

  1. This is great! But you lost me on the last step: In the script you will want to replace my document ID with your document ID. I can see how to delete your document ID, but where do I find my document ID to add?

    I am new to Google Classroom and love your blogs and book. Thank you!

  2. hey this is really awesome, thank you 🙂
    I just have a couple questions about this feature…

    1) can i save this script copy and use it again in the future? where does it save if so?
    2) after the copies are made, do they then have individual id’s now? if i wanted to share one of them with someone else, via link, they wouldn’t be able to access all the other 20 docs I made too, right?

  3. Thank you so much. Do you know how to rename each file that is created, to given names from a spreadsheet for example. I have found when copying many sheets for example, it gets confusing if they are connected to forms.

  4. Our administration wants to create copies of a spreadsheet to track students in ISS. There is a new spreadsheet every day. Is there a way to not only make the copies in advance, but to also name each copy by date?

    1. I don’t understand what you’re trying to do. You can use that script to make as many copies of the spreadsheet as you want. Modify the code to append the date but that might be trickier than you want to try.

  5. I used this script last month, and it worked like a charm. Today, however, it isn’t working at all, and when I tried the “debug” tool, it gave me something about line 16 that I can’t really understand. This is happening even when I run the “debug” on an unedited copy of your original script. Help please?

    I really appreciate all of the great resources and tips and tools you’ve made available to us here — thank you so much for sharing your knowledge and talent to help make this profession better for everyone!

  6. Hi Alice! This looks like exactly what I need, however, I don’t see my copies showing up in my drive. Does this only work in Chrome? (Mac user at home and not crazy about Chrome on my personal devices)

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