How to save Google Drive files locally with Excel VBA macro

Other Questions Google drive
1

I have an Excel spreadsheet with Google Drive file links in some cells. These links work fine when I click them manually - they open the files in my browser since the sharing permissions allow anyone with the link to view them.

Now I want to create a VBA macro that can automatically download these linked files and save them to a specific folder on my computer. Is there a way to do this programmatically?

I tried using basic VBA commands but I’m not sure how to handle the Google Drive URLs properly. The files are various formats like PDFs and images. Any help with the VBA code would be appreciated.

2

first off, change your google drive links by replacing ‘/view’ with ‘/export’ or try the direct download link options. then utilize the URLDownloadToFile API in your vba to get those files. it usually works well for most types, but just a heads up, PDFs might be a bit tricky.

3

You need to modify those Google Drive URLs to make them actually downloadable. Grab the file ID from each URL and rebuild it like this: https://drive.google.com/uc?export=download&id=FILE_ID. For the VBA part, skip URLDownloadToFile and use WinHTTP.WinHTTPRequest instead - it handles auth problems way better and gives you more control. Build a function that loops through your cells, pulls out the file IDs, creates the download URLs, and uses WinHTTP to grab the files. Don’t forget error handling because Google Drive loves to throw HTML pages at you instead of the actual file when there’s permission issues or large file confirmations.

4

Had this exact problem last year automating report downloads from shared Google Drive folders. What saved me hours of debugging: Google Drive throws up a virus scan warning page for larger files instead of giving you the direct download. Here’s what actually works - use a two-step approach. First, check the response headers and content type. If you get HTML instead of your file, grab the confirmation token from the response body and make a second request with that token. Also, set a decent timeout on your HTTP requests. Google Drive gets sluggish during peak hours. Once you handle these Google-specific quirks instead of treating it like a normal file download, everything runs way smoother.