Google-sheets – How to change Google Sheets ownership in bulk

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I have a ton of Google spreadsheets I want to move to another Google Drive account. I ignorantly downloaded them all, forgetting that Drive converts .gsheet to .xlsx when you download. That means spreadsheets with UDFs, attached forms, or non-Excel functions are mostly changed beyond usability.

As far as I've been able to see, the simplest solution will be to share all the files I want to move with destination Account B, then make copies there, which will be owned by Account B. But this feels like a big kludge. Is there a better way?

Best Answer

As Ruben already outlined, the quickest solution should be bulk share and changing ownership of the files.

Share the spreadsheets in bulk to this new account of yours.
Modify the owner of these spreadsheets to be the new account.
Delete them from the old account as desired, or simply unshare them from the new account.

Related Solutions

Google Drive – How to Recursively Set Ownership of Files and Folders

I created a command-line tool to handle this.

After following the setup instructions on the GitHub project, you can run the tool with a specified path prefix and the email address of the new owner:

python transfer.py PATH-PREFIX NEW-OWNER-EMAIL

After getting authorization from OAuth, it will recursively walk the Google Drive account it got authorization to, match against the path prefix (ignoring non-matches), and then transfer ownership to the new email. If the new email address indicates a user who isn't even shared on the item yet, it will handle that as well. The current owner will not lose access, but the new or old owner can revoke it.

I should note that it's not always possible to transfer ownership of an item in Drive. For example, it's not possible to move ownership for an item from G Suite (Google Apps for Work) account to a normal GMail account. It can be shared (which the script will do), but ownership transfer will fail.

Google-drive – Changing ownership of Google Documents

Pertaining to your question, I shall answer according to the sequence of points given above:

Correct. It is not possible to transfer ownership of the document. You can share the document using the first account and get the second account to create a copy of it on Google Drive and delete the original file.
Correct. There is a feature in the Google Apps Domain panel that allows domain administrators to easily copy everything in the Google Drive of one account to another. The only limitation is that it must be within the same domain.
Correct. As per point #1, it is already not possible to transfer ownership of documents between accounts, whether it is an @gmail.com or not account.
Incorrect. It is not possible to even transfer ownership from one account to another. However, you can do the same thing as pointed out in point #1 by sharing the document and creating a copy using the second account.

If you would like to transfer ownership of documents entirely using the web interface, I would strongly suggest that you either use third-party tools, or share everything in the Google Drive of the original account with the destination account, and create a copy of everything shared just within Google Drive.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Google Drive – How to Recursively Set Ownership of Files and Folders

Google-drive – Changing ownership of Google Documents

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