Your Guide to Converting Box Notes into Google Docs
If you’re here, it’s likely because you’re migrating cloud storage from Box to Google Drive and realized now you can’t open all those Box Notes you created. You hopped on Google to search for a tool to help and haven’t found much. I’ve got good news and bad news; the bad news is there isn’t a tool that’s reasonably priced (at least not yet). The only thing we’ve found is using CloudFuze but their minimum price on a project is $2000.
Unfortunately, this is a strategy a lot of companies employ, making their product sticky by not making it easy to leave. We often warn people off of using tools like this such as Box Notes, Dropbox Paper, ClickUp’s docs tool, etc. because of this.
The good news is this can be done manually and we have a step-by-step guide for the Box Notes conversion below. We’ve found it typically takes about a minute per document to convert the document, title it, and save it in the proper location.
Don’t want to do this yourself? Click here to schedule a call with us to do it for you! We specialize in data migrations, file organization, email workflow, password management for teams, and project management.
Step 1: Get Set Up
- Start by opening up 2 tabs in your browser, one for Box and one for Google Drive.
- In the Box window, click the All Files section in the left sidebar.
- At the top of the screen in the search bar, type “.boxnote” (without quotation marks.)
- Make sure the Type section that appears above your search results is set to Box Note.
- Make the the button all the way on the right shows a grid. This ensures you’re looking at the files in a list view. Only in the list view is the location of the Box Note shown. You’ll need this to know where to save the new Google Doc in Step 4 below.
- See example…
Step 2: Weed Out the Junk
- If you’re like everyone else, you’ve likely got a lot of files that you no longer need. Taking an initial pass to weed out the junk will save you significant time. Why waste your time converting notes you don’t need?
Step 3: Convert to a Google Doc
- After you’ve deleted the unnecessary notes, go back to the top and open the first note.
- Click into the body of the text and Select All (Cmd+A on Mac or Ctrl+A for PC) then Copy (Cmd+C on Mac or Ctrl+C on PC).
- Next go over to Google Drive. Click on “New” into the top left corner and select Google Doc.
- Paste the text into the doc (Cmd+V on Mac or Ctrl+V on PC).
- Now go back to the Box note and Copy the title and Paste into your Google Doc.
- Pro tip: If you like to brand your documents, you can set up a template library in Google Docs so every one of your documents is beautifully consistent. Here’s a video showing how to do this that’s part of our Resource Library we give to our clients.
Step 4: Name and Save
- Click in the top left of your Google Doc where it says “Untitled Document”. Google will automatically apply the title of your document to the file. Update as needed. If you don’t have a naming convention, see the video below.
- Next click the folder with arrow icon to the right of the title (see image below). Here you can search for and select the location to store your document.
- Refer to the file path we referenced in Step 1. (Go back to the list view of all Box Notes to see this.)
Step 5: Keep Track of What’s Completed
- Unfortunately with Box, once you search for something you can no longer sort alphabetically so we need an easy way to keep track of where we left off.
- If you’re comfortable with it, our suggestion is to delete the Box note once you’ve converted it to a Google Doc.
- At the very least, create a temporary folder to move the completed notes to.
Step 6: Repeat, repeat, repeat!
- Keep going until you’ve got all your Box Notes moved over to Google Docs.
Don’t want to do this Box Note to Google Docs conversion yourself? Click here to schedule a call with us to do it for you!
Let us know if we missed anything or if the process has changed so we can update our Box Note Conversion Guide for you.
