Local drive storage and portable hard drives are a thing of the past with cloud storage. Cloud storage providers like Google Drive, Dropbox and others make it super easy to host files over the cloud and to share across regions. Gigasheet also allows you to upload heaps of data from some of the most common cloud storage providers. Let’s see it in action!
Uploading Files to Gigasheet
Gigasheet can process billions of rows in spreadsheets and other file formats in a couple of minutes. To get started with file uploads, simply log in to your Gigasheet account. This is when you’ll be redirected to the “Your Files” page. Press the “New” button to your right and select “File Upload”.
As of writing this article, Gigasheet supports the following file types:
- CSV
- LOG
- TSV
- JSON
- XLSX
- PCAP
- ZIP
- GZIP
- EVTX
Fun Fact: Got zipped files? Gigasheet automatically extracts the files out of the archive and uploads them for you!
Now here’s the juicy bit; where can you upload these files from? Not only do we support the typical local storage uploads, we also support uploads from:
How does it work? Let’s dig deeper into a few of these options next!
Google Drive
Drive is perhaps the most commonly used storage provider due to direct integration with most Google services. To get started with data imports from Google Drive, you need to allow Gigasheet to authenticate to your drive and access relevant files.
Once you’ve signed in to your account, you’ll get a permission request from Gigasheet. To access and upload your files, Gigasheet needs to see and download files from your drive first. If you’re concerned about your privacy, Gigasheet does not access files other than the ones selected and uploaded by you specifically.
Once you press Continue, you’ll be authenticated and able to access contents from your Drive. Simply select a supported file and press “Select”. If you’ve selected a folder, all files within the folder will be uploaded to Gigasheet!
Fun Fact: You can upload multiple files and folders to Gigasheet from your Drive by selecting as many files as you’d like. The “Select” button will show the number of selected files.
Amazon S3 with Link
Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3) is home to most of the files uploaded by AWS’s cloud users as well as log files generated by its services. Gigasheet supports file upload from Amazon S3 via public or pre-signed URLs.
How does it work? Let’s head into the S3 console. I’ve created a sample bucket in my test account and uploaded a few data sheets to it as objects.
If you’ve enabled public sharing for objects in your S3 bucket, you can directly use that link to upload files to Gigasheet. For example, here’s an object for which I’ve enabled public access via S3 bucket policies and setting the appropriate object ACLs (more on this here).
To upload the file to Gigasheet, head over to your File Upload menu and select Link. Paste in the link and that’s it – your file will be uploaded if you configured public access properly.
Though this is rarely the case for sensitive data as exposing it might incur other data privacy risks. To keep your data private and share it with trusted entities (like ourselves), you can create a pre-signed URL. Here’s how you do it:
- Select your file in the S3 bucket
- Press “Actions” and select on “Share with a pre signed URL”
- Enter minutes or hours for which you wish to expose the file with others. Anywhere between a 5 to 10 minute mark should be best
- Once you press “Create presigned URL”, the URL will be copied to your clipboard
That’s it. Head back to Gigasheet and paste the URL back to the Link option in the File Upload menu. You should now see both your uploads in the Your Files page.
OneDrive
OneDrive is also a popular option to host files in Microsoft’s cloud. To access and upload files from OneDrive, you need to authenticate to a Microsoft account and accept permissions (similar to Google Drive). Once successfully signed in, you’ll be redirected to this permissions page:
Again, these permissions are necessary for you to upload your files to Gigasheet from within our website. We don’t access data other than the files/folders uploaded by you to our cloud. Once accepted, you’ll be able to select files like this:
Dropbox
Dropbox is no different from other cloud storage providers where you’ll need to sign in, provide a few permissions, and then upload files with ease to Gigasheet. Select “Dropbox” from the upload menu, and sign in to your Dropbox account.
You’ll be redirected to the “Before you connect…” page soon after. You can trust our application as we’ll only request relevant permissions to access and show your files to you from Gigasheet’s File Upload menu. That’s it – we don’t access your data without your permission.
Once you press Continue, you’ll see the permissions we’ll be needing and have to accept them to proceed. Press Allow to complete your authentication process.
That’s it – you can now access your Dropbox account from Gigasheet’s file upload menu.
If you don’t wish to keep your account signed in, you can always sign out of the storage provider account right away by pressing “Log Out”.
Box
Box works just other cloud storage providers where you’ll need to sign in, provide a few permissions, and then upload files with ease to Gigasheet. Select “Connect to Box” from the upload menu, and sign in to your Box account.
Once successfully signed in, you’ll be redirected to this permissions page:
Again, these permissions are necessary for you to upload your files to Gigasheet from within our website. We don’t access data other than the files/folders uploaded by you to our cloud. Once accepted, you’ll be able to select files like this
Link
Have a link to a hosted file? No need to download and then re-upload into Gigasheet. Just select "LINK" from the upload menu and paste the URL into the box and Gigasheet will upload the file directly from the source. Easy!
What’s Next?
Upload complete? We’ll take it from here. Whether it’s processing, parsing, or presenting your data; it’s our forte. Once we’re done crunching your data, you can open up your file in our web-based (and superior) spreadsheet and quickly get started on analyzing your data.
Want to take Gigasheet out for a test drive? We offer a free tier for researchers, testers, and everyone to give this new spreadsheet experience a go. Come sign up and take a shot!
The ease of a spreadsheet with the power of a data warehouse.
