Can Google Drive Extract Text From a PDF?

Yes, Google Drive can extract text from a PDF, and it is free. When you open a PDF or an image in Google Docs, Drive runs optical character recognition on it and drops the recognized text into a new document below the original. It works well for a page of plain prose. It falls down on the thing most people actually need, which is structured data: Google states outright that its OCR does not detect tables, lists, or columns, so a scanned receipt or invoice comes back as a jumble of text, not rows.

Last updated July 2026. The formats, size cap, and formatting limits below are quoted from Google's own Drive help documentation.

Can Google Drive do OCR?

Yes. Google Drive has built-in OCR that runs when you open an image or PDF as a Google Doc. You do not install anything or turn on a setting. Drive converts the file, keeps the original image at the top of the new Doc, and places the extracted text underneath it. It is the same recognition engine Google uses across its products, and for a clean, typed page it is genuinely good.

How do I extract text from a PDF in Google Drive?

Upload the PDF or photo to Drive, right-click the file, choose Open with, and select Google Docs. Drive creates a new Google Doc containing the original image followed by the recognized text. From there you can copy the text out. The whole flow takes a few seconds for a short document, and there is no separate OCR button to find, it happens automatically when you open the file as a Doc.

Is Google Drive OCR free?

Yes. It is included with a Google account and uses your normal Drive storage, so there is no separate charge for the OCR itself. That is the strongest reason to reach for it. The cost shows up not in dollars but in what it will and will not do, and in the 2 MB file size ceiling that a high-resolution scan blows past quickly.

What file types can Google Drive convert to text?

Google's help page lists PDF for multipage documents and three image formats: JPEG, PNG, and GIF. That is the whole list. Notably it does not include TIFF, despite what a lot of third-party guides claim, so if your scanner outputs TIFF you convert it to PNG first. The table below collects Google's stated limits in one place.

How accurate is Google Drive OCR?

It depends almost entirely on the scan. Google recommends standard fonts such as Arial and Times New Roman, and sharp images with even lighting and high contrast, and says text should be at least 10 pixels tall. Meet those conditions with a clean typed page and recognition is strong. Feed it a faded thermal receipt or a phone photo taken at an angle and the results degrade. Google auto-detects the document language but does not publish an accuracy percentage, so treat any specific number you see quoted online with suspicion.

Why does Google Drive OCR lose my formatting and tables?

Because Google says it will. Its documentation states that bold, italics, font size, font type, and line breaks are likely to be retained, while lists, tables, columns, footnotes, and endnotes are not likely to be detected. A receipt is a table: item, quantity, price, lined up in columns. When Drive OCR flattens that into a stream of text, the relationship between an item and its price is gone, which is why you cannot get clean spreadsheet rows out of it no matter how good the scan is.

Can Google Docs convert a scanned PDF to editable text?

Yes, that is exactly what it does. Opening a scanned PDF with Google Docs produces editable text you can correct, copy, and reformat. The limitation is not editability, it is structure. You get editable prose, not a structured record, so a scanned contract becomes workable text while a scanned invoice becomes text you still have to reorganize into fields by hand.

Does Google Drive OCR work on images and photos?

Yes, on JPEG, PNG, and GIF images, including photos, as long as each file stays under 2 MB and the text is right-side up and at least 10 pixels tall. A phone photo of a document works if it is sharp and evenly lit. The 2 MB cap is the usual snag, because a modern phone camera easily produces a photo several times that size, so you often have to shrink the image before Drive will process it.

What languages does Google Drive OCR support?

Google Drive OCR detects the language of the document automatically rather than asking you to pick one, and it recognizes a wide range of scripts. Google does not publish a definitive supported-language count on the Drive help page, so the honest answer is that it covers the major world languages and auto-detects them, and you should test your specific language on a sample page rather than rely on a number from a third-party list. For English business documents, which is what most US users are scanning, this is not a constraint.

What to do when you need rows, not text

Google Drive OCR is the right free tool when you want the words off a page. It is the wrong tool when you want the numbers in a spreadsheet, because it explicitly does not read tables. When the goal is a scanned receipt or invoice turned into columns you can total, you need extraction that reconstructs structure, which is what PDF data extraction does, and if the destination is a Google spreadsheet specifically, getting receipt data into Google Sheets as clean rows is a different job than pasting a wall of OCR text. If your source files are digital PDFs headed for a spreadsheet rather than scans, a dedicated PDF to Excel converter handles that path directly.