Google Document

Google Document is the cloud-based document format used as the native format of documents created within the office suite within Google Drive. (Google Sheet, .gsheet, is the variant for spreadsheets.) The document content is "in the cloud"; when you sync a Google Drive directory with a local operating system, only a pointer file gets transferred to the local system, so if you don't entirely trust your documents to the cloud, or want to work with them offline without an Internet connection, you need to export them into a different format.

The .gdoc file contains a line such as this (JSON-style):

It points at the document content on Google's servers.

Links

 * Wikipedia: Google Docs
 * Google Drive blog
 * Tool to convert Google Drive documents to Markdown
 * What’s Up, (with Google) Docs? – The Challenge of Native Cloud Formats