How to upload documents to Gemini and make the most of its features
Gemini, Google’s AI, is one of the most powerful free tools out there for document research and analysis. It’s capable of interacting with documents of various formats, allowing you to upload files and extract valuable information quickly and accurately. Don’t believe us? We’ll explain how you can upload PDFs to Gemini or any other type of document, as well as what AI can do to help you with your documents.
In May 2024, Gemini added document uploads exclusively for Gemini Advanced subscribers. However, since the beginning of 2025, Google has released this feature to all users :
You no longer have to pay anything to upload a document to Gemini! It supports Google Docs, PDFs, Spreadsheets, Code, and Word files, via its mobile app, its web version, or its function within Google Drive. Let’s see how it is used…
How to upload documents to Gemini
Uploading documents to Gemini is easy. Just follow these steps:
- Open Gemini (either its app or its web version).
- Press the + button on the left side of the text input bar.
- Select Files (or Drive if you have the document in Google Drive).
- Now, ask Gemini whatever you want about the document and hit send.
Gemini won’t take long to read the entire document, analyze it, and answer your question. You can then ask other questions about the document without uploading it again.
Types of documents you can upload with Gemini
- Text documents: DOC, DOCX, PDF, RTF, DOT, DOTX, HWP, HWPX, TXT and files created in Google Docs
- Presentations PPTX and slides created with Google Slides
- Spreadsheets or data: XLS, XLSX, CSV, TSV, and files created in Google Sheets (Gemini Advanced subscribers only).
- Code C, C++, Python, Java, PHP, SQL, and HTML (Gemini Advanced subscribers only)
What Gemini can do with your documents
As we mentioned before, Gemini is a pretty powerful AI, so it can do a lot of useful tasks with the documents you upload. Once you upload a document to it, it becomes an expert on the topic covered by the file, being able to solve any kind of question or task you ask it. Here are some of the things it can do:
- Summarize the text
- Give personalized feedback or comments
- Answer specific questions
- Solve problems related to the text
- Generate actionable insights
- Generate statistics from spreadsheets
- Create charts from spreadsheet data
- Identify patterns/trends in a data set
- Detect errors or potential problems in code
It should be noted that, at the time of writing this article, uploading spreadsheets and code files is not available for free (you must pay for the Gemini Advanced subscription for that).
In this way, Gemini proves to be an indispensable tool for professionals, researchers and anyone who needs to process large volumes of information intelligently.